Serious 2020 Democratic Primaries Page 10

Started by VisionofMilotic April 10th, 2019 11:07 AM
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Ivysaur

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The Iowa Caucus was on Monday. It is Thursday morning and we're still waiting for the full results to come in and be verified. This is unprecedented!
In 2012, the Republican Party took two weeks to correctly announce the caucus results. So they are still within the margin.

The issue is just that caucuses are a deranged way to elect anything, not how competent the organisations are.

VisionofMilotic

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In 2012, the Republican Party took two weeks to correctly announce the caucus results. So they are still within the margin.

The issue is just that caucuses are a deranged way to elect anything, not how competent the organisations are.
My current understanding of the GOP Iowa Caucus from 2012 is that results were reported within hours, and they called it for Romney. It didn't take them all week to go through the process of just communicating with the public like this year's Iowa Democratic caucus. Now, I am more familiar with ths Democratic leadership so if this is not correct let me know, but what it sounds like is that after two weeks the results were corrected to show that Rick Santorum was the winner, and not Romney. While this still sounds like a nightmare and my sympathies to GOP voters on this one, what stands out to me as different about the caucus on Monday was the lack of transparency in this extended period of time before the party made public all of the data they had. So much time passed with so much still concealed, and despite this delay for "quality control" there clearly was no quality. The full results we have don't make any sense. There's precinct data that's literally gone missing, more people voting (in large numbers) than were even counted in the room, reports of precincts pushing votes to a coin toss to break a tie when there was never a tie to begin with, numbers incorrectly rounded up and down, delegates being removed from one candidate and given to another, viable candidates declared unviable, huge numbers of votes disappearing on re-alignment. The data is so horribly mangled that The Associated Press refuses to even call a winner. My understanding of the republican caucus in 2012 is that they reported the results in a normal span of time, but it took two weeks to fully resolve the difficulties they had. In this 2020 Democratic caucus they took days to tell us everything they knew, and it's not all correct, and there's yet to be a really thorough analysis of what happened here in Iowa recently, and I don't know if there is ever going to be one two weeks from now otherwise. We have a hot mess on our hands that is no closer to being cleaned up.

I know a lot of voices are calling for the end of caucuses all together in backlash to this 2020 Democratic Iowa Caucus, and even that Iowa doesn't deserve to be the first state in the primary anymore. I don't actually agree with breaking with that tradition because democracy can fail in any state, and it doesn't have to be a caucus state. In the 2000 presidential election the state that our country's fate hinged on was Florida, and Gore may have won that state and not Bush had there been a complete statewide recount of the ballots. 170,000 votes were not read by the machines just because of where people signed their names or because the holes next to the candidate of choice weren't fully punched through in the "hanging chad" fiasco. There was also the deceptive and confusing design of the butterfly ballot that misled voters to select the exact opposite candidate of whom they thought they were voting for, and lots of would-be Gore votes were given to Pat Buchanan.

https://theintercept.com/2018/11/10/democrats-should-remember-al-gore-won-florida-in-2000-but-lost-the-presidency-with-a-preemptive-surrender/

https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/political/18-years-since-the-butterfly-ballot-florida-s-voting-system-still-can-t-get-it-right-1

I think there is some benefit to having a caucus. Because you have to vote in public it's harder for irregularities to get through without being flagged. Whether it's a case where there are genuine mistakes and oversights due to human error or there's corruption on the part of an official to rig it, whatever the reason when there are irregularities they immediately are very glaring as they were in this caucus.

The fact that there is no secrecy with regard to a ballot is potentially an advantage in my opinion, unlike any other primary a caucus-goer has to stand up in a public space and declare support for a candidate in front of strangers. Since there is no privacy in this process, a reform to the caucus that I think would be interesting is if it was televised live as public service just like you can watch a senate hearing. That way it would be more accurate than any other way of voting because there is a video record that can be reviewed objectively.

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VisionofMilotic

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We're onto New Hampshire this week. I'm braced for anything after Iowa.

All of the frontrunners Sanders, Warren, Biden and Buttigieg have acknowledged that there were irregularities from several Iowa precints, and candidates have submitted documentation to support it.

https://www.abc57.com/news/democratic-candidates-submit-caucus-irregularity-claims-to-iowa-democrats

Last week as voices cried out for Tom Perez to step down as DNC chair he did what he should have done days ago, called for a re-canvass, conceding that the there were too many problems with the Iowa Caucus for public confidence, with the infamous "Enough is enough" tweet. Troy Price the Iowa Democratic party chair essentially said that Perez had no authority, and that this was a matter for the state. To consider moving forward the Iowa Democratic party pressed that one or more presidential campaign needed to request a recanvass. Meanwhile Mayor Pete was given the most delegates.

