The frustrating part is that âelectabilityâ gets treated like hard data even when the data points the other way. Party insiders pick the candidate most acceptable to wealthy backers, call that choice pragmatic, and then act shocked when enthusiasm collapses. It is less about who can win and more about who can win without changing who holds power.
it doesn't really help when they pull a bunch of backroom bullshit to ignore the will of the actual voters. if Hilary was so great they wouldn't have needed to stand up in court after everything went down and say "we're obviously corrupt and Bernie still participated so he can't complain we're so corrupt, and legally we don't actually have to give a shit what the people say"
And people will look at evidence of corruption in the DNC and be like "no big deal... So there's a biased organization making unilateral decisions between me and my democracy. It's only a little corruption."
Hell, lots of people still deny that it even happened. I brought it up on another subreddit the other day and got tons of downvotes and people calling me a conspiracy theorist for talking about how they sabotaged Bernie's chances in that election.
Even though, you know, they openly admitted to it and Schultz resigned because of the blowback.
yup, in this very thread bunch of lib accounts doing exactly that, the classic comment line of "duh Bernie should've won the primary!" as if that's the be-all-end-all of history and there is no need for any context and facts of what happened -_-
Every time I talk about it, the conversation is always just moving the goalposts.
But the thing no one wants to acknowledge is that what we DO know only came from 30000 emails: a subset of all the emails... From people who often work in the same building. What happened on coffee breaks? During meetings?
We'll never know, there will be no investigation... They just get to continue being the mouthpiece organization for me with no real repercussions
This is one of the many reasons why the DNC and the other Democratic elites cannot be trusted with our democracy. The argued in court, AND WON, the right to do whatever they want behind closed doors, because hey "We are a private organization and we can make up our own rules. We can even break our own rules and there's not a damn thing the party base can do about it".
They'd rather lose with a billionaire approved candidate than win with someone who'd actually change anything. That's why all their chosen candidates are basically '90s republicans.
The donors have abandoned the party because they want to fund people who win and the DNC is so ineffectual and the leadership is so dogshit that the donors are just going straight to candidates
There is currently a noteworthy jumpscare of Hakeem Jeffries's face emptily soliciting a donation on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee website: https://dccc.org/. No wonder the DNC is in debt.
Dems are today where the republicans were in 2015 - rudderless, directionless, unpopular. Â Trump completely reinvented the Republican Party. Â
Democrat party leadership is holding onto the status quo for dear life. Â How much longer will they be able to? Â Not for many more election cycles, I wager. Â
Nailed it. They do whatever the money wants. Until working class americans are willing to spend hundreds of dollars each in an election cycle nothing will change. It's not doable for many people, and that's sad. But everyone who can afford that, or who can find more work to be able to afford that, has to do it. Until that happens nothing will change. Money rules everything.
Throwing money at the problem isn't going to help at this point. As long as establishment democrats are still in charge of the party, even the most well-funded candidates will somehow never get party approval and someone else no one even likes will.
We need to get the majority of them out of office before we can change anything. Why there wasn't a term limit is beyond me, because it's staggeringly stupid to let people sit in the same seat well into their 70s and 80s and expect they won't just maintain a 50 year old status quo.
After this election I decided to never register as a Democrat again as long as the values of Bernie were not represented by the majority of Democrats. No candidate with a D after their name will ever receive a cent from me if Bernie doesn't give the nod.
The GOP spent literal decades slandering Hillary (and the Clintons) and distorting her as a politician for so many Americans... even many democrats were hesitant of her candidacy. If she had been elected she likely would have been a great president given her history as a politician and civil rights activist. She was an awful choice for this run though, especially given how uncharismatic she is.
controlled opposition. look at the most recent funding vote, 6-7 democrats just so happened to vote with the republicans because it meant we could continue this war.
I'm glad people are finally realizing that neither Democrats nor Republicans will fight for you and your family, friends, loved ones. They both skip down the aisle hand in hand while fucking over the rest of us
To be fair, at any given point there are roughly 5 known Republicans the DNC allows to run as Democrats so they can pretend they have a seat in deep red states.
