So long as there’s a proper primary I don’t see the harm in this, not really. I can’t see her running a good enough campaign to make it through the primaries, at least not without also having a good enough campaign to beat the fascist party after Trump.
It sure looked like Bernie was gonna kick her butt until the DNC decided they didn’t like a Democratic Socialist possibly winning. Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned for a reason.
I don’t trust the primaries to be fair. There is too much money and power at stake to let “the people” actually decide the candidates. To me it’s the major reason everyone says both parties are the same. It’s because both candidates are picked by the same people, at least at this level. Yes I know they aren’t the same, especially now. But have you ever noticed how feckless the Democratic leadership seems to be? It’s because the billionaires are really the ones in power.
If there’s a form of Ranked Choice Voting in the primaries, such as STAR Voting or Ranked Robin, then the DNC will have a much more difficult time pulling shenanigans.
First Past the Post voting in the primaries favors moderates and extremists, but an issue with moderates is that they don’t excite voters with big life changing policies. So no one, except people already bought into preventing the worst option, show up to vote in the general elections. Which makes it harder for everyone.
More states need to get forms of Ranked Choice Voting implemented, specifically STAR or Ranked Robin voting if we want to see more progressive wins.
neat. i have been voting for longer than that. there have been years where there was only one person on the primary, which efficiently means “primary votes are cancelled” - when the dnc say they want the incumbent.
that is a de facto cancellation. telling the people who could vote that they are ignored.
my point stands: the dem side needs to do a better job.
I’ve been voting since I was 18 and I’ve never seen that in the past 16 years. 2024 was skipping because Biden was the incumbent at the time. Incumbent are almost always given the primary. The GOP does the same and is entirely different.
I agree with you, but as devil’s advocate, why would a political party vie against itself for a seat it already holds. At best, it would only slightly sully the incumbent’s name. Take Biden for example: either he’s doing a good job, or he needs to be replaced because he’s not doing a good enough job.
That’s absolutely not true. I’ve been voting since 2012 and the only presidential primary I’ve voted in that had more than one candidate was the Hillary-Bernie primary. That’s the only one.
In 2012 Obama was the incumbent, which again as I mentioned, incumbents typically aren’t primaried if they are doing a decent job and up for re-election.
Since then there was 2016, 2020, where both years had a primary for the DNC. 2024 was just a fluke because Biden should have dropped out. Or even stuck with his original campaign promise of not running for re-election.
Depending on your state. In mine, there was a single candidate. That’s a primary in the same way the USSR had elections. If you lived in one of the states that had two candidates in 2020 then good for you. I didn’t.
They were NOT expecting Obama to oust Hillary, and took steps to make sure something like that doesn’t happen again. Allegedly the new DNC head or whatever his title is wants fair primaries, so I guess we’ll see.
As far as I know/remember it was, at least as fair as any primary with superdelegates can be. Or rather, it was still using an unfair system and enough people turned out so that the system to keep nominations “in check” didn’t work.
Cynthia McKinney was elected as a Democrat in Georgia around that time. iirc she was looking at a presidential run. You might have seen her on here yesterday for her latest tweet. (Spoiler: super bigot)
Which is to say, if you open the field to everyone in the country you will spend a certain amount of time winnowing the contenders from the stunt candidates. Republicans don’t do that because they’re all the same candidate. So they spend almost zero time (since Perot) dealing with that.
Superdelegates aren’t great, but an alternative to achieve that aim of not having to platform every trust fund kid with a boot on their head might be good.
She ran as a Green Party candidate, not a Democratic one. I’m not sure how she’s relevant?
She was pretty suspect even in 2008, so I’m not sure I buy that if we don’t have superdelegates and let voters decide who the candidates are, then the stupid masses will just pick whoever.
I don’t think superdelegates are to prevent popular candidates (see Obama), I think they’re to get a comprehensible slate of candidates to focus on issues and themes and not on turning the Iowa caucus into something bizarre by claiming to be a Democrat who just happens to demand we all live in the sea or something.
Again, republicans don’t have this problem, and they’re well known to fund ‘spoiler candidates’ with the intention of wrecking momentum or message or other campaign aspects.