The Bernie Sanders campaign has contested the results of the Iowa Caucus, demanding a recanvass of the data throughout various precincts. I think Bernie is right to be noisy about this, and not just let the machine run over the voters and install Pete without a word. He should fight for every delegate he may have won, as should everyone in the race, whether it is Warren, Biden or Klobuchar who had votes disappear that they should have received. That's just fair.

A re-canvass in Iowa is going to be a charade though. Price has readily acknowledged that several of the tallies on the precinct worksheets presented to the Iowa Democratic Party are wrong. The math doesn't add up from data just vanishing to more people voting than even possible. However, in the internal party emails Troy Price has been plain that no corrections can be made. It doesn't matter what the worksheets say, how ridiculous the numbers may look because well... it's official folks. The worksheets can show results that are mathematically impossible, but there can be no adjustment. Yes, these results stand, even if they know the results are wrong! The Iowa Democratic party and their lawyers have argued that it would compromise the integrity of the process to make any corrections, comparing it to tampering with someone's ballot based on a subjective opinion. This is insane. I know I am double posting, but this is an update that was so bewildering to me that I couldn't not share the madness.

https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2020/2/10/1918106/-Iowa-Democratic-Party-gives-Buttigieg-the-delegate-lead-but-refuses-to-correct-caucus-math-errors

This not a matter of opinion. The math is either correct or it isn't, and what is unethical is for the Democratic party to just crown Mayor Pete no matter what. If Tom Perez was honest he would respond to the Iowa Democratic party by calling for a vote for the DNC to strip Iowa of her delegates at the convention, and give nobody any delegates from this state. Just erase them if they don't want to redo the Iowa Caucus or have a real recanvass, and start everything with a clean race in New Hampshire. That would be the example I would make of Iowa, and I guarantee there would be less of these discrepancies in future states. But he is not serious of course, he is playing good cop to Troy Price's bad cop. Iowa is not going to be the last controversial state in the primary. The fix is in.

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Nah

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Not even trying to be subtle now, are they? You would think that in the presidential election after the one where there were concerns about election security and foreign influence that the people running these things would make sure that it all goes well this time. But instead they do the caucus with a very new app from a questionable entity, and one that one of the candidates has given money to at that (and then said candidate just happens to win the state), then just basically come out and say "we know the results are probably wrong but we ain't gonna fix". They don't really expect people to be fine with this, do they? Or maybe they do and just don't care, that wouldn't surprise me.

great way way to start really
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gimmepie

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Not even trying to be subtle now, are they? You would think that in the presidential election after the one where there were concerns about election security and foreign influence that the people running these things would make sure that it all goes well this time. But instead they do the caucus with a very new app from a questionable entity, and one that one of the candidates has given money to at that (and then said candidate just happens to win the state), then just basically come out and say "we know the results are probably wrong but we ain't gonna fix". They don't really expect people to be fine with this, do they? Or maybe they do and just don't care, that wouldn't surprise me.

great way way to start really
Did you think it would just be the Republicans emboldened by Trump getting away with the Russia and Ukraine muk? The DNC is just as corrupt as the Trump crew and after seeing how easily he got away with what he did, they probably don't see any reason to even try and be subtle about their shady muk anymore. Politics over there are just all around broken and it's getting laughable to actually call the US a democracy at this point.
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Ivysaur

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I'm also going to add that, in the great scheme of things, one delegate in a caucus, a messy system that luckily is used by a clear minority of states, is not going to change the outcome. I know, I know that many Bernie Sanders suporters are just dying to scream conspiracy and, certainly, they are delighted by the evidence that he got the short end of the stick from the problems in the caucus. But wait until he sweeps NH and NV and goes into SuperTuesday as the leading candidate before claiming that there's a massive DNC conspiracy to defeat him, please.

A very good rule of thumb is "don't assume evil is behind things that can be explained by human stupidity". I honestly doubt the Iowa DP set out to specifically rig the caucus against Sanders in particular, it's more likely the whole thing was a massive mess (just ask Santorum in 2012) and Sanders was in the wrong place. Again, wait to see if there are ballot boxes disappearing mysteriously in NH or something before assuming the Evil Washington Elites are just rigging everything.