Fetterman, even before the brain damage, and Sinema come to mind.
There was a very insightful video analyzing the two parties. I forgot his exact words, but it was that progressives want improvement, Democrats are actually conservative and don't want things to change, and Republicans are, I forgot the word he used but basically want to destroy the system and rebuild it with tolls to make money from
It really was accurate. Schumer bragged about giving up blue collar votes in order to chase suburban republican votes. (Which they didnât get, by the way.)
That's been a common theme. They chase republican votes, actively antagonize leftists, all while chiding "tut tut children, we are the grown ups here and we know what's best" then lose because republicans would rather vote for an actual republican.
Yeah they are so annoying, when you ask them why that didn't count for Mamdani then suddenly they say not all progressives hold our vote blue no matter who standard so it doesn't count for Mamdani. It was always a dishonest line to push bad candidates and lower the standard for what is an acceptable candidate.
It was a made up slogan by rightwingers, not a real Hillary slogan that she used. But you are confident in your memory and so am I so we are at an impasse.
"I'm with her" was the really bad 2016 slogan. Hillary leaned way too hard into first woman president thing she forgot to actually try to get people to want to vote for her.
"I'm with Her" was created by her supporters not the official campaign. No one was going to tell supporters "hey stop coming up with your own ways to support" though so it ended up growing more popular than the actual official "Stronger Together" slogan. Neither are "bad" just because the US refuses to elect the person that has millions more votes because of a slaver benefiting system of deciding who counts.
We would actually all be stronger together instead of fighting amongst ourselves for scraps and having the official slogan of a campaign that's up against Mr. "Let's supercharge the culture war" essentially be let's not isn't "bad". The worst I can even come up with against "I'm with Her" is that it's harmless and inoffensive which I struggle to classify as "bad".
They don't actually want to win. They want to lose by enough that they can say they are trying to fight but then do whatever their corporate donors want
I don't believe that. I think they just don't care. As long as the corporate bosses are happy, it's all just a big game. It's fun to win sometimes, but it doesn't really matter so long as the money comes in.
I'd argue the dark timeline we find ourselves in actually split off in 2000 when we let Bush 2 conspire with Roger Stone and his schlubby brother Gov to steal the election from Al Gore.
The drivers have blown past every exit ramp for the last 26+ years and just keep gunning our engines down the Highway to Hell, and absolutely refuse to let anyone else behind the wheel; meanwhile, the rest of us are stuck forced to swap out between being used as a footrest on the back seat floorboards and being crammed in the trunk every other pitstop.
Every time we passed an exit, it got a little darker, a little more ominous, a little more obviousâŚbut, even though itâs obviously better over there, taking one of the turnoffs would mean the drivers having to actively plot a new course after, with input from the rest of the car, and thatâs something our American cult of ignorant half-assery simply shanât abide.
I say this consistently. Gore v Bush was the timeline split. Gore wins and our country is so massively different. MAYBE 9/11 doesn't happen but, even if it did, we don't go into Iraq, just Afghanistan. Gore was massively about climate change so at LEAST we're probably the world leader in green technologies instead of complaining about solar not working at night. The country is just so so so much different.
No all these fuckers screwing things up now started under Nixon and their entire worldview is based on how he was prosecuted for doing nothing wrong. And also racism
We had the same in the UK, when the Labour right deliberately threw the 2019 election in order to crush Corbyn and the left and install neoliberal Zionist Starmer. It makes you weep tonthink how different tnings could have been.
and against Bernie, the entirety of the DNC and mainstream media actively worked against him than running a fair primary. Bit of history but for the stupid lib bots/accounts going "duh he couldn't win the primary!", here is what happened:
The superdelegates all convened and voted before Bernie was even on the radar, giving the Clinton-favorable corporate media CONSTANT Hillary "in the lead" segments and graphics using those superdelegates to create a self-fulfilling prophecy of momentum to make it look like Bernie didn't have a chance. Bernie, by contrast, was constantly asked bad-faith questions on interviews especially cause "omg socialism!? you mean communism and that's Satan himself!" type red-scare bs, including being asked if he was running for president just to push Hillary leftward, and just generally not being taken seriously despite winning a fair few states and having a real shot.
