RecoveringYuppy
Penultimate Amazing
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2020 Democratic Candidates Tracker
- Thread starter Brainster
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acbytesla
Penultimate Amazing
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As I said in my last post "should" isn't necessarily a factor.
But if someone of color wins, the primaries/caucuses the party should dance with the girl they brought.
Belz...
Fiend God
Delvo
Дэлво Δε&#
N, (s)he needs to be part white!
acbytesla
Penultimate Amazing
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As long as they are black on the right side I'm fine with it.
Delvo
Дэлво Δε&#
That's not anywhere near an honest representation of either reality or what the article even said. Nor is it even relevant. You're trying to infuse an emotionalized expression of the intended conclusion instead of a rational non-circular argument, and you're doing it on a red-herring tangent.
The article itself said that the results of primaries were skewed by Party machine machinations, not the popularity of the candidates' ideas. If you don't believe your own source, perhaps you shouldn't have used it.
Also, since the subject was general elections in the first place, not primaries, if you wanted to stick to the subject, perhaps you shouldn't have done exactly what someone who's trying to avoid it would do, by using a source that not only has absolutely nothing to do with it but even explicitly says that those irrelevant results resulted from a factor that wouldn't apply to the actual subject here.
Okay... I got into it a lot with people over this during the last primaries but...
What kind of sense does it make for the primaries to be about the general voting populace of the party telling the leadership of the party who the candidate should be?
That... doesn't... make... sense. That's the larger group telling the smaller who to tell them to vote for. That's madness.
The only way that the primaries make sense as a concept is if it is the party leadership telling the broader party voting base who to vote for.
There seems to be this image of what a primary is where the leadership of the party gets together, asks all the rank and file street level members of the party who they want to be the candidate, the general voting population of the party tells them, and they nominate that person which.... why? What? How?
The literal only way primaries make sense on a most base conceptual level is that there is a sizable population of people out there going "I already know I'm voting for the candidate of my party, I just need to know who that is."
What kind of sense does it make for the primaries to be about the general voting populace of the party telling the leadership of the party who the candidate should be?
That... doesn't... make... sense. That's the larger group telling the smaller who to tell them to vote for. That's madness.
The only way that the primaries make sense as a concept is if it is the party leadership telling the broader party voting base who to vote for.
There seems to be this image of what a primary is where the leadership of the party gets together, asks all the rank and file street level members of the party who they want to be the candidate, the general voting population of the party tells them, and they nominate that person which.... why? What? How?
The literal only way primaries make sense on a most base conceptual level is that there is a sizable population of people out there going "I already know I'm voting for the candidate of my party, I just need to know who that is."
Belz...
Fiend God
See, that's over-democratisation in progress. Everything must be held up to a popular vote, nowadays. Experts? Who needs those elitists?! Life-long professionals? Pfft, let me be the judge of their credentials! Truth? I'll check a few Youtube videos first...
TragicMonkey
Poisoned Waffles
It's a taste test. 'These are the products we're considering selling, which would you, the consumers, most likely purchase?'
I think that's a fair comparison.
WilliamSeger
Philosopher
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Delvo
Дэлво Δε&#
You present this as a choice between two alternatives, but you still build option #2 in as part of option #1. You entirely skip the idea of the Party not telling people who to vote for. Without that, option #1 would be "the commoners telling the Party who they want".
Now you finally describe the real alternative that you left out before, and throw in some expressions of confusion afterward, but still give no particular reason why something so sensible, simple, & obvious would be confusing. Is that because you're still stuck on "the Party tells the commoners what to do" even when you manage to keep it from slipping out?
The Atheist
Psychopath
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Apologies for the belated response, but the question was asked what evidence there was that a shift to the left is bad for Dems and why they should look to occupy the centre, which is currently vacant:
How about evidence from within Trump's own re-election machine?
If Trump's data analysis - infinitely superior to the Dems' - is showing a shift left helps Trump, it ought to be absurdly obvious to anyone looking in.
Taking a shift left is a punt that requires these assumptions:
That women who have turned against Trump will vote for a candidate and party that is openly Socialist.
That moderates will vote for a candidate and party that is openly Socialist.
Take the bet by all means, but it looks like a 10:1 shot to me going up against the 1:100 chance of those voters wanting to tread the middle, conciliatory ground.
Gonna be another fun couple of years in US politics yet.
How about evidence from within Trump's own re-election machine?
If Trump's data analysis - infinitely superior to the Dems' - is showing a shift left helps Trump, it ought to be absurdly obvious to anyone looking in.
Taking a shift left is a punt that requires these assumptions:
That women who have turned against Trump will vote for a candidate and party that is openly Socialist.
That moderates will vote for a candidate and party that is openly Socialist.