And let me ask: let's say that the real caucus result had been Sanders 26%, Buttigieg 24%. Other than the one delegate (out of over one thousand needed to win the nomination) changing hands, what would have changed? Sanders has got a bounce in the polls. Pete would have got a bounce anyway because he was the winner of the "moderate" lane while Biden was in free-fall, and if you think ex-Biden voters would have flocked to Sanders just because he had narrowly won instead of narrowly lost, well, think again. So yeah, if suddenly mysterious muk starts happening in the upcoming three states, then I can buy it's a conspiracy. But if everything goes smoothly in the following days and the actual effect is... that Sanders lost one delegate, then what is the problem...?

PD: Sanders lost 2016 because more people just happened to cast their votes for Clinton.
PD2: I donated money to Sanders in 2016 and would love to see him win the general if he wins the primary.

gimmepie

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I'm also going to add that, in the great scheme of things, one delegate in a caucus, a messy system that luckily is used by a clear minority of states, is not going to change the outcome. I know, I know that many Bernie Sanders suporters are just dying to scream conspiracy and, certainly, they are delighted by the evidence that he got the short end of the stick from the problems in the caucus. But wait until he sweeps NH and NV and goes into SuperTuesday as the leading candidate before claiming that there's a massive DNC conspiracy to defeat him, please.

A very good rule of thumb is "don't assume evil is behind things that can be explained by human stupidity". I honestly doubt the Iowa DP set out to specifically rig the caucus against Sanders in particular, it's more likely the whole thing was a massive mess (just ask Santorum in 2012) and Sanders was in the wrong place. Again, wait to see if there are ballot boxes disappearing mysteriously in NH or something before assuming the Evil Washington Elites are just rigging everything.

And let me ask: let's say that the real caucus result had been Sanders 26%, Buttigieg 24%. Other than the one delegate (out of over one thousand needed to win the nomination) changing hands, what would have changed? Sanders has got a bounce in the polls. Pete would have got a bounce anyway because he was the winner of the "moderate" lane while Biden was in free-fall, and if you think ex-Biden voters would have flocked to Sanders just because he had narrowly won instead of narrowly lost, well, think again. So yeah, if suddenly mysterious muk starts happening in the upcoming three states, then I can buy it's a conspiracy. But if everything goes smoothly in the following days and the actual effect is... that Sanders lost one delegate, then what is the problem...?

PD: Sanders lost 2016 because more people just happened to cast their votes for Clinton.
PD2: I donated money to Sanders in 2016 and would love to see him win the general if he wins the primary.
It's not so much that I think there's a huge anti-Sanders conspiracy, it's more of a principal matter for me because I feel fairly confident in saying that they would be a lot happier to strip delegates or re-canvass if it had been a more moderate candidate like Buttigieg or Biden being screwed over. Plus, it's pretty hard to deny the conflict of interest in one candidate having given money to the company overseeing voting.

It's not likely to have a huge impact in the overall end result of the nomination, but that doesn't mean this sort of thing is okay, regardless of whether it's because of conspiracy, stupidity or some other maliciousness.
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Ivysaur

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It's not likely to have a huge impact in the overall end result of the nomination, but that doesn't mean this sort of thing is okay, regardless of whether it's because of conspiracy, stupidity or some other maliciousness.
This I agree completely. But I insist things shouldn't be blown out of proportion just yet.

Kanzler

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These victories for Sanders have been very underwhelming. There's a strong chance he might not get the nomination. It feels like there's a ceiling to the amount of support he can get, and it won't net him a majority of delegates.

VisionofMilotic

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I'm also going to add that, in the great scheme of things, one delegate in a caucus, a messy system that luckily is used by a clear minority of states, is not going to change the outcome. I know, I know that many Bernie Sanders suporters are just dying to scream conspiracy and, certainly, they are delighted by the evidence that he got the short end of the stick from the problems in the caucus. But wait until he sweeps NH and NV and goes into SuperTuesday as the leading candidate before claiming that there's a massive DNC conspiracy to defeat him, please.

A very good rule of thumb is "don't assume evil is behind things that can be explained by human stupidity". I honestly doubt the Iowa DP set out to specifically rig the caucus against Sanders in particular, it's more likely the whole thing was a massive mess (just ask Santorum in 2012) and Sanders was in the wrong place. Again, wait to see if there are ballot boxes disappearing mysteriously in NH or something before assuming the Evil Washington Elites are just rigging everything.