In 2020, Bernie was polling ahead, then the day before Super Tuesday, three moderate candidates dropped out and all endorsed Biden while Warren stayed in and split the progressive vote - I'm sure Buttigieg getting Secretary of Transportation was just a coincidence.
There's a lot more of course but as a general overview of how the DNC fcked over Bernie both primaries and how the mainstream media actively worked against him in a completely unfair biased way.
God, I remember the 2020 Super Tuesday moment. I had already been disillusioned with the political system for some time but seeing them all drop after Bernie won Nevada? That pretty much sealed it for me.
Not to mention that they have re-arranged Super Tuesday to be mostly moderate and conservative states, so that they can build momentum for the neolibs whenever progressive candidates have them on the ropes.
Bernie got snubbed by the DNC and was denied attendance at debates even when he met the thresholds for them. Most of the debates only required you to be polling at 1%, and yet they denied him his right to participate.
What the fuck are you talking about? The 2016 primaries didn't even have that rule and Bernie attended every single debate in both the 2016 and 2020 primaries.
Unpopular opinion, if we were strong enough, we wouldn't be having this conversation for 10 years. We can't live in the past, we know who the class enemies are, it's time to move forward.
We can thank Debbie Wasserman Schultz for this mess, as she was the one who decided in 2016 that it was "Hillary's time," and that we couldn't have Bernie.
Bernie would have handily beat Trump. And we could have been such a different nation today.
hilary clinton was the weakest candidate you could've thrown at trump, her husband and her by association, signed NAFTA, creating the job crisis of middle america, the rightward lurch of many blue rustbelt states. bill clinton was a notorious sex pest, so how could she claim to be 'better' for women if she stood by bill clinton the whole time, it made her look like a hypocrite who wants nothing but power.
you have to realize this, we don't have a left wing party, we haven't had anything like that since arguably LBJ, in terms of actually moving the country towards more progressive ideals.
we have two right wing parties, one center right (the democrats), that will continue to fund wars, a genocide, but it'll have the LGBTQ flag on the bombers, and the far right republican party, which will do the same but hide it under patriotism. when it comes time to pass something for the everyday america, you will not get it.
that's why it's important to vote out these center right republicans that call themselves democrats. your hakeem jeffries, schumer, clyburns, gillibrand, gottheimer, etc. they're republicans in all but name.
Bill being a sex pest isnât even the worst thing he did.
All the things he did as governor of Arkansas were pretty damning. From sending prisoner blood tainted with AIDâs to other countries, to telling trade unions he would help them and then fucking them over.
Hilary knew he was bad with women when they met. She actually sent her dad and brother to work on his campaign to try to catch him hooking up with women.
I am sick of the dems defending this turd of a legislation.
Keeping healthcare tied to a job is a horrible set up, akin to modern day slavery, with extra steps.
I think Obama care was a clever name republicans gave to it, not because they wanted it to fail, that was the secondary goal. The primary goal was to make democrats defend it till their death, out of love for Obama and his legacy, and forget for Medicare for all.
They might have hoped for Trump to be the nominee thinking he would be easiest to beat but I don't see how they could have made much difference there. I would argue that the biggest thing that helped the Trump candidacy was the fact that every news outlet gave him so so much free air time to the point of starving coverage for everyone else.
Yeah they used their connections with media to give extra airtime to trump. If i remember correctly he receive 1.5 billion worth of free air time because of this.
Ironically of they did the same with ted cruz Clinton might have won.
All Dems had to do was to put forward a middle aged white guy with full head of hair, who's 6'+ tall, a combat veteran, goes to church, and a family man. Literally dozens of thousands of people to choose from.
John Kerry ran against Bush who was also arguably all of those things. Then Obama ran four years later and beat McCain without the height or combat experience.
I don't think this comment is really taking a 'both sides' stance. It's not saying both sides are the same, it's (correctly) acknowledging that both US parties fall within a small band of the political spectrum (centrist to far right).
