She has some criticisms for her past as an attorney, but I’m not sure why she’s so disliked now. What has she done to engender such distaste from the public?
She has some criticisms for her past as an attorney, but I’m not sure why she’s so disliked now. What has she done to engender such distaste from the public?
The single biggest problem standing between the left and sustained and meaningful control of the federal government is the complete lack of ability of voters to circle around a consensus candidate. There are several valid reasons to be critical of Harris just as there are pretty much every single Democratic Presidential decade basically of my lifetime. But Republicans vote consistently for candidates they dislike or even hate just to beat Democrats. Every single candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2016, 2020, and undoubtedly in 2028 will have some vocal subset of registered Democrat voters telling you exactly why they will never in a million years vote for them. I saw it constantly on Reddit and I don’t see any reason why it won’t continue.
Until somebody drops the magic “consensus candidate” name that somehow pleases everyone, Democratic voters are always going to be a major hurdle to their own success. And frankly I don’t think that “consensus candidate” name exists. Such is the curse of being the big tent party opposite the GOP. Republicans know they can continue winning elections for at least a little longer thanks to Democratic infighting alone.
Democrats fall in love. Republicans fall in line.
It’s reductive, but look at the Christian Right and Trump. Trump is nowhere close to the picture of a Christian. It’s astounding he can safely cross the threshold of a church. But he promises to make sure abortion is illegal and men can’t pretend to be women to steal kids, so they vote for him. Replace the abortion issue with guns and you get another set of voters who will vote Republican regardless of what they might personally feel.
Meanwhile and to your point on the left, each candidate’s worst flaws are held as some kind of uncrossable line by people who are terminally online (which isn’t helpful) and the Democratic Party does what they can to feed this and make sure they don’t have to enact meaningful change. They just want to maintain the status quo but they get to do it with a pride flag waving behind them. If the Party establishment would just stop putting a thumb on the scale (not just against Bernie but ANYONE remotely progressive/left of the neoliberal center) and let the primary process shake out the most popular candidate, they might actually find themselves winning elections.
More accurate is: Republicans vote, Democrats don’t.
If this country had compulsory voting with sane voting days, and better protections against taking away voting rights to blacks and poors, Democrats would have a supermajority in Congress, and a Democratic president for decades.
I don’t really think compulsory voting would be that beneficial for democrats. Yes, it may boost them a few points across the board, but my general intuition about the general public is they lean towards democrats but are more socially conservative than you see in online spaces. 2020 is probably the best example: super high turnout yet Dems still clipping by with only a +4 advantage instead of the +10 predicted by looking at far more politically engaged voters.
It’s not social stuff. A lot of Americans are socially conservative, but social progressives and social libertarians (live and let live types) together make a clear supermajority. The problem isn’t that Americans are socially conservative, it’s that a large number of people have the notion that Republicans are good for the economy and Democrats are bad for the economy, and that therefore when things are economically rough they should vote in the Republicans. This group of people play a large role in why Congress flips so often.
Both are parties are mostly corporate owned so it makes no real difference in quality of life for people so the only way for them to differciate is pointless culture issues.
The DNC doesn’t put their thumb on the scale as much as people like to pretend. The real problem is the under 40 crowd simply not showing up to vote in primaries. There is nothing stopping the same turnout in general elections happening in primaries except people refusing to get off their couches.
Bernie was the frontrunner in 2020, and Biden was doing terribly, until the DNC brokered a deal with all of the other candidates to have them simultaneously drop out and endorse Biden.
In 2016, the DNC had a special fundraising deal with Hillary that funneled joint money directly into her campaign.
IMO these are good examples of the Democratic establishment internally picking a candidate and throwing their weight behind that candidate. I haven’t seen anything like this from the RNC.