And let me ask: let's say that the real caucus result had been Sanders 26%, Buttigieg 24%. Other than the one delegate (out of over one thousand needed to win the nomination) changing hands, what would have changed? Sanders has got a bounce in the polls. Pete would have got a bounce anyway because he was the winner of the "moderate" lane while Biden was in free-fall, and if you think ex-Biden voters would have flocked to Sanders just because he had narrowly won instead of narrowly lost, well, think again. So yeah, if suddenly mysterious muk starts happening in the upcoming three states, then I can buy it's a conspiracy. But if everything goes smoothly in the following days and the actual effect is... that Sanders lost one delegate, then what is the problem...?

PD: Sanders lost 2016 because more people just happened to cast their votes for Clinton.
PD2: I donated money to Sanders in 2016 and would love to see him win the general if he wins the primary.
I can assure you that nobody is "delighted" to find evidence of the democratic process being compromised. C'mon, give us more credit than that. Having a secure process is something we should all be serious about, and only a crazy person would be "dying" to tell you some bad news.

It's also worth noting while you are characterizing Bernie Sanders supporters as screaming conspiracists, not everybody who expresses skepticism about the fairness of the process we saw in Iowa is necessarily even a Sanders supporter. There are people who have shared concern about the integrity of the process who have not identified themselves as Bernie Sanders supporters and made no comment about who they support, or may have even indicated support for another candidate entirely in previous comments. Some people who have expressed skepticism have even said specifically that they are not democrats, therefore won't be casting a vote for Sanders or otherwise. There are also people who are not United States citizens viewing this thread that can't be voting for Bernie and won't be directly affected by who wins this primary, yet even so they registered concern about what has been reported. Preserving a free and fair election is something that should have bipartisan support larger than Bernie. While yes, I personally am going to vote for Bernie Sanders, I have also posted my dismay to learn of inconsistencies that occurred affecting candidates that I don't necessarily support such as Andrew Yang and Elizabeth Warren. Even if I disagree with a candidate I still want the process of challenging them to be done properly, based on whose ideas won the most voters and not failings in the procedure. Any candidate being negatively impacted by irregularities or suppression is of interest to me.

While you dismissed the idea that there is corruption in Iowa, and that instead these are all honest mistakes that happened to Bernie Sanders. However, bear in mind that data from 90 precincts also went missing in the 2016 Iowa caucus, a controversial caucus which Clinton was declared the winner of by a fraction of a point after a number of precincts reportedly being tied and decided by coin tosses. When Bernie Sanders asked to look at what data the party had to verify the accuracy of these results in such a close race the Iowa Democratic chairwoman refused to turn over anything for a review. You say that we should learn not to "assume evil is behind things that can be explained by human stupidity," but how do you explain trying to prevent anyone from seeing the results as just human stupidity? There would be no reason for the Iowa democratic chair to do this unless there was something to hide.

https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_9550670

Bernie Sanders may have won the New Hampshire, but I wouldn't celebrate just yet that there is no bias in this process against us, because there are some red flags coming out of the Nevada Caucus already that this process may not be above aboard entirely. This is Nevada's first time doing early voting, and the Nevada Democrats are getting a brand new piece of software to help them count the data again just like the present we got in Iowa. We've been told by the party that it's not the same shadow app, but we don't know anything about this tool, other than that it was recommended by a "group of tech and security folks whose names and affiliations were not provided." This app is still being knocked together, and has not been live tested. The press has received no response so far to questions about how early votes will be tabulated. Voting starts in 2 days, yet people running the caucus sites have said there has been no training on how to use this new gadget.

https://www.mintpressnews.com/nevada-democrats-caucus-new-software-despite-iowa-app-problems/264777/

The DNC would have to be more than stupid to do exactly what they just did in Iowa again in Nevada and expect no problems might occur. It would be Einstein's definition of insanity, "doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting a different result."

I think it's more likely that the DNC wants the dodgy results they will probably receive, than they are crazy.