Even 2016 was pretty fair. The nomination went to the person with the most votes and the majority of the non-super delegates. Bernie lost because people didn’t want to vote for him because of a variety of reasons but not because the primary wasn’t “fair”. If more people voted for him he would have won.
No, Bernie had the nom stolen by Hillary and DWS via corrupt back room dealings and superdelegate shenanigans. Everyone was voting Bernie and for the corporate elite that was a problem. They solved it by ratfucking the primaries, a tried and true dem tactic.
Ah yes, super delegate shenanigans like the majority going to the candidate who had over 3 million more votes than the other. The only way Bernie could have won with super delegates is if he got almost all of them. And if he did then the candidate who got 3 million less votes would have won the nomination and we would still be facing people saying the democratic primaries aren’t “fair”.
Now don’t get me wrong, DWS was biased as fuck. But if the voters simply turned out and voted for Bernie then bias wouldn’t have mattered. The RNC was biased towards Jeb bush and Ted Cruz but you know how that turned out.
Nope Bernie won the state. He won and got 18 delegates and Clinton got 11. But then at the convention Clinton got the 8 super delegates from the state which put her at 19 delegates to Bernie’s 18 but Bernie still won the state. Here’s my source.
Bernie lost because people didn’t want to vote for him because of a variety of reasons but not because the primary wasn’t “fair”. If more people voted for him he would have won.
Uh oh
(I agree, although DWS really screwed up everything including discussing this)
Yeah this is something that really bothers me about my fellow leftists and is pure revisionism about the 2016 primary. Bernie lost fair and square and all we had to do to make sure that didn’t happen was get more people to vote for him. But according to many people on here if the candidate fails to win then it’s their sole fault because they couldn’t convince voters to go with them. But I guess that doesn’t apply to Bernie.
Also I hate how DWS screwed up talking about this all because she was biased as fuck towards Clinton. Her bias wouldn’t have mattered if more people had voted for Bernie but her having a bias at all must mean Bernie was cheated out of the nomination.
Does this mean if Trump enforces voting via Real ID, and millions of people get removed from their right to vote, and Trump wins in '28, that more people should have voted for Democrats or that Trump shouldn’t have purged the voter rolls of as many people as possible that wouldn’t vote for him?
Just to terrify you a little bit. In the 2020 election, Harris and Biden only had one candidate that regularly polled worse than they did, which was a culty Tulsi. And if you remember, out of that large field, Biden won.
The DNC has a gigantically fat thumb on the scales.
The only purpose of the staggered primary is for them to slowly manufacture your consent for who they want. The only way we’re going to get an honest primary is if the entire country did it on one day like we do the general
All delegates need to go. The electoral college and all the historical reasoning behind it are no longer valid.
If you want a more fair election, ranked choice, with weighted votes like a Borda system. Borda is good at finding broadly acceptable compromise candidates because it rewards strong second- and third-place support instead of only first-place votes. It’s good at finding better consensus candidates but even this can be gamed by deliberately ranking strong candidates last. No system is perfect, but there are lots better options than what we are currently using.
Why would the Democratic Party operate like that when it risks allowing a Bernie-style candidate to go all the way to the general?
They’re going to crowd the field with slop candidates, like Tulsi Gabbard and Liz Warren and Beto were in '20, then consolidate the rest of the field around whatever neolib shithead demonstrates a significant popular appeal. The roadmap was laid out in '76 and repeated in every open primary since then.
Keeping populists like Jesse Jackson and Paul Wellstone and Bernie Sanders out of the top ticket slot is absolutely a feature, not a bug.
So long as there’s a proper primary I don’t see the harm in this, not really. I can’t see her running a good enough campaign to make it through the primaries, at least not without also having a good enough campaign to beat the fascist party after Trump.
Three words: Hillary Rodham Clinton
It sure looked like Bernie was gonna kick her butt until the DNC decided they didn’t like a Democratic Socialist possibly winning. Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned for a reason.
