Democratic Primaries 2020 - With a whimper

If they picked someone else they risked splitting the black vote with Bernie instead of winning it handily. The African American vote really has a lot of weight in the Democratic primary.

Your intuition is correct, edems would prefer to lose with Biden than win with Bernie. Biden has a chance to win because of the pandemic and they are okay with that too but it’s secondary.

3 Likes

I wonder if Cory Booker has any regrets about exiting the race so early.

There was definitely a path for him the way things played out.

The fact that this is true is why Bernie probably shouldn’t have run, and instead should have thrown his considerable weight behind a different progressive candidate.

Being seen as a bigger threat than the other party by ‘your own side’ makes the odds of actually winning the primary quite a bit lower.

We can all be as pissed as we want that the corporate owned media screwed Bernie. We can all be as pissed as we want that the eDems were willing to do what it took to stop Bernie from being the nominee. Our being pissed doesn’t mean that it wasn’t incredibly obvious before this whole thing started that all of it was going to happen. They cheated less than 2016 and gave Bernie a much more favorable setup (lots of different eDem candidates) and he still lost.

This has been my problem with Bernie all along too. You guys talk a lot about his ‘accomplishments’ but I’ve requested a list of them repeatedly and not a single credible thing has ever been presented besides him moving the Overton Window left in a big way post 2016. The guy is right directionally, but he’s an idealist who can’t close. Losing with honor doesn’t impress me at all.

To be an effective person you have to first see how the world is, then you have to understand why it is that way, and finally you have to create and execute a plan that takes that into account. Idealists start by asking how the world should be and then they act as if it is. To use the quote you guys love so much you want it to be one way but it’s the other. This is why idealists suck. They fail repeatedly and then they get to blame the world for their failure because ‘that isn’t how it should work’. It’s just incredibly self righteous and annoying honestly.

And I don’t want to hear any bullshit about how I’m a bad person for seeing all of this clearly. I voted for Bernie in TX and momentarily broke up with atheism to say a prayer that he’d pull it out. I hoped like hell that he was right and that we were going to see a huge wave of normally inactive voters who would be activated by a candidate offering to actually improve their lives. That absolutely didn’t happen and I’ve processed that. This is what returned from processing it.

2 Likes

It’s the policies, not the person. The Democratic establishment sees it as their job to ensure the left loses the primary. It then becomes the left’s job to ensure the nominee wins the general.

Yeah that’s clearly false. The policies don’t matter until after you win the election… and then it’s an exercise in what you can get done, which is itself a derivative of how hard you won the election.

If policies mattered Bernie, Warren, or Yang would be the nominee. Instead it’s Joe fucking Biden.

The left is busy navel gazing about policies it doesn’t have the power to execute instead of figuring out how to gain the power it needs for those policies to be worth more than a warm fart.

1 Like

I suppose I don’t understand what you mean by policies’ “mattering”. When I say it’s about the policy and not the person, I mean that Sanders ran on a broadly redistributive platform, which is anathema to the Democratic establishment and would remain so regardless of the candidate running on them. The popularity of broadly social-democratic policies is seen as a problem to be overcome, rather than an opportunity to be seized.

4 Likes

I agree with this… and I don’t have a solution. I really doubt we’re going to see any major economic reforms until society has a pretty major collapse. The last time it happened the trigger was the Great Depression. Maybe the economic impacts of beer virus will be what does it this time.

IOW, galaxybrains

The virus is bringing everything into clearer focus, but we have been heading straight into misery for awhile with our aging population and climate change. We really need to start acting on that now, but the demEs preferred policies would do nothing to help. It puts all of us in a very awkward situation with no good choices. At least bernie running means we could try.

1 Like

Biden is specifically targeting the aging population with a reduced Medicare eligibility age. You should be pleased! trollface.jpg

This is basically saying that black voters are too dumb to know whether a politician is racist or not.

95% of voters are too dumb to know anything myself included.

Yeah basically? Like, not because they are inherently dumb or uniquely uninformed, but because they’re voters in America and voters in America don’t know anything about anything.

Like, this is a really weird “gotcha” that I see pulled out all the time. Black voters aren’t uniquely wise or informed about elections. They’re as dumb as everyone else. It would be weird if I thought that all of the old white people who voted for Biden were morons but the black people who voted for him did so for smart, rational reasons. They’re all wrong.

6 Likes

Voting for a guy because you think racist old white people will vote for him, and voting for a guy because you’re a racist old white person are inherently different things. The black community has absolutely zero faith in the white communities ability to do the right thing, and I gotta say that’s based on their personal experience.

When Biden says something moderately racist middle aged+ black people probably instantly think ‘that’ll play well with the whites…’

Agreed though that voters are voters no matter the race. Still there’s an excellent reason why the black family on this SNL skit is funny. (the part I’m referencing starts at 1:15)

1 Like

b369a82fd291e14d76b9c654ce17f19e

Biden does well in the South because he and his allies have been building up a network of supporters there for years. He just has a good ground game over there. Bernie did well in NV because he put the work in and got people to knock on doors and the eDems have ignored much of the population. Old-fashioned retail politicking is still a thing in 2020, you can’t simply have better policies and expect to win on that alone.

3 Likes

Biden won a ton of states on ST where he had literally no offices, no campaign events, no retail politics presence at all.

Trump had none of those things anywhere in 2016.

3 Likes

I don’t think there are very many voters who are operating on the level you think they are. I don’t think there’s any appreciable number of black voters who are doing 4d chess and voting for who they think racist white people will like.

2 Likes

Which states? Oklahoma? I dunno, I’m sticking with the idea that retail politics matters rather than the theory that black Southern voters are too dumb to vote in their self-interest but Hispanics aren’t

And Florida Man only barely won against the most unelectable candidate of all time. That’s not really a model for success.

2 Likes

If there’s one thing I think black voters are adjusting for it’s white racism. It’s not 4d chess it’s their level 1 political awareness. The first question they have is ‘will the whites allow it to happen?’

The cynicism levels among African Americans about America are… well they are high to put it mildly. And for excellent reasons.

1 Like