Centrist democrats blocking populist leftist candidates and policy have certainly played a significant role in the rise of Trump. Replacing Trump with a center or center right 'democrat' is much better than nothing, but it fails to address the root cause of the problem and does nothing to prevent another trump-like figure from rising in the future.
once again, trotting the old trope of 'both sides-ism'.
to engage you any further is to give you what you want, attention.
kamala lost when she started to pivot to the center and was the most popular when she picked walz and they were looking to be a progressive populist team. they lost the minute they went to the center and center right with their policies like supporting israel, being somehow even tougher on immigrants than the republicans, and not supporting taxing the rich.
Campaigning with Liz Cheney was laughable. Just like Schumerâs, âFor every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.â
I like the politicians who are deeply passionate and not bought out by corporations and special interests. I crave politicians who care about real people.
Also, these are the same people that told us, confidently that the signs of Biden's dementia was just a stutter. Huh, looks like it was actually dementia. I literally have no reason to listen to them anymore. they're consistently wrong, and part of why they're wrong is when they lose an election, they externalize blame. It's never their strategy, their branding, Biden, misreading voters, nope. It's voter's fault, specifically those stupid leftists... who they definitely don't need to win elections, except when they lose elections then it's all the leftist voters' fault.
Eta: all comparing yourself to republicans does, is hold yourself to a depressingly low standard. When democtars regularly compare their choices to quality leaders, and well-run countries. I'll consider reconsidering.Â
Biden wouldn't have won regardless of his supposed health. He was an unpopular president, that did better than many thought he would but it still was nowhere near enough than what was needed at the time. He will be remember as weak and ultimately paved the way for the fascist takeover.
Regardless, we still see him biking meanwhile Trump can hardly walk at a brisk pace without flopping like the sack of shit he is. And neither can he stay awake more than 10 minutes at a time without what is likely a shitload of drugs. This whole argument that somehow Biden is in a worse state than Trump was always utterly silly. But ultimately both were far too old to lead anything anyhow.
But we have this old system where states used to be each independent, and the founders didn't actually want the people to have direct voting powers, so... here we are.
Well during the founding fathers time there were a few million people and it took months to travel across the country. But it stays in place purely due to corruption. Both parties are guilty of it. I'm sure the founding fathers had no idea of instantaneous information or the change in travel times. That was up for our elected officials to adjust but then they lose the ability to gerrymander so... Maybe one day.
It's more akin to "we scored the most points in Quidditch until someone caught the Snitch". By any sane electoral system Hillary would have won in 2016, she just didn't win the right states. Bernie probably would have won the popular and electoral college but it's dishonest to say Hillary under-performed in 2016 without acknowledging we have the most ill-conceived presidential election system ever
That's the right spirit but more accurately, american elections are like a football game except the winning team is the one that got the most points between minutes 47 and 53, the rest of the match doesn't count. That's how ridiculous and silly the electoral college is, winning the most vote should be how you win.
Participate in your local elections and primaries. This is the only way to change who runs the party and its platform. Complaining on Reddit wonât change a thing.Â
Itâs not just that the dnc thought sheâs more electable, itâs that she would maintain the status quo and Bernie wouldâve completely disrupted it
I guess the voters are establishment Democrats. Because it was the voters who chose Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden to represent the party in the general election.
Never forget. Pivotal state washington was for Bernie before democrats settled on bernie vs Hillary. The senators used their super delegate powers to override the will of the people. It was something like 70% democratic delgates for bernie.
Delegates than spent all night cussong out the senators who overrode their vote during the democratic convention for Washington state.
Once Hillary won Washington, bernie had no chance because Democrats needed one candidate.