There’s nothing illegal or unethical about that. The party is entitled to support the candidate they think has the best chance of winning, and they were proven right when he got the most votes in history… while Trump got the second most in history. At that point if Bernie were the more popular candidate he should have been able to beat Biden head to head and he didn’t. Because progressive voters talk a good game but are too lazy to actually show up for primaries. You get out of the system what you put into it and believe it or not the DNC doesn’t throw it’s weight behind establishment candidates because they hate progressivism, they do it because progressive voters are historically less reliable. And lo and behold Biden got 19 million votes to Bernie’s 9. This is literally a “prove us wrong” situation with the DNC. Show them a progressive candidate is viable by voting for one. But don’t be surprised when the DNC is prioritizing winning the general election and in doing so is already promoting the candidate they know has the best chance of winning. That’s literally the entire purpose of a party apparatus existing in the first place.
Again, nothing wrong with that. Bernie lost because more people voted for Hillary, not because she had more money. She beat him by 4 million votes. 4 million real human beings. Not party elite. Bernie was winning the caucuses, the parts of the primary where regular voters don’t get a say. But when the voters got their turn, they made their choice free of coercion. Bernie had more than 4 million additional supporters easily who sat on the sidelines, watched the outcome, and then complained without ever considering actually participating. I guarantee you that. Feels like about 3 million of them gave me shit daily on Reddit back in 2017 when I said all these same things then. All openly accusing the DNC of rigging the outcome while admitting they didn’t vote in the primary because they refused to register with a party that “rigged” primaries, despite the fact that the accusations of rigging occurred after said primary was over. So I guess being too lazy and jaded to even show up is somehow everyone’s fault but their own.
We shouldn’t be emulating the RNC. A fascist authoritarian party that got Trump because they don’t vette their candidates and the party has gone completely insane as a result and the country will never be the same again. Not exactly a glowing example of good outcomes. That’s exhibit A 1 for why a political party exercising some level of discretion over which of their candidates gets the most attention isn’t inherently bad. And believe me, with Trump’s upcoming legal troubles, you’re going to see some pretty heavy scale tipping in favor of DeSantis by next spring.
The funny part is, Trump suggested to take away guns first, and do due process second - and these 2nd Amendment goobers still voted for him.
This is mostly right but there’s also a harder element to the social behaviours of the two voting groups. Republicans are happy to play dirty and Democrats always take the high road. Dems don’t seem to mind screwing each other over by meddling with public will in the primaries, why don’t they for once take the gloves off and play at least a little bit of the Repubs game? I can see how this could make it a totally populist nightmare, but that’s what we’re already facing.
Keir starmer tried that in the UK and the press just lambasted him for dirty tricks. It is whoever controls the press that wins regardless
I agree. Dems just need to be OK with the person the DNC picks for them and vote like good little peons.
That’s not the only option. People can start participating in primaries to get the candidates they actually want. But when the general election rolls around and the other option is christofascism, yes, you need need to vote against that. Or you won’t be voting for anything ever again pretty soon.
We really need a different election system (ranked choice for one option) for the primaries to have any impact. As they stand it’s just an illusion of choice while the DNC decides who they want for their candidate and the shitty voters go along with it.
I don’t think I agree with that. I haven’t seen a single Democratic nominee who wasn’t also the lead vote getter in my lifetime. Pretty sure there hasn’t been one since the modern primary process was introduced in the 70s. Sure you can argue that the DNC throws it’s weight behind certain candidates in terms of money and exposure, sure the order of the primaries influences how the later ones tend to lead. And superdelegates will always be controversial. But you can’t argue in good faith that the DNC is choosing the candidates for us until you show me one who didn’t win the primary popular vote somehow getting the nomination.
Ironically the closest we’ve gotten to that in recent years was 2016 when Bernie won very few primary elections but won many of the caucuses. The caucuses are inarguably less small-d democratic than primaries but the same people arguing that the DNC rigged those primaries against Bernie conveniently ignore that actual voters didn’t want him.
At the end of the day it’s still the voters who pick the nominee. And voters can easily pick more progressive candidates if they want to, but the numbers don’t lie. Turnout in the primary in 2016 for Dems was 14.4 percent of eligible voters. In the general it was over 40%. In 2020 primary and general participation among Democrats both went up which is good, but the relative gap between primary and general participation more or less stayed the same. Biden won the Presidency with over 80 million votes. He won the primary cleanly, more than doubling second place Sanders’ total… with 19 million votes. That’s a massive, massive discrepancy.