It's also surfaced that Buttigieg's staff was hired by the Nevada state party to be the "Voter Protection Director of the caucus." This is an unsubtle conflict of interest, just as it should have been a conflict of interest that Buttigieg's campaign paid over 40,000 dollars to Shadow Inc whose app did the faulty counting, and a potential conflict of interest that the founder of the corporation that launched Shadow is tied to the senior strategist in Buttigieg's campaign.

https://news3lv.com/news/local/voters-concerned-after-nevada-democratic-party-hires-buttigieg-staffer

I think it's frankly dangerous to brush away the irregularities we saw in Iowa just because there are more states out there and more delegates to be won, and not that much changed. Iowa alone may not change the winner of the caucus, but if there's not a public outcry it will enable more "careless" mistakes like that or outright cheating in the margins because there's no accountability or pressure to be as accurate as possible. The Iowa Democratic party has acknowledgd that the results are mathematically wrong, but that they won't be corrected even if they are wrong. Delegates skimmed off the top here and there from state to state will indeed affect the outcome of the primary. Fight for every delegate that you think is yours, because you are going to need it at the convention.

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VisionofMilotic

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So has anyone cast a vote yet in their state?

Early voting started a couple of weeks ago where I live. I was planning to wait and just vote right before work on Super Tuesday, which is March 3rd. The states that can vote then will be Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia.

However, I got a message from my dad who is a teacher that there's going to be tomorrow rally in our city taking place at one of our Historically Black Colleges, and a march to early vote at 11:30 am. Bernie Sanders is going to be there speaking, and going to that event sounds like fun. So I'm there.

Good luck to anyone voting soon. Hope you have a nice, easy experience. May the best man or woman win.

If you are looking forward to voting on any bonds or candidates nationally or locally you can share, but no pressure to do so.

There's a sales tax up for vote here in my state NC that will be used to increase funding for teachers. I will be voting for it.

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Nah

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New Jersey is usually one of the later states to vote in presidential primaries, so I gotta wait a bit before I can.
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VisionofMilotic

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What's happening around Mike Blomberg in this primary is really sickening. I wanted to make less critical posts lately, but I read something from the Intercept last night that really was thr straw that broke the camel's back. This man keeps brazenly buying the election right in front of our eyes.

I knew for awhile that he was spending more than anyone flooding the airways with half a billion dollars of propaganda during the short time he's been running, a million dollars per day just for the Facebook ads alone.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/482770-bloomberg-has-spent-1-million-a-day-on-facebook-ads-in-last-two-weeks

It's also pretty well-known by now that he donated more than a quarter of a million dollars to the DNC. After doing so the debate rules that restricted everyone else were changed. Had this not happened he wouldn't have met the threshold of grassroots support required. He should not even be on this stage.

https://www.insider.com/dnc-debate-qualification-rules-bloomberg-donation-2020-2

He has even told us to our face on television that half of the congress we have now he bought to the tune of 100 million dollars.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/mike-bloomberg-debate-bought-south-carolina-congress-citizens-united-958322/

For some time I thought the most disturbing thing about Blomberg of all was that he donated to virtually every state left in the primary. 10,000 to the New York State Democratic Committee, 10,000 over there to the Democratic Party of California, 10k more to Massachusetts and another to Michigan, New Mexico, Oklahoma. The list goes on and on, one by one he is trying to bribe his way through the state primaries.

https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup

This is not even counting the collective group for the state parties that he gave nearly 1 million dollars to.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/02/11/bloomberg-billionaire-bounce-112133

He's going on the ballot for the first time I think on Super Tuesday, so we'll see how high a placement his money bought him next week. I expect shenanigans on a local level.

It gets even worse though. Bloomberg has hired the vice chairs of both the Texas and California state democratic parties to work on his campaign. This should be illegal, and that it isn't just illustrates how broken our campaign finance is, and why we need a real reformer in the white house pronto.

https://theintercept.com/2020/02/28/bloomberg-super-tuesday-texas-california-democratic-party-hires/

The chairs Bloomberg purchased don't just have state-wide influence, they have nationwide political influence. He owns chairs that are sitting on the rules committee, deciding the rules we play by, dictating the party's agenda, amending the party's charter, recommending the officers. His senior advisors Carla Brailey and Alexander Rooker who vice chair California and Texas are also superdelegates.

Unlike the pledged delegates when you win a state the superdelates don't have to vote for what their constituents voted for, they are powerful party elites that get a special vote on who the nominee will be at Democratic convention, and these guys work for Bloomberg. If it's a brokered convention, which is very possible looking at the size of the field, that means a second round of voting starts that invites the super delegates in. One candidate may have won more than anyone else as they campaigned throughout the primary, the can have the majority, but if it isn't a victory by a huge majority of over 1900 pledged delegates then the convention is open to being contested. It would be very controversial to drag us down this road, but in this scenario the party elders can get up off of their chairs and theoretically vote to install Mike Bloomberg over our protests.