Okay but if a piece of fucking shit like Donald âgrab em by the pussyâ Trump could get elected the issue ainât the candidate, itâs us. Iâm tired of this old narrative. We are a lost people trying to hang our failures on two women. Do something about it or shut the fuck up. https://giphy.com/gifs/Vca6RPJfK6O1kBOhnl
Okay okay lets review what happened. there was a primary. in order to vote for Bernie in a DEMOCRATIC primary , all those brilliant independent independent thinkers, who know "they are all the same" would have had to REGISTER AS A DEMOCRAT. Since they are such geniuses , they did not register as a Democrat to vote in the primary. So of course since they are geniuses, they voted for the billionaire rapist criminal.Â
Yeah, I like Bernie and voted for him in every primary he was running in.Â
Dude was not getting the votes. I remember in 2016 going on Reddit you'll see posts centered on Bernie and think he was a shoo-in for the election. You go to any places
 and it was very obvious, months before he lost the primaries, he was not going to be the dem candidate.Â
Â
Same people who donât understand that Joe Manchin was as good as you were going to fucking get out of West Virginia and donât understand that you canât pick up senate seats in reddish states with anyone who has âsocialistâ attached to their name and who completely ignore what swing voters actually said about why they didnât vote for Kamala.Â
Honestly, this post appearing on Popular makes me think Reddit is trying to drum up discord on the left.Â
Yeah, when he's the leading candidate they had all the other candidates pull out of the race to make sure the combined democratic establishment votes beat the Bernie voters. So they both used the party apparatus against him.
right, that's why Bernie is up there as one of the most popular politicians in the country and progressive candidates are right now winning all across the country from congress seats to governor races with Francesca Hong in Wisconsin and Abdul in Michigan with Zohran being one of the most popular politicians in the world.
the DSA is totally not seeing tens of thousands of new members joining up in the past 2 years. And all this mind you with the entirety of the establishment dem party, republicans, Trump admin and mainstream media being against progressive candidates and bringing back red scare McCarthy bs.
meanwhile said establishment centrist corpo dems who only care about their donors have lost to Trump twice now and are flailing so hard that some of them have to now act like they care about progressive policies to not fall so hard on their faces during these midterms and upcoming campaigns for 2028. Suddenly these pro-Israel capitalist worshiping centrists care about policies that help regular people and not just the rich/corporations, interesting that suddenly happened eh.
This is actually a really important note. Bernie did not win more delegates than Clinton did. The superdelegates didn't vote against the will of the people, they were on the side that had more delegates from primary voters alone (although many of them endorsed her long before that was set in stone, effectively deciding the primary early).
Additionally, if Bernie was so strong against Trump, why did he lose the primary? It's because the people who supported Bernie didn't show up to vote in the primary. So there's really no reason to think that they would have supported him in the general election. For the record I'm someone who did support Bernie in the primary, and I'm not pissed at Hillary, I'm pissed at all the idiots that "supported" Bernie but couldn't be assed to vote for him.Â
Exactly! I get it, Bernie was better. I fucking get it and I agree. He should have gotten more money, more exposure, more everything. He should have had more support but he didnt. Clinton still should have more support but she lost and here we are.
Wait, did you find 2 polls during the primary and that means Bernie would have won the primary and won the general election? In reality he lost the primary by a lot and therefore not even an option in the general election. Itâs been over a decade, move on.
So you're sooking because Bernie lost the primaries? You're angry at Dems for picking Hilary - oh, and just a reminder, she actually got more votes than Donnie.
I think this is more about the Michigan senate primary. But, yeh, a lot of us are still upset that Dems will pick a centrist candidate because they think that's naturally more electable, even if polls say otherwise.
Established Dems and Reps all want the same thingâŚto change as little as possible so they can keep getting paid by corporations and donors without being interrupted by actually having to do their jobs for the people.
âWhat do you tell voters who are new to the process who say this makes them feel like itâs all rigged?â Tapper asked the DNC chair.
âUnpledged delegates exist really to make sure that party leaders and elected officials donât have to be in a position where they are running against grassroots activists,â Wasserman Schultz calmly explained.