I don’t trust the primaries to be fair. There is too much money and power at stake to let “the people” actually decide the candidates. To me it’s the major reason everyone says both parties are the same. It’s because both candidates are picked by the same people, at least at this level. Yes I know they aren’t the same, especially now. But have you ever noticed how feckless the Democratic leadership seems to be? It’s because the billionaires are really the ones in power.
If there’s a form of Ranked Choice Voting in the primaries, such as STAR Voting or Ranked Robin, then the DNC will have a much more difficult time pulling shenanigans.
First Past the Post voting in the primaries favors moderates and extremists, but an issue with moderates is that they don’t excite voters with big life changing policies. So no one, except people already bought into preventing the worst option, show up to vote in the general elections. Which makes it harder for everyone.
More states need to get forms of Ranked Choice Voting implemented, specifically STAR or Ranked Robin voting if we want to see more progressive wins.
the key here is “proper primary.” I can’t remember a time when they’ve had one that wasn’t fucked up in some way.
2024 was the only year recently we didn’t have a primary.
neat. i have been voting for longer than that. there have been years where there was only one person on the primary, which efficiently means “primary votes are cancelled” - when the dnc say they want the incumbent.
that is a de facto cancellation. telling the people who could vote that they are ignored.
my point stands: the dem side needs to do a better job.
I’ve been voting since I was 18 and I’ve never seen that in the past 16 years. 2024 was skipping because Biden was the incumbent at the time. Incumbent are almost always given the primary. The GOP does the same and is entirely different.
yeah. see. i disagree that incumbents should be given anything. earn it. primary every time.
i have been voting since 1997.
I agree with you, but as devil’s advocate, why would a political party vie against itself for a seat it already holds. At best, it would only slightly sully the incumbent’s name. Take Biden for example: either he’s doing a good job, or he needs to be replaced because he’s not doing a good enough job.
So primaries are only so politicians can choose their voters, and not the other way around? I was told only MAGAts are the cultist?
why? because its supposed to represent the current situation and overton window not be a reminder the parties are “clubs” that set their own rules.
That’s absolutely not true. I’ve been voting since 2012 and the only presidential primary I’ve voted in that had more than one candidate was the Hillary-Bernie primary. That’s the only one.
It absolutely is true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries
In 2012 Obama was the incumbent, which again as I mentioned, incumbents typically aren’t primaried if they are doing a decent job and up for re-election.
Since then there was 2016, 2020, where both years had a primary for the DNC. 2024 was just a fluke because Biden should have dropped out. Or even stuck with his original campaign promise of not running for re-election.
Depending on your state. In mine, there was a single candidate. That’s a primary in the same way the USSR had elections. If you lived in one of the states that had two candidates in 2020 then good for you. I didn’t.
1992? 2000? 2004? 2008? 2020?
What about 2008? It wasn’t fair?
As far as I know/remember it was, at least as fair as any primary with superdelegates can be. Or rather, it was still using an unfair system and enough people turned out so that the system to keep nominations “in check” didn’t work.
Cynthia McKinney was elected as a Democrat in Georgia around that time. iirc she was looking at a presidential run. You might have seen her on here yesterday for her latest tweet. (Spoiler: super bigot)
Which is to say, if you open the field to everyone in the country you will spend a certain amount of time winnowing the contenders from the stunt candidates. Republicans don’t do that because they’re all the same candidate. So they spend almost zero time (since Perot) dealing with that.
Superdelegates aren’t great, but an alternative to achieve that aim of not having to platform every trust fund kid with a boot on their head might be good.
She ran as a Green Party candidate, not a Democratic one. I’m not sure how she’s relevant?
She was pretty suspect even in 2008, so I’m not sure I buy that if we don’t have superdelegates and let voters decide who the candidates are, then the stupid masses will just pick whoever.
Oh man you’re right I’d forgotten that.
I don’t think superdelegates are to prevent popular candidates (see Obama), I think they’re to get a comprehensible slate of candidates to focus on issues and themes and not on turning the Iowa caucus into something bizarre by claiming to be a Democrat who just happens to demand we all live in the sea or something.
Again, republicans don’t have this problem, and they’re well known to fund ‘spoiler candidates’ with the intention of wrecking momentum or message or other campaign aspects.
They can’t remember.
