I think it’s important to highlight the importance of primary elections here. Unlike most other countries, the process of choosing who a party nominates to stand for election is entirely controlled by voters in the USA through primary elections.
The Democratic Party loses because the Republican Party nominates populists that people are excited to vote for. If the Democrats want to win, they need to do the same—nominate people that voters are actually enthusiastic about.
Primary elections have historically rubbish turnout. If progressives, social democrats, and socialists want their candidates to be nominated, they should be starting information campaigns to get their fellow left-wing Democrats to vote in primary elections.
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.
The important part of a primary isn’t the actual person, it’s that they force the democrats to acknowledge what their base wants and pretend to want it too.
It’s also the best opportunity candidates get to frame issues and demonstrate vision. Conventional wisdom is that a contested primary is bad for the general, but that hasn’t been true for decades. Election after election, a contested primary wins the general.
“The Democrats” are a lot less cohesive than you’re giving them credit for. Yes, there’s a national committee and several important figures within the party, but there is no single “leader of the Democratic Party” who dictates policy down to their underlings. Plenty of times we’ve seen prominent Democrats in power defy the party leaders and suffer no immediate consequences.
The traditional American political system is very decentralised. Parties are more like labels that politicians adopt rather than actual vehicles for political control. Anyone is free to join any party and nobody needs the party’s permission to stand for election.
Meanwhile, if you take a look at how political parties work in other countries, there’s usually a person holding the title of “party leader”, that usually being the president, leader of the opposition, prime minister, or holder of some other important state office. The party leader is in control of the entire party and all of the party’s elected officials are expected to follow the party’s official ideology as dictated by the leader. If they refuse, then they will be kicked out of the party. The party leadership has complete control over who is allowed in the party and who it nominates to stand for election.
The Democratic Party has several important leaders. Biden, of course, is the president and thus the most influential. But he’s not the dictator of the party. He still has to negotiate and work with the likes of Chuck Schumer in the Senate and Hakim Jefferies in the House for his agenda. And, of course, Biden doesn’t have the power to dictate policy to the various state chapters of the party, which have their own local leaders setting agendas independent of what Biden wants.
Contrast this with the Republican Party, which in recent years has become a lot more hierarchical, with Trump as the undisputed party leader. Trump’s power over the party is all informal, but informal power is still power and the reality is that Trump, as the de facto leader of the Republican Party, can almost unilaterally dictate who the party nominates and what the party’s policy platforms will be on a national scale. That sort of centralisation just isn’t present in the Democratic Party.
Plenty of times we’ve seen prominent Democrats in power defy the party leaders and suffer no immediate consequences.
That’s the problem, the democrats have all the same tools the republicans have, but they only use them against progressives. How defiant do you think Manchin or Sinoma would be if they were cut off from DNC resources, removed from committee assignments, and an AG was specifically selected for their willingness to effectively prosecute them and their families for their blatant corruption?
the process of choosing who a party nominates to stand for election is entirely controlled by voters in the USA through primary elections.
Courts have ruled consistantly that the political parties, which are private institutions, have control over all aspects of the primary process. Political parties are private tyrannies that put their agenda above the will of voters.
How it works on paper and how it works in reality are two different concepts.
Yes, the Party can nominate whoever it wants by fiat, but… do their own self-established rules (which they do follow) allow them to do that? Do you really think that’s how it works in reality?
This is like saying “the NFL is a private organisation and can declare any team they want to be the winner of the Super Bowl without paying attention to the result of the games”. Yes, that’s technically legally true but that’s not how it actually works in reality.
I’m not suggesting the party nominates a candidate by fiat, that would be a ridiculous PR blunder. I’m saying they achieve that same outcome, but by a thousand slightly more subtle means.
For just one example, when I was volunteering for local progressive candidates, they all struggled to find vendors to print their flyers, signs, etc. Why? Because the Democratic Party has a policy that any vendor who works with a primary challenger will be banned from future business with the party. This policy has been shown to be selectively applied to progressive challengers.
But it certainly happens at the top level too. Look at how Debbie Wasserman Schultz, then chair of the Democratic party, changed the rules multiple times to explicitly benefit Hillary over Bernie in 2016. Or how, in 2020 after Bernie won Iowa, all of the centrist candidates dropped out and endorsed Biden.
