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?
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.