The campaign season for the 2024 Presidential election is well underway, with four candidates obtaining even a remotely notable status in the race. The only problem is that they all are pretty poor political candidates, regardless of who is being talked about. Hence, this entirely unnecessary guide to the upcoming election, where the goal is to sift through the endless mounds of s*** to see who sucks the least. With that out of the way, let’s see who is throwing their hat into the ring.

First to be examined is the candidate I must regretfully choose to endorse, President Biden. I know my grandpa won’t be happy to read that, sure, and I definitely understand why. After all, while the first year and a half was surprisingly solid thanks to a sympathetic Congress and a COVID crisis that rallied the political elite around him. We’re talking about laws passed to improve decaying infrastructure, boosting the economy in the post-COVID world, and more. And yet, since the House of Representatives shifted to Republican control in 2023, the one thing keeping Biden’s flaws from being exposed just vanished. 

But what exactly are those flaws, and why are they so crippling in the eyes of so many? Well, the first one is that Biden is literally as old as dirt, as he is around 80 years of age at the time of this writing. Such advanced age, as well as many frequent verbal gaffes, have raised suspicions of cognitive decline that I am personally not yet inclined to believe in. On top of that, his administration’s support of Israel in the face of their invasion (and possibly worse) of Gaza has understandably peeved many younger voters. Of course, these are still entirely valid reasons for reservations, and I don’t blame anyone for having them. And yet, he still is a far less incompetent candidate than the rest of the field, which speaks volumes about this race.

After all, the main alternatives to President Biden are the two Republican candidates remaining in the race, with only one of them really having a chance. So first, let’s talk about the candidate who completely wasted her opportunity, Nikky Haley. Positioning herself as a slightly more moderate and slightly more reasonable alternative to a certain other candidate, she has only been seen as remotely viable since December. And yet, that viability is soon to end if it hasn’t already. For one thing, she’s made a handful of remarks in recent weeks that fly in the face of her more moderate image, including a display of blatant ignorance regarding slavery’s role in starting the Civil War.

 Even worse, Haley hasn’t won a single state in Republican primaries and caucuses so far. First, she lost to Ron DeSantis in Iowa, who then dropped out of the race because he lost to  former President Trump. And then came Nevada, where Trump chose not to put his name on the ballots. She still lost, this time to a “none of these candidates” option, which is just the ultimate embarrassment for an American electoral candidate. Even made a meme to sum that one up. 

So where does that leave the Republican Party? What are they doing to try and defeat who they understandably see as a sitting duck in Biden? Surely they don’t bring back the candidate who Biden just defeated the last time around. Surely they pick someone new, someone without the endless piles of baggage and stolen classified documents, right?

Only fools make the same mistakes twice, right? Well, if that adage could ever be proven true, the GOP just busted the myth, because Donald Trump is well on his way to a third consecutive Presidential nomination. Put simply, a man with 91 felony criminal charges and owing hundreds of millions of dollars in lawsuit rulings should have a much harder path to the Presidency than this. It just speaks to the nature of the modern Republican Party that he is continuing to dominate politics in the GOP, a party where loyalty to one man may well soon supplant loyalty to the Constitution. But that’s a story for another time, and I would like to talk about everyone else today, considering you all know my unfavorable opinion of Trump.

However, I would like to talk about a certain other candidate to round out the entry. This candidate is running as an independent, without a major party backing him, and his name is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Now I am all for independent candidates gaining prominence to combat the two-party system, but RFK is just not him. For one thing, despite being a Kennedy, the family is not on board with his campaign. And that Super Bowl ad ripping off an old JFK commercial did not help matters. But other than that, I don’t know enough good things about the guy to have a favorable opinion of him. I just wish the options were better in this electoral cycle, especially given its critical nature to the future of our democracy. I therefore endorse Joe Biden, or whoever the Democratic nominee may be, but only because I’ll take the status quo over most of the other candidates. Good luck, America, we’re going to need it.