I really hope the party does not go this way, the American people expect them to support whoever has won the majority, whether that is Sanders, Biden, Roger Rabbit it doesn't matter, they should not use this mechanism to overturn what the people voted for and install a favorite. It would crack the party into a thousand fragments, and not only hand Trump the general election but be the end of the Democratic party. I'm not saying they are going to go that far, let's hope not, but I am saying that this is the outcome that Bloomberg is bidding for. He made the purchases that he did because he is looking for a brokered convention, and it's quite scary to watch. If the DNC goes for this they will be saying in no uncertain terms that they care more about the donors than they do about us the people.

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Nah

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So how are people feeling about things now
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Kanzler

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welp.

Business as usual for the Democratic Party. I do have a couple questions:

Why didn't the 18-29 vote show up? Why did the guts of most undecided Democratic voters pick Biden? Can we count on Biden to be more electable than Trump this November?

gimmepie

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Why didn't the 18-29 vote show up?
It's hard to motivate people to show up when they feel like the system is rigged against them and, to an extent, they're right. It's worrying though, because the system will enevr get fixed if nobody shows up to elect the people who'll put the work in to achieving that.
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Tsutarja

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On top of people thinking the system is rigged, long lines at polling sites also contribute to the lower turnout. I saw stories on reddit the other day about people observing peers in the 18-29 age range showing up to the polls to vote, only to leave because of long lines being a "waste of time."

Nah

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I imagine that part of the reason why a lot of the undecideds went for Biden is that this country as a whole doesn't skew towards the left very much and so were more likely to vote for Biden to begin with, plus the whole "Biden is probably more electable" thing.

But I don't think that Biden is as electable as some people want to think. Fielding the same sort of candidate (an old centrist democrat) that lost to Trump 4 years ago should be enough of a sign by itself to cast doubt on that. On top of that, I have a hard time imagining that a major part of the Trump campaign strategy won't be to routinely bring up Ukraine or the Creepy Uncle Joe thing, nevermind Biden's ever increasing number of gaffes....and all these things will undoubtedly have some effect.

Personally I don't really care for the whole electability argument. It almost always favors the status quo candidate, and every person who goes "well I like X better but Y is more electable so I'll vote for Y" is ironically contributing to the reason why X is perceived to be less electable--if all these people went and voted for X, they'd find that X is suddenly more electable than they appeared. Why should we vote for the "electable" moderate? So we can be told to do it again 4 years later because the conservative is worse than the moderate Democrat? When there's always going to be a conservative and they're always going to be the worse choice of the two?

It's time that the moderates took a psyducking chance on progressives and vote for them, otherwise it's just going to come and bite them in the ass someday, and they'll have no one but themselves to blame.

Though tbh I'm not optimistic (when am I ever optimistic though) that either Sanders or Biden or anyone really could defeat Trump this year.
Nah ンン
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colours

she/her
gracidea fields
Seen December 30th, 2022
Posted December 29th, 2022
8,974 posts
18.1 Years
so, a couple of things. i realize that this perspective is very unpopular on this community, and i apologise in advance. playing devil's advocate is not something that i'd imagine people particularly enjoy doing, but i feel like it's necessary for some food for thought sometimes. this, i feel, is one of those times.

i'd like to preface this post by saying that out of everyone on the current democratic field, i'd vote for Bernie Sanders a hundred times over. ideologically, i feel like my views align with his the most. i'm a struggling college student, i avoid hospitals (i shouldn't, but y'know...'murica) because i really don't want to deal with the medical bills, and im currently working a job that doesn't pay me nearly enough to survive. all of these things combined make me a prime target for the foundation of what Sanders is talking about, and in a lot of ways, he's right. this country is fundamentally broken is a lot of ways and i feel, imo, that he's the best candidate to fix those, our national debt be damned. fiscal republicans and democrats can rattata about it all they want, economically speaking as long as our interest rate is low and our economy is "good" (read: no recession), the larger number is meaningless. a government being in debt is not the same as an individual being in debt and i think that's what a lot of people don't realize.

