The democrats haven’t held a legitimate primary since 2008!
In 2008 it was a genuine competition between Obama, Hillary, and a handful of other lesser known politicians. Obama won the general in a landslide.
In 2012 Obama ran unopposed. Obama won the general.
In 2016 the democrats rigged the primary against sanders for Hillary, and to absolutely no one’s surprise who was paying attention, Hillary lost the general. Why? she didn’t genuinely win the primary. Shocking!
In 2020, refusing to learn mistakes from 2016, the democrats once again screwed over bernie and didn’t run a legitimate primary - rigged it so that all the candidates except no-path-to-win Warren exited the race to split the progressive vote away from bernie. Joe biden won by the skin of his teeth, and he would of lost if it weren’t for the country reacting to trumps handling of covid.
In 2024, once again refusing to learn the democrats didn’t even bother with a primary, ran an old demented geezer as a presidential candidate, realized that wasn’t going to work, and then anointed unelected Kamala Harris who didn’t even need to compete in a primary.
And they’re shocked they lost?! These people make way too much money to be this stupid.
I can’t stop thinking about how in 2016, my conservative grandmother watched the primary debates and told me she actually thought Bernie made a lot of good points.
And then she went on to vote for Donald Trump in November.
This, I think, is the disconnect the DNC keeps failing to recognize.
We just keep nominating milquetoast centrists whose message is little more than “maintain the status quo”, when nobody is happy with the status quo.
But we have to run centrist candidates, they say, or else we’ll lose all the voters in the center!
If that’s how it works, then why is the GOP winning by doing the exact opposite?
In a world where rent keeps going up but wages stay the same, people are scared and frustrated, and they don’t feel like their frustrations are heard.
Along comes a smooth-talking con man who tells them, “I know you’re angry at the world, and I’m going to give you a scapegoat to blame it on. It’s the immigrants’ fault. It’s trans people’s fault. It’s the woke left’s fault. It’s whatever target I tell you to hate next’s fault. And if you elect me, I will stick it to these people in order to Make America Great Again!”
Meanwhile, the best we can do is “Vote for me because everything that other guy said is horrifying.” That’s it. That’s the only real sales pitch we have for Harris. But no matter how terrible the other guy is, it reflects horribly on us that we can’t even talk about our own candidate’s merits at all.
We need to run a candidate who can say, “I too know you’re angry at the world. And I’m here to offer real solutions, not snake oil, and more importantly, not the status quo either.”
The difference between the right and left here is that the right actually likes their guy. And if not even we like our candidates, why should voters?
Alas, we learned nothing in 2016 and I suspect the DNC will continue to learn nothing now.
The dnc is absolutely not gonna learn a god damn thing except to once again give a tongue lashing to the left while making out with corporate America and the military industrial complex.
My view: yes, the Dems could have some better, but they still put up a legitimately good candidate. The GOP put up a pile of orange dog shit… And the dog shit won. How is it the Dems fault that more than half the population enjoys dog shit?
For the Dems to win, they need to run a fucking perfect campaign and the GOP doesn’t. Why? Because media fragmentation and propaganda. The bulk of the population doesn’t want to be informed. How is that the Dems fault? How did the Democratic party reach those voters that don’t give a shit about truth?
This isn’t a failure of the Democratic party, this is a failure of our society.
The left needs to stop making the perfect be the enemy of the good, or we will never get anywhere.
Good fucking luck with that. Too many people view their spotless moral record as being more important than outcomes or improving lives (/not actively making things worse).
Misanthropy is the only real outcome to this sort of behavior.
“Spotless moral record”
BRO WE ARE FUNDING A FUCKING GENOCIDE WHILE WE HAVE RECORD HOMELESSNESS, DEATHS OF DESPAIR, WORSENING CLIMATE CHANGE, LACK OF HEALTHCARE, ILLITERACY, WOMEN DYING IN CHILDBIRTH AT RATES NOT SEEN IN THE FIRST WORLD.
But go off smug
liberalfascist.And instead of doing something even remotely helpful, they let the genocide harder guy win.
But go off, accelerationist, go ahead and tell me how this makes things better. And keep using the word fascist, maybe someday you’ll learn the meaning.
Everyone that screams accelerationist seems to be ok with the incrementalism that turned Democrats into full fledged right wing fascists.
Exactly! They’re courting dick fucking Cheney rather than listen at all to their base, and have the fucking nerve to chastise us for voting wrong?! fuck these shit ass liberals!
They had some insane idea that they were pushing their politicians left, when in reality they were getting pulled to the right.
they still put up a legitimately good candidate.
Its hard to imagine any greater evil than the mass murder, systematic rape, and targetting of innocents of all kinds that the Israels have done using our direct military support, and this candidates unflagging support.