Even 2016 was pretty fair. The nomination went to the person with the most votes and the majority of the non-super delegates. Bernie lost because people didn’t want to vote for him because of a variety of reasons but not because the primary wasn’t “fair”. If more people voted for him he would have won.
No, Bernie had the nom stolen by Hillary and DWS via corrupt back room dealings and superdelegate shenanigans. Everyone was voting Bernie and for the corporate elite that was a problem. They solved it by ratfucking the primaries, a tried and true dem tactic.
Ah yes, super delegate shenanigans like the majority going to the candidate who had over 3 million more votes than the other. The only way Bernie could have won with super delegates is if he got almost all of them. And if he did then the candidate who got 3 million less votes would have won the nomination and we would still be facing people saying the democratic primaries aren’t “fair”.
Now don’t get me wrong, DWS was biased as fuck. But if the voters simply turned out and voted for Bernie then bias wouldn’t have mattered. The RNC was biased towards Jeb bush and Ted Cruz but you know how that turned out.
In the 2016 WV Democrat Primary, Bernie won every single county, 40k more votes than Clinton, but Clinton won the state. Your math isn’t mathing.
Nope Bernie won the state. He won and got 18 delegates and Clinton got 11. But then at the convention Clinton got the 8 super delegates from the state which put her at 19 delegates to Bernie’s 18 but Bernie still won the state. Here’s my source.
Uh oh
(I agree, although DWS really screwed up everything including discussing this)
Yeah this is something that really bothers me about my fellow leftists and is pure revisionism about the 2016 primary. Bernie lost fair and square and all we had to do to make sure that didn’t happen was get more people to vote for him. But according to many people on here if the candidate fails to win then it’s their sole fault because they couldn’t convince voters to go with them. But I guess that doesn’t apply to Bernie.
Also I hate how DWS screwed up talking about this all because she was biased as fuck towards Clinton. Her bias wouldn’t have mattered if more people had voted for Bernie but her having a bias at all must mean Bernie was cheated out of the nomination.
Does this mean if Trump enforces voting via Real ID, and millions of people get removed from their right to vote, and Trump wins in '28, that more people should have voted for Democrats or that Trump shouldn’t have purged the voter rolls of as many people as possible that wouldn’t vote for him?
If the dnc had proper primaries we would have had Bernie.
Just to terrify you a little bit. In the 2020 election, Harris and Biden only had one candidate that regularly polled worse than they did, which was a culty Tulsi. And if you remember, out of that large field, Biden won.
The DNC has a gigantically fat thumb on the scales.
Remember when the media decided that Biden winning the south Carolina primary was basically a coronation.
The only purpose of the staggered primary is for them to slowly manufacture your consent for who they want. The only way we’re going to get an honest primary is if the entire country did it on one day like we do the general
Hahahaha. Good one. That’ll totally happen.
a regular primary with enough debates, and where superdelegates are shun till the end, should be bare minimum
How about just no super delegates and the people decide.
How about a primary where superdelegates get no more/better votes than anyone else?
What am I thinking? That might result in someone who isn’t on the corporate teat!
Super delegates need to go
All delegates need to go. The electoral college and all the historical reasoning behind it are no longer valid.
If you want a more fair election, ranked choice, with weighted votes like a Borda system. Borda is good at finding broadly acceptable compromise candidates because it rewards strong second- and third-place support instead of only first-place votes. It’s good at finding better consensus candidates but even this can be gamed by deliberately ranking strong candidates last. No system is perfect, but there are lots better options than what we are currently using.
Why would the Democratic Party operate like that when it risks allowing a Bernie-style candidate to go all the way to the general?
They’re going to crowd the field with slop candidates, like Tulsi Gabbard and Liz Warren and Beto were in '20, then consolidate the rest of the field around whatever neolib shithead demonstrates a significant popular appeal. The roadmap was laid out in '76 and repeated in every open primary since then.
Keeping populists like Jesse Jackson and Paul Wellstone and Bernie Sanders out of the top ticket slot is absolutely a feature, not a bug.
If there is a primary hopefully she will perform the public service of prompting the others to distance themselves from Bidens handling of Gaza