Billionaires like Steyer and Bloomberg aren't the main problem — even if Cory Booker thinks they are

Booker could have had all the money in the world and it really wouldn't have mattered

Late Monday morning, Senator Cory Booker announced that he would be suspending his presidential campaign.

"It was a difficult decision to make, but I got in this race to win, and I’ve always said I wouldn’t continue if there was no longer a path to victory," Booker wrote in an email to supporters. "Our campaign has reached the point where we need more money to scale up and continue building a campaign that can win — money we don’t have, and money that is harder to raise because I won’t be on the next debate stage and because the urgent business of impeachment will rightly be keeping me in Washington."

The ever-increasing whitening of the Democratic presidential primary has largely been attributed to money. For months now, we have seen nonwhite candidates such as Kamala Harris, Julián Castro, and now Cory Booker collectively cite their respective campaign’s financial woes as the basis for them exiting the still-too-crowded field.

This has all taken place in the midst of billionaires like Mike Bloomberg and Tom Steyer managing to rise in recent polling for no other reason than their infinite resources affording them the luxury of blanketing the airwaves with their respective ads, boosting name recognition. Even so, while I agree that the campaigns of Bloomberg and Steyer offer yet another grim look into an inconvenient truth about American democracy — it mirrors an oligarchy far more than most who help shape the political narrative are willing to admit — I am not convinced money alone doomed the Booker campaign.

After all, it’s not as if Booker didn’t used to get criticism over the kind of money he raised — notably corporate interests (as some have already made note). Booker knows how to raise money, but the political climate has changed, and with it, many folks’ political calculations. As a result, Cory Booker could have been provided the code to Scrooge McDuck’s vault of gold and likely still would have failed.

What really sank him, and flatly, what also sank the bids of Kamala Harris and Julián Castro is the unspoken preference the Democratic electorate by and large has for a white candidate — especially if he is male.

It’s been evident for sentient beings for quite some time, but in the case of Booker, it has been particularly frustrating to watch white people in the media marvel at how “smart” Pete Buttigieg for possessing the moderate political views he developed only about two weeks ago. As The Huffington Post’s Amanda Terkel pointed out, news outlets cited Buttigieg’s Rhodes scholarship 596 times in 2019, while Booker’s had just 79 mentions.

Senator Amy Klobuchar was correct in her assertion that if she had the experience of Pete Buttigieg, her candidacy would not have been taken as seriously. “Could we be running with less experience than we had? I don’t think so,” Klobuchar told the New York Times last November. “I don’t think people would take us seriously.”

Yet, the reason why she remains in the race and Kamala Harris doesn’t is the same reason Pete Buttigieg is considered a rising political star in the way Booker and Castro aren’t: it’s good to be white. It’s evident in Klobuchar’s main selling point: that she represents “Midwestern values,” which based on her routine lack of recognition of cities like Chicago, Detroit, Gary, and Milwaukee while boasting such chops boils down to “I appeal to white people.”

Cory Booker has consistently made mention of the need to appeal to black voters in those Midwestern states, but again, the voters who look like he and I, along with our brown neighbors, continue to be an afterthought. And before some unimaginative mind cites black support for Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders being higher than that of Booker and other nonwhite candidates, that is not so much a testament to our inherent bias as it is a realistic assessment of the Democratic base writ large.

Yes, Barack Obama infamously rode the wave to history on the heels of historic levels of black support in both the primary and general election, but only after we saw white people find comfort in his themes of “hope and change.” Obama was succeeded by bigotry and proclamations of “American carnage.” This period of history — complete with its rise of white nationalist violence — has rightly been likened to “The Great Redemption” period.

It matters not whether we ever reach the point in which the electorate, still majorly populated by white Americans, want to admit that. It has already been proven by our political discourse, the amount of money nonwhite candidates can’t raise, and yeah, our polling data. Politically, Booker and I didn’t really align outside of criminal justice and gun control, but nonetheless, I do hate that he, like Harris and Castro, represent so much of what Democrats pretend to care about...and yet.

Put simply, white people — even those who claim not to share any of Donald Trump’s prejudices — are still so terrified by the prospect of four more years of his monstrosities that they are willing to place the Obama legacy in the hands of Joe Biden, the man who was selected as vice president at the time mainly to help settle the fears of older white voters. Every other group, sensing this, is also voting accordingly.

Money can do many things, but it can’t pay that sort of prejudice away.