anyway, onto my main point... which is that it's worth taking a step back and thinking about why Joe Biden appeals to a lot of people to begin with. i think it's quite tunnel-visioned to say that his appeal lies just in the fact that he's a moderate. sure, that's a part of it, he's certainly a moderate compared to literally anything Sanders offers, but the biggest contrast that i see between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders is the execution of their message. this basically means that while the substance of what you say is important, how you say it is more important. if you don't believe me, consider how many times you've heard (if you have, that is) that Hillary Clinton sounds "inauthentic" and "fake" in comparison to Sanders in 2016. Sanders gave a message of revolution which was strong, Clinton sounded flat in comparison. she sounded boring, corporate and at a lot of times, stiff in her speeches. Sanders in that same time period was a new face that REALLY riled up the anger that young people felt towards the government during that time and wanted a complete overhaul of how things were done, and kickstarted the rise of the progressive movement.

how your message comes across and how you deliver it speaks volumes to people. this is the biggest reason why Sanders, as far as im aware, has been struggling a lot with expanding his base. people who vote for him agree with the bigger picture of his platform (i mean duh, but i'll get to why this matters) and also are the people who are directly most impacted by it. it's imperative that the US finally be brought to the 21st century as far as healthcare is concerned and it's ridiculous that college costs as much as it has, among other things like eliminating student debt and the like, you get the point. Sanders' policies to his supporters make sense on a logical level.

Joe Biden is different in the sense that he focuses a lot on the execution of his message rather than the substance of it. personally speaking i don't remember a damn thing that Biden has promised as the top issue that he plans to tackle rather than turning the clock and things being as the were back in the Obama era except i think Biden is slightly more left, but that'd be about the only difference. i mean, everyone is already familiar with his gaffes and stumps by now but like... Biden's personality as an affable old man who hugs people a lot, talks about his dead son a lot and in general speaks about things in a much more emotional, humanistic way makes people feel like he cares about them on an individual level. whether you personally feel he actually does or not is irrelevant, but it's the biggest difference between the two and quite the stark difference, at that.

Sanders does very little of this, in contrast. it's more often "the 1%" "the millionaires and the billionaires" and (insert something negative about the Democratic Party here). i mean, yeah, logically, he's right, but despite being right, he ends up pissing a lot of people off and if not doing that, he ends up looking disconnected to the average voter. the thing is, Sanders spills out hard truths that people don't want to hear, but need to. his supporters are more often than not people who resonate with those hard truths in wanting to weed out corruption in government. and look, it's not that Biden supporters are in some super different camp when it comes to wanting corruption out of government, but they feel that Biden's more "friendlier" image is better for the job as they prioritise that execution more than a guy who constantly sounds like his default speaking voice is like 75 decibels.

a lot people also think Biden's "dementia" is going to bite him in the ass against Trump in the debates and i've seen countless upon countless times that people fear that Trump is going to demolish Biden, but let's not forget that Trump lost all three debates against Clinton yet that wasn't a guarantee for her to get into the white house. Trump is not some debating mastermind like some people think he is, he's an incompetent moron. he didn't win the presidency because of his debate skills, he won the presidency in part because he delivered his message in an effective way and convinced enough people that he was an outsider moderate republican that was going to change things for the better instead of the same old corporate dc bullmuk. despite his electoral college win, it's not like Trump won important states by a landslide. Florida was won by a percent and some change, Pennsylvania was won by a thinner margin, and North Carolina was won by 3%, and Michigan was won by like less than half a percent?

anyway the tl;dr of all of this is to provide a different perspective of sorts. it'll be interesting to see what happens in the coming months as to whether or not Biden maintains his lead or whether Sanders catches up.

gimmepie

Age 27
Male
Australia
Seen 1 Day Ago
Posted 1 Day Ago
Counterpoint: If how you present your argument was as big a factor as you suggest, Biden would have dropped out by now with no support because he can barely string a sentence together.

That aside, you do have a point about Sanders' appeal. Most people aren't interested in the greater good, they are interested in what they perceive as being the best for them and aren't about to do the research into why Sanders' policies are the best for literally everyone who isn't a corrupt billionaire.
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Her