I think it’s important to highlight the importance of primary elections here. Unlike most other countries, the process of choosing who a party nominates to stand for election is entirely controlled by voters in the USA through primary elections.
The Democratic Party loses because the Republican Party nominates populists that people are excited to vote for. If the Democrats want to win, they need to do the same—nominate people that voters are actually enthusiastic about.
Primary elections have historically rubbish turnout. If progressives, social democrats, and socialists want their candidates to be nominated, they should be starting information campaigns to get their fellow left-wing Democrats to vote in primary elections.
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?
The important part of a primary isn’t the actual person, it’s that they force the democrats to acknowledge what their base wants and pretend to want it too.
It’s also the best opportunity candidates get to frame issues and demonstrate vision. Conventional wisdom is that a contested primary is bad for the general, but that hasn’t been true for decades. Election after election, a contested primary wins the general.
“The Democrats” are a lot less cohesive than you’re giving them credit for. Yes, there’s a national committee and several important figures within the party, but there is no single “leader of the Democratic Party” who dictates policy down to their underlings. Plenty of times we’ve seen prominent Democrats in power defy the party leaders and suffer no immediate consequences.
The traditional American political system is very decentralised. Parties are more like labels that politicians adopt rather than actual vehicles for political control. Anyone is free to join any party and nobody needs the party’s permission to stand for election.
Meanwhile, if you take a look at how political parties work in other countries, there’s usually a person holding the title of “party leader”, that usually being the president, leader of the opposition, prime minister, or holder of some other important state office. The party leader is in control of the entire party and all of the party’s elected officials are expected to follow the party’s official ideology as dictated by the leader. If they refuse, then they will be kicked out of the party. The party leadership has complete control over who is allowed in the party and who it nominates to stand for election.
The Democratic Party has several important leaders. Biden, of course, is the president and thus the most influential. But he’s not the dictator of the party. He still has to negotiate and work with the likes of Chuck Schumer in the Senate and Hakim Jefferies in the House for his agenda. And, of course, Biden doesn’t have the power to dictate policy to the various state chapters of the party, which have their own local leaders setting agendas independent of what Biden wants.
Contrast this with the Republican Party, which in recent years has become a lot more hierarchical, with Trump as the undisputed party leader. Trump’s power over the party is all informal, but informal power is still power and the reality is that Trump, as the de facto leader of the Republican Party, can almost unilaterally dictate who the party nominates and what the party’s policy platforms will be on a national scale. That sort of centralisation just isn’t present in the Democratic Party.
That’s the problem, the democrats have all the same tools the republicans have, but they only use them against progressives. How defiant do you think Manchin or Sinoma would be if they were cut off from DNC resources, removed from committee assignments, and an AG was specifically selected for their willingness to effectively prosecute them and their families for their blatant corruption?
Courts have ruled consistantly that the political parties, which are private institutions, have control over all aspects of the primary process. Political parties are private tyrannies that put their agenda above the will of voters.
How it works on paper and how it works in reality are two different concepts.
Yes, the Party can nominate whoever it wants by fiat, but… do their own self-established rules (which they do follow) allow them to do that? Do you really think that’s how it works in reality?
This is like saying “the NFL is a private organisation and can declare any team they want to be the winner of the Super Bowl without paying attention to the result of the games”. Yes, that’s technically legally true but that’s not how it actually works in reality.
I’m not suggesting the party nominates a candidate by fiat, that would be a ridiculous PR blunder. I’m saying they achieve that same outcome, but by a thousand slightly more subtle means.
For just one example, when I was volunteering for local progressive candidates, they all struggled to find vendors to print their flyers, signs, etc. Why? Because the Democratic Party has a policy that any vendor who works with a primary challenger will be banned from future business with the party. This policy has been shown to be selectively applied to progressive challengers.
But it certainly happens at the top level too. Look at how Debbie Wasserman Schultz, then chair of the Democratic party, changed the rules multiple times to explicitly benefit Hillary over Bernie in 2016. Or how, in 2020 after Bernie won Iowa, all of the centrist candidates dropped out and endorsed Biden.