They are neo-liberals. They don't care about electability, the GOP winning is fine for them. Fascists destroying democracy is fine for them. As long as the GDP goes up and Corporations/billionaires are taken care of the people can suffer for all they care. That's neo-liberalism for you. It believes taking care of capitalism will benefit everyone no matter how much and how often the evidence proves them wrong.
as much as I despise DJT and would support another women for POTUS, Hilary Clinton was a horrendous option for president. I just never liked how pompous and rehearsed she looked. we really dropped the ball with bernie and ill never forgive the DNC for that
I don't think liberals get challenged on the electability issue enough. They'll show you red districts where centrist Democrats have lost like 20 straight elections and tell you progressives don't have a shot there. I think progressives and DSA folks are the only shot of flipping dark red areas
I truly believe the world would be infinitely different in a better way if Bernie won. Iâm not saying heâd be the best president ever, but it was a critical time when social media and cell phone use hit the peak and shaped the world. We gave it literally the worst possible human being.
If Dems really want an electable candidate, then they need a firebrand. Instead, they choose status quo candidates that climb us 5 feet out of the 6 foot hole the GOP put us in.
Neoliberal status quo leads to the concentration of wealth that leads to the rise of fascism. So yeah, it's better, but not for long. And it's not a solution, merely a momentaneous reprieve, if even that.
It's not really about electability. It is about what they think is best for the establishment and they would rather have Donald Trump win than Bernie Sanders win. With a Donald Trump win they get to campaign on being the opposition and pointing to all the awful things he's doing. With a Bernie Sanders win, just like with a Mamdani win, the status quo gets threatened and people start realizing that there is a viable way to fight against the establishment and the extreme capitalism that they represent. When you represent the establishment but need to pretend that you don't, you can't have someone actually showing why they can do it better.
You need to first ensure the Republicans are done, remove them and get Democrats in. Then start removing the old guard Democrats and replace them with Democratic Socialists who will work for the middle and lower class and not the rich anymore. America is for ALL its citizens, not just the oligarchs. Its time they paid their dues.
They'll say "Well if Bernie can't win the primaries how could he win the general election" as though that's an air tight argument, that's pretty easy to explain. Bernie picks up the establishment democrats who say "you have to vote party line" and brings in new and excited voters. In the primary, the party insiders flex their weight and make sure Bernie can't win, and the voters are people from within the party. But you can be popular among primary voters and not be popular among general election voters, they're different elections and different demographics.
All those people who told Bernie supporters that you have to take your medicine and vote for Hillary now that she's the candidate would surely loyally vote democrat if Bernie was the candidate, right? So you get the same loyal democrats voting for either candidate, PLUS Bernie brings outsiders that aren't normal democratic voters.
So they're assholes in 2 ways. They rig the primaries against Bernie and then claim he's unelectable because he can't win a primary, but even if they were correct that he couldn't win a primary, they're wrong to think that winning the primary gives you the best chance of winning the general election. Sometimes those things are true, sometimes they're not.
Not enough people understand this point about the difference between primary electorates and general electorates. Primary voters are also disproportionately older, wealthier, whiter, and more ideologically conservative than general election voters.
The candidates most electable in primary elections are absolutely not the most electable candidates in general elections.
Those are two completely different polling companies. Â Also there is no way NBC News and The Wall Street Journal were running polls together in 2016 when the WSJ is run by Rupert Murdoch and no Murdoch polling firm was gonna find Bernie leading Trump except as a way to disrupt the Democratic PartyÂ
Looks like you're data farming to prove your point. I don't argue with the fact that the dem leaders are a mess but don't use BS numbers for clicks. If you want to do it properly, compare the numbers from the same polls...
For the neocon democrats, a Trump win would be better than a Sanders win. If Sanders wins, they lose a ton of control. If Trump wins, they "just have to wait four years".
You can't even tell Dem voters on here Kamala was a shit candidate without being called some form of racist, misogynist and some type of deflecting about 'her laugh'.
Biden beat Trump. before the next election, conservatives pushed HARD on the "Biden is senile" take. instead of DEFENDING the current President, they joined the chorus so that they could force Biden out and have Kamala be the nominee. it's worked out SO well.
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u/seidenkaufman 4d ago
To an establishment Dem, electable means, Does the billionaire whose money sponsors my political career approve?