Take the bet by all means, but it looks like a 10:1 shot to me going up against the 1:100 chance of those voters wanting to tread the middle, conciliatory ground.
Gonna be another fun couple of years in US politics yet.
Delvo
Дэлво Δε&#
Another untrue distraction
Even that guy, whoever he was and whatever he based his ideas on, didn't say it helps Trump. He just said it doesn't hurt, and gave no support for even that.
Even granting the "openly Socialist" bit, which is not really accurate itself, it's still neither an assumption, nor anything in particular about such a narrow group as women who voted for Trump but then turned against him, nor sharing the conventional obsession with the Lost Tribe Of Moderates. If it has anything to say about moderates at all, it's not a way of trying to keep chasing them but an observation that doing so keeps resulting in failure so there's no reason to think it will suddenly start working now.
The Atheist
Psychopath
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Laughably ignorant. Trump's data analysis was infinitely superior, and with Robert Mercer pulling the strings, that situation will continue.
We either learn from history or we don't.
(Note I don't live within 10,000 km of USA and don't give a rat's arse who wins - it's all just entertainment to me, but I would prefer a person in the WH who is prepared to act on climate change and not pay guys to try to refute it)
Except it hasn't failed at all. Hillary failed, not the message, and if you don't recognise that, then you missed the point entirely. Obama was so moderate they gave him a second term, despite being black.
But hey, keep pushing the Dems left - every time that happens the Republicans laugh.
The funniest part about all of this is the huge talk of how divided America has become since Trump's election, yet the Dems seem to want to harden the divide by making the difference bigger than ever.
acbytesla
Penultimate Amazing
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The problem of course with your analysis is that you think policy positions mean a lot more than they do. The "divide" between conservative and liberal isn't what led to Trump being elected. Hell, Trump never ran as a conservative. He ran as a populist xenophobic racist.
If you look at the policy proposals of these people that Trump etc are demonizing as the radical left, you'll see they are extremely popular. This is a game. Portray your opponents as radical and extreme. Doesn't mean they are.
Brainster
Penultimate Amazing
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It didn't use to be this way. Back in the 1960s, the primary system was just a means of assuring the party bosses that a candidate could actually get people to vote for him. The idea was to participate in a few primaries, then go to the convention and negotiate a deal with the party bosses, who had the real power. In 1960, JFK participated in only 10 primaries, while skipping 6 of them entirely (including California and Florida). In 1968, Humphrey did not contend in any of the primaries but still won the nomination.
This infuriated the Vietnam War protesters. Their candidates (McCarthy and RFK) had consistently won in the primaries and yet were denied the nomination. So they set about changing the rules, to make the primaries much more important. There had been primaries in only 14 states (and DC) in 1968; in 1972 there were primaries in 21 states. And the result was that the anti-war faction got their candidate in George McGovern. Who got hammered by Nixon in the general election. By 1980, the number of primaries was up to 35, and once again, the party's nominee (Jimmy Carter) was buried in a landslide loss to Reagan.
It wasn't hard to see that giving the primary voters so much power was problematic; the D's had suffered two wipeouts and one narrow win. So the party bosses came up with the concept of the superdelegates. These were made up of the party grandees, who, it was presumed, would help establishment candidates over the insurgents who appeared to be favored by the primary voters. Over time, the number of superdelegates was increased.
Of course the superdelegates received a lot of attention the last time around from Bernie Sanders supporters, who felt that they made the playing field uneven for their candidate. No surprise, they pushed for changes after the election and in August of last year, the DNC announced that the superdelegates would not be able to vote on the first ballot, effectively stripping them of their power.
Delvo
Дэлво Δε&#
And once again the pushers of this anti-progressive nonsense prove that isn't really about policies or election strategies at all, but just another part of the Hillary cult of personality, along with "Russia Russia Russia!".
Not everything is about her... especially when you're talking to people who've already said over & over again that they're talking about a pattern over hundreds of elections, not just hers (even aside from Democrats Presidential candidates' success or failure following the same pattern of winning when campaigning on progressive "change" and losing when they don't at least since Bill, Democrats also lost over a thousand seats during the Obama Administration alone following exactly your advice), only to have you try to drag it back to her again & again like half of the conversation never happened. You're acting exactly like the Trumpers will act when Trump is gone.
This obsession is doing none of you any good. She lost, it's over, get over it; other things can be allowed to matter now. There's a lot of world out there that isn't Hillary.
angrysoba
Philosophile
Andrew Yang has passed the 65,000 donations to get to the debates.
Now clearly he is someone who has no chance of getting the nomination, but also clearly someone who the party bosses wouldn’t want to represent their one-shot in the election.
Now clearly he is someone who has no chance of getting the nomination, but also clearly someone who the party bosses wouldn’t want to represent their one-shot in the election.
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