MicroWaveDonald Trump has no idea what has hit him, and it’s a joy to watch
Dagwood222I have to admit when I’m wrong.
I was all for Joe staying in the race, because I didn’t think the Dems would coalesce around one candidate without a shit-show convention.
Now I’m glad I was wrong. Just putting it out there.
mozz100% the same
Dude I've never been so happy to be wrong as fuck
You know what the cool thing is? Those of us who were wrong for one reason or another will actually about it. We don’t pretend we were right the whole time. We don’t pretend it just didn’t happen.
Hindsight being what it is, I’m almost wondering if the timing was planned in advance. Biden already told us he’d be a one term president. If in 10 years they came out and said “Yeah, that was the plan from day one but we couldn’t tell anyone” I would absolutely believe it.
I threw an idea out in response to a comment here right after Biden backed out and the more I think about, the more it seems likely to be right.
My theory is that the DNC likely timed Biden stepping aside so it would be late enough they couldn’t hold primaries for the nominee. It came out in 2016 that the DNC was basically rigged for Clinton to win, regardless of what voters wanted. The 2016 primaries caused dissension with voters leading to lower turnout, and I think that was also somewhat true in 2020. By waiting as long as he did to back out, Biden took voter choice out of it and helped rally everyone behind Harris.
I could absolutely be wrong, but every time I run it through my head it feels more likely to be true. And if I’m right, it is a bit sleazy. However, I have to admit I’m surprised and impressed by how it’s turned out. I didn’t expect people to rally so strongly behind Kamala, and I’m excited to be a part of it!
It wasn’t “rigged” for Clinton (and I thought she was not a good candidate).
Bernie lost because less people voted for him.
If it wasn’t for the undemocratic caucuses, he would have lost earlier. For example, he won the Washington caucus but got crushed in the primary (which had massively higher turn out).
The fact of the matter is that the broader electorate wasn’t as left-wing as Lemmy or /r/politics is.
This take is reductive to the point of dishonesty. It was, in fact, rigged for Clinton in a number of ways. Major media outlets invariably attributed an overwhelming majority of superdelegate votes to Clinton, right from the beginning. In all the reportage most people saw of the race, this dishonest framing gave a strong impression that Sanders had no chance—that voting for him would be a waste.
To say nothing of any other chicanery that took place, that went a long way to depress progressive turnout, and dissuade any moderate Democrats from considering him as a serious contender. The media were pro-Clinton in a much more fervent and mask-off way than they’ve ever been pro-Trump, and mainstream Dems, by and large, believe the shit they read in WaPo and NYT.
Do you not remember all the leaks showing extreme bias towards Clinton, derision of Sanders, and even deals between Clinton and the DNC?
The emails and documents showed that the Democratic Party’s national committee favored Clinton over … Bernie. … The leaks resulted in allegations of bias against Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign in apparent contradiction with the DNC leadership’s publicly stated neutrality, as several DNC operatives openly derided Sanders’s campaign and discussed ways to advance Hillary Clinton’s nomination. Later reveals included controversial DNC–Clinton agreements dated before the primary, regarding financial arrangements and control over policy and hiring decisions. source
Or that DNC leaders argued in court that they didn’t need to hold impartial primaries and could select whatever candidate they wanted?
… DNC attorneys argued that the DNC would be well within their rights to select their own candidate. source
For their part, the DNC and Wasserman Schultz have characterized the DNC charter’s promise of ‘impartiality and evenhandedness’ as a mere political promise—political rhetoric that is not enforceable in federal courts. The Court does not accept this trivialization of the DNC’s governing principles. While it may be true in the abstract that the DNC has the right to have its delegates “go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way, the DNC, through its charter, has committed itself to a higher principle. source
At the end of the day, yes, Bernie got fewer votes. But that is a small part of the iceberg, ignoring all the things that led up to it and all the biases at play in the organization putting the vote on in what I would (and did) call a “rigged” primary.
The primary was rigged before it even began. Typically when there’s no incumbent you’ll see several politician make a run for it. But 2016 was different. Hilary and the DNC went around to all of the presidential hopefuls in 2015 and basically told them to sit this one out because it’s her turn. Hilary was supposed to waltz her way to the nomination uncontested because they didn’t want a repeat of 2008. The only reason we got Sanders is because he was an outsider so he didn’t get the memo (or perhaps they didn’t consider him a serious threat).