Of course that’s true, but the rules surrounding superdelegates and other tomfoolery wasn’t enough to make a difference in any recent presidential primary. 2024 was an anomaly but it seemed pretty likely Kamala would have won the nomination regardless (this is not an excuse to not hold a primary).
The rules for primaries to legislative or local offices are actually completely clean and fair, at least as far as I can tell.
The way we run our primaries is an absolute joke. The presidential race is over months before half the country has even had a chance to vote. That gives the establishment every opportunity to manipulate media coverage to boost their preferred candidate.
The way every single establishment candidate dropped out and endorsed Biden (who was near last place) on the same day was ridiculously transparent. I’ll also go to my grave with absolute certainty that Warren stayed in because the establishment got to her. I don’t know if it was a carrot, a stick, or both, but they kept her in the race as a spoiler. Warren completely dropped her campaign but refused to drop out for almost another month.
We should be up in arms about the Democratic primary process, not calling them “clean and fair”. Everyone should vote on the same day, we should have ranked choice style voting, and debates shouldn’t all be run by corporate media. That’s the minimum we should accept.
As for the superdelegates, they are the perfect demonstration of how our of touch and clueless the party establishment is. It doesn’t even occur to them that if they ever were to override the will of their voters that it would sink the party for a generation or more. There is no world in which they could do that then win the general.
I didn’t say the national presidential primaries were clean and fair. I said that local primaries are. And that is true.
Regardless, nothing you said changes the fact that when it came down to actual votes in the primary, those who voted in the Democratic primary seemed to prefer moderate neoliberals over social democrats and progressives in 2016 and 2020.
All this complaining about the primary process amounts to useless hand-writhing because no amount of calling for reform or argumentation is going to change the system. Calling for people to be “up in arms” is a useless activity because being angry by itself means nothing. If you want change, you need power. If you want power, you need to get it by playing within the rules of the current system.
So vote in the damn primaries to get the party to nominate progressives and tell your mates to do the same. Start or sign ballot initiatives to move to nonpartisan blanket primaries and ranked-choice voting.
Exit polls in the 2020 primary showed that voter’s had really only one issue that drove their vote, and that was electability. Corporate media absolutely pounded out the message that Bernie was less competitive with Trump than more establishment candidates. That was disinformation because Bernie and Biden performed almost identically in polls against Trump. Bernie was the clear favorite when it came to platform and policy.
Getting people actively engaged or “up in arms” is how you win elections, including primaries. That is a lesson the establishment understands when facing off against progressives, but consistently fails at in general elections, at least since 2008. It’s not a waste of anything to get people energized, even on a losing issue.
Quit fucking lecturing progressives on the need to vote. Progressives vote more consistently than any other group in the US political spectrum. You are just furthering establishment disinformation. They want people to think progressives are flaky and unreliable so they can continue to win the electability argument in primaries. Progressives don’t just vote. They make up almost the entirety of the grass-roots Democratic ground game, and the vast majority of individual donors.
Progressives vote more consistently than any other group in the US political spectrum.
If that’s true, then that means that they’re losing primaries despite being disproportionately represented. You’re just saying that progressives losing primaries is more than fair. If progressive are the most consistent voters, and they still lose, then they’re just not popular.
Did you even read what I just wrote? Exit polls said that Bernie was the candidate that voters would most like to see in the presidency but, for most voters, electability was an overriding concern for pretty obvious reasons. Bernie and Biden performed almost identically against Trump in polls, but that’s not what voters believed. News coverage was relentless in telling voters that Bernie was “too radical” to win in the general, so that’s what most voters believed.
What can I do but keep fighting? Assuming that America isn’t over, the most important thing right now is to force the Democratic establishment to acknowledge their role in this disaster and embrace whatever reforms we can get.
In practical terms, if Rahm Emanuel wins election at the DNC, it’s pretty much a guarantee that the party will learn nothing and the failures will continue to compound. That’s where my attention is.
True enough but the DNC is absolutely not innocent here with how they like to fuck around in their primaries.
