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.
I mostly agree. I do think that a lot of folks on the left liked our candidate, though, and that a lot in the right disliked Trump but sucked it up and voted for him because they thought they “had” to. Harris’ likeability rating is way higher than Trump’s in the polls.
I don’t think any of this would have been an issue if Bernie was the Dem candidate in 2016.
I think the problem is that plenty of people might like Harris, but not so much that turnout for her matched Biden. The people who like Trump love him, and they turned out in the same numbers as 2020 basically. He didn’t need to meaningfully grow his base if people weren’t motivated to show up for his opponent.
It’s definitely a demonstration that having the most palatable candidate doesn’t matter. It might if voting were compulsory, but it isn’t.
Every Republican family member except one that I’ve asked about Bernie has said more or less the following:
I like him, I like that he’s not Dem/Repub, he’s got the country’s best interest at heart, etc.
Then it’s usually followed by how he’d never get a chance, and then it revolves back to why Dems suck and repubs rule, or at best, “they’re both the same.”
You are 100% right: people want change, they want progress, and regardless of how shitty he is, Trump got things done that his base wanted.
Clinton, then Biden, and now Harris, promise marginal improvements to the status quo while dismissing large swaths of their electorate that don’t fall in line.
If they ran progressive candidates with progressive policies, they’d pull voters from all over. But they wont, hence, fascism.