No no, it's cool. They'll just trot out every VP or losing Presidential candidate still breathing, toss in a Kennedy to give Lawrence O'Donnell viewers an erection and call it a day. No need for introspection, just blame everything on Russia and scold people who don't vote for them.
2020 US Elections | Biden certified as President | Dems control Congress
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No no, it's cool. They'll just trot out every VP or losing Presidential candidate still breathing, toss in a Kennedy to give Lawrence O'Donnell viewers an erection and call it a day. No need for introspection, just blame everything on Russia and scold people who don't vote for them.
Dubya is certainly preferable to Trump
Who wouldn't view Bush favorably compared to Trump..?
You seem to not realize that the aim of the party is not to provide the most popular candidate for president, but one who can get elected whose position is in line with the party.
But for 80k or so "deplorables" in those 3 states, they'd have everything they wanted.
The 'line' of the party changes. The Dems have a ton of progressives who want a proper centre-left wing choice.
You missed this bit:
"...whose position is in line with the party."
No fecking wonder they shut him down. the democrats are just right wing feckers as the republicans.
Trump's only issue are the tweets?
Your very own link has this:
The validity of these claims has been disputed.
I meant for 2016.
Trump's only issue are the tweets?
Compare body counts. Anyone who rehabilitates Bush has no business considering themselves left wing.
that was a pithy response but you can't claim electability after Hillary Clinton lost to a guy who admitted to sexual assault on tape.Fair enough. But I'd say it's an inherently flawed approach either way...the aim of the party shouldn't be to religiously follow the party 'line' but should be to consider what that line is (albeit within a certain spectrum) and go with what is needed from there.
I don’t consider myself left wing. I’ve made it pretty clear that I supported Hillary because I wanted to see the US maintain the positions it held under Obama.
That doesn’t change the fact that she received millions more votes in the primaries. Favoritism or not, she’d have won the nomination.
I’m not saying that’s the right approach, just what happened. If she had won, the Dems would have got away with exactly what the party wanted at that point
Probably, yes. And she lost the general election.
To be fair, that's what happens. The people that vote in the US primaries are usually a large proportion of those who end up voting in the general election - nearly half the Democratic vote in 2016 also voted in the Dem primaries. Compare that to the UK, where Labour's leadership election, having what's currently considered a large membership, managed about 1/20th of its general election vote (it was even less in absolute numbers than the primary for NYC mayor in 2013). Say what you like about US politics (and plenty of it is flawed), but the primaries do get a big portion of the vote involved in choosing the line it takes.
So you're advocating the Dem super delegates go against the popular vote and choose their own candidate?
I don't actually get the point you're making here.
So you're advocating the Dem super delegates go against the popular vote and choose their own candidate?
I don't actually get the point you're making here.
I'm advocating that there not be super delegates. But the bigger point is that you don't get to crow about electability when your candidate lost to someone who admitted to sexual assault on tape.
With no super delegates, she wins the nomination anyway.
When did I crow about the electability?
I merely pointed out why the DNC preferred Hillary.
I don't know if people voted based on the lesser of two evils principle or whether they simply voted based on information they were fed by their news sources. You could probably highlight that the lesser of two evils type choice is a bad one if Hillary lost the popular vote by 3 million instead of winning it. The fact that she won it suggests that this was just a strange outlier election that was uniquely influenced by both wildly divergent candidate dynamics and a variety of outside sources. But as usual, third party candidates did absolutely nothing to suggest they aren't anything more than spoilers that gift the opposition a better chance of winning.
The US held some pretty terrible positions under Obama. He has deported more people than any other president in history. His administration sold arms to Saudi which were then used to kill innocent men, women and children in Yemen and create a humanitarian crisis there. Obama regime armed questionable groups in Syria. His administration tried to hide Hillary's official emails and other communication as SoS and blocked their release. He did nothing to address the main problem in US politics - the power of money. All this after running in 2008 on the platform of not wanting to play the same old Washington game, but changing the way the game is played.
Obama has always been the media darling for being the first mixed race president but he was a very average president. Being better than some or other presidents who came before him doesn't make him a good president.
It just goes to show that politicians rarely govern as they run. They are faced with far more complex policy issues when in office than the quaintly naive rhetoric they sell to the public during the campaign.
I'm not saying Obama was a great president, just that I agree with a lot of his main policy positions.
It just shows that politicians on both Democratic and Republican parties are just the same shit.
want a different country? vote different would be a start.
Voting different is what happened 15 months ago and we got Trump.
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You know i mean voting different as in outside the duopoly.
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
We had that too - Stein got a few votes and it helped Trump.
Without all the Super Delegates she was handed at the beginning the narrative of the election becomes much different. Things would have been far closer between the two which would have led to more debate about who was better. Might have changed some voters minds.
I don’t have numbers for this, but it seems to me that a lot of people were not only Bernie-or-bust, but would rather vote for wild card Trump than for a continuation of the status quo. The antipathy toward the establishment was unwise to ignore, and to many of us it was rather unsurprising that Trump won, even if she carried the popular vote.
Also, I find the blaming of third party candidates to be missing the forest for the trees. Surely the focus ought to be on why half the electorate don’t even bother voting at all? It’s a symptom of the same sentiment that carried Trump into office.
Gary Johnson and Evan McMullin together got more votes that would have gone to the Republican candidate than Jill Stein got.
The Libertarian candidate got more votes this election that previous elections.
It shows that millions of people didn't like either the Dem or the Repub nominee.
Gary Johnson got 4.4 million votes, McMullin got another 731,788.
Can Pence be Spiro Agnew instead please?
Yep, they were factors as well. But broadly put from 1992 until 2016 there has been a clear trend that third party candidates never do anything other than siphon votes away from the candidate they share the political spectrum with; to the advantage of the opposition candidate. Its always been and is likely to remain a duopoly where voting third party never counts for anything other than hurting one of the two parties.
I disagree with this mindset. Personally I'd never vote for the "least of two evils". That mindset is a self-fulfilling negative feedback loop. It's also very dangerous to a free thinking and critical thinking polis. If they offer me two shite choices, I am not falling for that con game even if others do. N
And Perot would/should have won. He was leading every poll by a healthy margin and had captured the public's imagination. The momentum was on his side. But then he pulled out after some really shady threats on his family. When he re-entered months later the momentum was gone. Its very likely the former CIA chief in the 1970s and the South's starling democrat throughout the 1980s could have colluded to force Perot out by shady means.
You can't blame anyone for not voting for Hilary.
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