Of course that’s true, but the rules surrounding superdelegates and other tomfoolery wasn’t enough to make a difference in any recent presidential primary. 2024 was an anomaly but it seemed pretty likely Kamala would have won the nomination regardless (this is not an excuse to not hold a primary).
The rules for primaries to legislative or local offices are actually completely clean and fair, at least as far as I can tell.
The way we run our primaries is an absolute joke. The presidential race is over months before half the country has even had a chance to vote. That gives the establishment every opportunity to manipulate media coverage to boost their preferred candidate.
The way every single establishment candidate dropped out and endorsed Biden (who was near last place) on the same day was ridiculously transparent. I’ll also go to my grave with absolute certainty that Warren stayed in because the establishment got to her. I don’t know if it was a carrot, a stick, or both, but they kept her in the race as a spoiler. Warren completely dropped her campaign but refused to drop out for almost another month.
We should be up in arms about the Democratic primary process, not calling them “clean and fair”. Everyone should vote on the same day, we should have ranked choice style voting, and debates shouldn’t all be run by corporate media. That’s the minimum we should accept.
As for the superdelegates, they are the perfect demonstration of how our of touch and clueless the party establishment is. It doesn’t even occur to them that if they ever were to override the will of their voters that it would sink the party for a generation or more. There is no world in which they could do that then win the general.
I didn’t say the national presidential primaries were clean and fair. I said that local primaries are. And that is true.
Regardless, nothing you said changes the fact that when it came down to actual votes in the primary, those who voted in the Democratic primary seemed to prefer moderate neoliberals over social democrats and progressives in 2016 and 2020.
All this complaining about the primary process amounts to useless hand-writhing because no amount of calling for reform or argumentation is going to change the system. Calling for people to be “up in arms” is a useless activity because being angry by itself means nothing. If you want change, you need power. If you want power, you need to get it by playing within the rules of the current system.
So vote in the damn primaries to get the party to nominate progressives and tell your mates to do the same. Start or sign ballot initiatives to move to nonpartisan blanket primaries and ranked-choice voting.
Putin won with actual votes too.
Exit polls in the 2020 primary showed that voter’s had really only one issue that drove their vote, and that was electability. Corporate media absolutely pounded out the message that Bernie was less competitive with Trump than more establishment candidates. That was disinformation because Bernie and Biden performed almost identically in polls against Trump. Bernie was the clear favorite when it came to platform and policy.
Getting people actively engaged or “up in arms” is how you win elections, including primaries. That is a lesson the establishment understands when facing off against progressives, but consistently fails at in general elections, at least since 2008. It’s not a waste of anything to get people energized, even on a losing issue.
Quit fucking lecturing progressives on the need to vote. Progressives vote more consistently than any other group in the US political spectrum. You are just furthering establishment disinformation. They want people to think progressives are flaky and unreliable so they can continue to win the electability argument in primaries. Progressives don’t just vote. They make up almost the entirety of the grass-roots Democratic ground game, and the vast majority of individual donors.
If that’s true, then that means that they’re losing primaries despite being disproportionately represented. You’re just saying that progressives losing primaries is more than fair. If progressive are the most consistent voters, and they still lose, then they’re just not popular.
It is true. See this Pew study.
Did you even read what I just wrote? Exit polls said that Bernie was the candidate that voters would most like to see in the presidency but, for most voters, electability was an overriding concern for pretty obvious reasons. Bernie and Biden performed almost identically against Trump in polls, but that’s not what voters believed. News coverage was relentless in telling voters that Bernie was “too radical” to win in the general, so that’s what most voters believed.
Okay, so what are you going to do about it?
What can I do but keep fighting? Assuming that America isn’t over, the most important thing right now is to force the Democratic establishment to acknowledge their role in this disaster and embrace whatever reforms we can get.
In practical terms, if Rahm Emanuel wins election at the DNC, it’s pretty much a guarantee that the party will learn nothing and the failures will continue to compound. That’s where my attention is.