Saying the DNC hand picks their candidates when younger and more progressive voters can’t be bothered to participate is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Or moderates simply still outnumber progressives. Those are really the only two possible conclusions you can draw. I don’t really think the latter is true personally so what it comes down to is primary turnout. All the money and exposure and power brokering within the DNC doesn’t change the fact that nobody is going into these voters’ houses in primary season and physically restraining them to keep them from voting. They are simply choosing not to. And you can’t really expect to be taken seriously if you’re going to complain about the outcome of a process that you willingly abstain from. That’s like going into a restaurant, telling the waiter to surprise you, then being angry that you get served a burger when you wanted chicken. Next time order the goddamn chicken.
This is exactly what I’m arguing. In good faith. To dismiss the impact of those concerns is just putting your head in the sand to hide from reality. Sure there are exceptions to the rule. AOC taking out Crowley for example. But as we’ve seen, that made waves, and the boys at the top, they did not like waves.
It’s not that I am dismissing their impact, I am dismissing that they’re wrong to do that. Primaries are not an official part of governance, they are a process of the party organization. They are not established or regulated by the constitution or federal law. As such the parties have every legal right to come out in support of a specific candidate which they think has the best chance of winning in the general election.
They also have allowed voters to have the lion’s share of the say in who that candidate is. Before the 70s it wasn’t that way and the party simply told you who the candidate was. Now voters have an unprecedented level of control over the direction a political party takes… if they choose to utilize that control. As of right now there is literally nothing stopping voters from picking a candidate in the primary that goes against the will of the party. It is 100% feasible and possible, all people have to do is show up. So if you don’t like the DNC throwing their weight behind Biden…show up and vote for someone else.
But when Biden gets 19 million votes and Bernie gets 9, that’s not the DNC telling you against your will who the candidate is. That’s not the result of a rigged outcome. That is the voters, the actual real people, choosing Biden. Or at least it’s the ones who would choose differently being too apathetic to do it.
The party needs to figure out what they actually stand for and focus on that. The Republicans have distinct factions but the conflicts between those factions are somewhat in the details. The factions in the Democratic party are wildly different and in direct opposition sometimes. The Democratic party has Socialists, Pacifists, and Environmentalist in the same tent as Corporatists and war hawks. Some of these factions just have zero common ground.
You want a one party system? I’m not a big fan of the Republican party but there are some issues they are championing at the moment like free speech. Back in the day that was the Democrats, and I have no doubts it will flip flop again at some point but that just goes to show how we need at least two parties to act as a check on each other.
Silencing your ideological opponents is great and all until it’s you being silenced.
Republicans are not championing free speech. Entirely the opposite with how they’re treating LGBT folks currently.
And on that note, the Republicans are so beyond bad that yes, a one party state is actually better. To be clear, a one party state is utterly awful. That’s how terrible the Republican party is. They cannot be even remotely viable when their entire platform is hating other people.
To be fair, dictatorships and communism is amazing if you have the right leader. It’s just never happened before. It probably never will.
Yes I’m a Python developer.
Dictatorships are (by definition) never amazing. The state exists to serve the public, not to subjugate it
Ah, if only all dictators would be benevolent dictators for life like Guido.
Free speech like this?
Legislation in Tennessee could potentially criminalize speech that causes ‘emotional distress’ to or ‘frightens’ another person, which could be seen as a suppression of free speech (www.alternet.org/gop-revolts-against-free-speech-republicans-push-anti-protest-bills-across-the-country/).
In Washington state, Republican Senator Doug Ericksen introduced a bill that would allow state authorities to charge protesters with “economic terrorism” if they participated in illegal demonstrations or coerced private citizens into doing so (www.alternet.org/gop-revolts-against-free-speech-republicans-push-anti-protest-bills-across-the-country/).
In Kentucky, a bill was passed criminalizing the act of insulting a police officer (www.alternet.org/gop-revolts-against-free-speech-republicans-push-anti-protest-bills-across-the-country/).
If the options are one liberal party and one fascist party, or just one liberal party, I would pick the one-party state every time. Anyhow, the Democrats are such an umbrella party that if they were the only party they would almost certainly break into two or more smaller parties, all of which would be far more tolerable than the Republican party.