Age 29
Seen 3 Hours Ago
Posted 1 Week Ago
Joe Biden also appeals to a lot of people because he’s spent his life fighting to preserve comfortable levels of racism for suburbia <3

twocows

The not-so-black cat of ill omen

Age 32
Male
Michigan
Seen February 19th, 2023
Posted April 30th, 2021
4,307 posts
14.2 Years
It's crazy to me that there were so many Democratic candidates I actually liked this year (kind of rare for me) and now it looks like the only one I would never vote for under any circumstances is the most likely to win. I legitimately don't know what people see in a guy who has had some incredibly awful takes in the past, who has been videoed doing some pretty creepy stuff from time to time (be honest, if it was someone else, you'd be really weirded out), who has repeatedly shown disdain for (relatively) young people and the problems we have to deal with (despite his generation being responsible for a large number of them), and who seems to be beginning to experience some of the negative mental effects of old age. He's also got the same problem I felt Hillary had in 2016, where it feels like he thinks he deserves votes, despite his platform largely being about who he isn't (Bernie or Trump). I legitimately can't stand him and people like him are the reason why I left the Democratic party in the early 2010s (originally to become a Libertarian, later just an unaffiliated independent). Just about any other significant candidate would have been a better choice and I probably would have voted for any of them (Bernie and Mayor Pete being my top two).

To be fair, it's likely to go to a contested convention, but I think it's far more likely Biden would win that than Bernie, even if Bernie somehow had more delegates beforehand. If Bernie doesn't win, I'll probably vote third party like I did in 2016. As an independent, nobody's entitled to my vote, they have to earn it, and Joe hasn't earned a thing from me other than ridicule.

Edit: Also, I've mentioned this before, but people may question why I like Bernie as someone who leans a bit libertarian (no longer affiliated but I still tend to agree with them). I think Bernie's solutions to problems tend to be the wrong ones, but he has a unique focus on the correct issues. The things he talks about with passion are the things I think are the real problems right now, and he's the only one who seems to actually care about them. It doesn't feel like anyone but him really cares about the crappy state of healthcare, massive student debt and education costs, etc. So while I don't necessarily agree with his solutions, I think there'd be a positive effect in that he'd force Congress to actually deal with the issues. And I think in return, Congress would probably limit some of his more extreme solutions. I think the interplay would be a good thing overall.
VNs are superior to anime, don't @ me

colours

she/her
gracidea fields
Seen December 30th, 2022
Posted December 29th, 2022
8,974 posts
18.1 Years
Counterpoint: If how you present your argument was as big a factor as you suggest, Biden would have dropped out by now with no support because he can barely string a sentence together.
true, except it's really easy to do mental gymnastics around Biden's gaffes. what one person sees as an utterly incompetent old man that barely remembers anything important, another person sees as an affable attribute of a folksy dinner table uncle. Biden knows how to play the flute of the latter very well.

alongside what i said before, i did a bit of research (pretty much googling around) to find what other reasons why Biden has been getting such high support. it's of no surprise that black voters are a large part of it, but they like Biden not really because of his issues or policy, but because they feel he can beat Trump. i think this article is a pretty interesting read when you get a chance. o:

"It's frustrating," said Cliff Albright, a co-founder of the nonprofit Black Voters Matter. "Even most of the black people voting with Biden aren't with him because they think he's best on the issues. It's a lot of 'I'm with him because I think he's the best person who can beat Trump.'"
and that whole article goes into detail about the many black voters that went for Biden and their various reasons. it's important to keep in mind that black voters are most definitely not monolithic, as obviously different black voters have different priorities, etc.

it seems that, between a candidate's policies and platforms and whether or not they can get Trump out of the white house, some people apparently feel the latter is more important.

Ivysaur

Grass dinosaur extraordinaire

Age 32
He/him
Madrid, Europe
Seen 2 Days Ago
Posted April 5th, 2023
21,076 posts
16.2 Years
Another view: the reason why Sanders ran such a close race last time and why Trump eventually won by 70k votes accross the Rust Belt wasn't because they wanted a revolution or the most anti-establishment voice, it was because they did not want Hillary Rodham Clinton as president. Simply put. The second a new moderate, establishment candidate stepped forward who had a much higher approval rating and none of her 20-odd years of baggage and character assassination, Biden won, by a pretty convincing margin, atracting hundreds of thousands of voters who had sat out 2016 or had crossed over from the Republican side because of their repulse for Trump.

I know Sanders offers some of the biggest change, and he's far close to an European social-democrat than a "commie" or whatever (says someone who literally voted for the Communist Party of Spain in the last election). But, honestly, look at Biden's programme, and if you think it's "conservative" or anything remotely similar, well, I'm sorry, but we have different views.

I expect he'll kick the orange clown in November pretty hard. Texas-as-a-very-close-battleground kind of hard.