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2020 Democratic Presidential Primary

lol ok i guess the literal only argument any of you can make is "but sanders sucks too!"

fun times

maybe girlboss pelosi's stimulus idea of tax cuts for 100k earners will help the dems in 2020
 
Look at the cattle call that decided to run. Barring something amazing happening on the trail, it was inevitable that it would come down to Biden vs. Sanders. When you have that many people running, those with the most name recognition have a huge advantage. If all you need early is 25-30% to win a primary or caucus and you have 90+% name recognition in a 10-25 person race, you have a massive advantage. You can come in third or fourth early and continue with that kind of presence. The others have to win and keep winning just to have an outside shot.

Add to that, the first two races are in totally inconsequential and unrepresentative states. This gets rid of many potentially viable, new candidates. There needs to be at least one big, diverse state in the first three or repeats of this year are predictable. The reality is if Iowa and NH were on Super Tuesday no one would give a damn about them.
 
Yea I agree with all that.

I think lots of folks on here agree with something like the general premise of a national day of primaries, probably something like automatic voter registration, expanded voter rights, better standardization of voting practices, early voting, maybe even something that looks like ranked choice.

My guess is if we had ranked choice Sanders would be more popular on aggregate. His ideas are more popular than Biden's on the whole, but people prefer the safety of Biden, so you may see lots of people picking Biden 1 and Sanders 2 or 3.

And I guess the point of continually harping on these things isn't that I don't want Biden to win or I want to depress turnout (lol), it's that I think the best ideas should continue to have a voice. It won't be Sanders in 2024, but I'm hoping there will be some in the party, probably some already regretting coalescing around Biden, who see work stoppages at Amazon and Instacart and get inspired about labor power, some who see Kamala Harris and Joe Biden pushing for free Coronavirus treatment and vaccines but not for any other kinds of financial relief for medical debt or people unable to pay for treatments for other conditions and say "that doesn't make sense." The New Yorker article articulated a lot of reasons why we're barreling towards apocalypse, and if 2020 isn't the year for significant reform, if we need 8 more years to steer us out of the gutter, fine, but I'm happy with the groundwork being lain for real social change.
 
TownieDeac said:
One final thought.

Hillary was at 36% strong enthusiasm at this time in 2016. Joe Biden is at 24%.

I fully recognize for many here Sanders is the problem. But why does the party keep tapping the default candidate nobody really likes?
Click to expand...

I mean, based on the way the primaries went, couldn’t you make the argument that it wasn’t the party tapping the default candidate, but the voters?
 
BeachBumDeac said:
I mean, based on the way the primaries went, couldn’t you make the argument that it wasn’t the party tapping the default candidate, but the voters?
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Definitely, though kind of a chicken-egg based on when the endorsements all came in.
 
TownieDeac said:
Yea I agree with all that.

I think lots of folks on here agree with something like the general premise of a national day of primaries, probably something like automatic voter registration, expanded voter rights, better standardization of voting practices, early voting, maybe even something that looks like ranked choice.

My guess is if we had ranked choice Sanders would be more popular on aggregate. His ideas are more popular than Biden's on the whole, but people prefer the safety of Biden, so you may see lots of people picking Biden 1 and Sanders 2 or 3.

And I guess the point of continually harping on these things isn't that I don't want Biden to win or I want to depress turnout (lol), it's that I think the best ideas should continue to have a voice. It won't be Sanders in 2024, but I'm hoping there will be some in the party, probably some already regretting coalescing around Biden, who see work stoppages at Amazon and Instacart and get inspired about labor power, some who see Kamala Harris and Joe Biden pushing for free Coronavirus treatment and vaccines but not for any other kinds of financial relief for medical debt or people unable to pay for treatments for other conditions and say "that doesn't make sense." The New Yorker article articulated a lot of reasons why we're barreling towards apocalypse, and if 2020 isn't the year for significant reform, if we need 8 more years to steer us out of the gutter, fine, but I'm happy with the groundwork being lain for real social change.
Click to expand...

Ranked choices is silly. It's the participation trophy for campaigns.

How could you possibly disrespect Yoda so much?

 
I mean caucuses are insane too, whether you call them participation trophies or just weird outdated bean counting. Ranked choice has real benefits in actually deriving data about people's first and second choices the party can use to therefore determine electability rather than foisting that impossible challenge on an electorate who generally doesn't know what it's doing.
 
RJKarl said:
Voting for someone second or third is like like giving a trophy for coming in fifth place. Either way you didn't win.
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That's not how any of the rank-order voting methods work though. You don't rank your candidate preferences and then those positions don't matter (participation trophy). If there's a runoff (for example) then they can drastically influence the outcome of an election. It's more than possible that a candidate with multiple "second place" votes can outperform the candidate who failed to achieve whatever the necessary viability metric was. Usually this works to choose a candidate that the majority of people prefer, even if it's not their first choice.
 
In fact, the very rhetoric that has circulated on this board for the last few years of "any dem, just not Trump" is an argument for ranked choice voting. We don't need people's first choice. We need the candidate who is going to draw the greatest amount of inspired support from across the party. Biden's number rn don't exactly inspire that confidence.
 
Ranked choice voting is good if you’re actually interested in gauging what people want. First to the post voting is good if you just see politics as a competition to be won or lost.
 
You know what is not helping Biden? This transparent attempt to weaponize #Metoo against him by the far left.
 
I mean he sucked his wife's fingers at a campaign event and has been called creepy joe for decades. Substantiated or not, Trump could have made that stick anyway. Of course it doesn't help, but it also doesn't make Dems look great who are going back and deleting their old Kavanaugh takes because of fear their "Believe Women" takes will look bad defending Biden in 2020.
 
If you can't get the most votes, you shouldn't win.

There's also a lot of room for fucking with the election. What if 25% of supporters of one candidate got together and refuse to put their top opponent on any of their ballots? That would make the vote ranking not reflective of how people really think.

You'll never convince me that a person who didn't get the most votes should win.
 
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