I’m a blue-no-matter-who person, and I don’t love it. I totally get that this is technically allowed under the rules, but it smacks of disenfranchisement and backroom deals. I’m still voting for whoever is the Democrats candidate, I’m glad people are feeling energized, but I still think it’s shady af. If we are letting The Powers That Be make last second calls like this, what’s stopping them from continuing to do it in the future? But I’m also not a voter who needed to be convinced.
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I was actually wondering if Biden waited as a deliberate tactic to avoid the divisiveness that has plagued recent Democratic primaries. Everybody pretty much has to get behind Harris real quick instead of having months to be convinced that another candidate is better and then go to the polls bitter on Election Day.
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No one’s talking about what I think is the shadiest aspect: the timing right on the heels of the RNC.
To poorly paraphrase Haley before she dropped out:
“Mark my words: whichever party retires their octogenarian candidate first and runs sometime younger is going to win this election.”
I think she’s right, most people weren’t happy with Biden or Trump as their choices. Biden waited until just after the RNC when Trump was designated the Republican nominee. It’s too late for the Republicans to do what the Democrats just did.
I think the primaries should be a national election with ranked choice voting. I’m disenfranchised with the current system due to how late primaries happen in my current and former state.
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Yea Biden definitely wanted to wait for the RNC to spend the entire time crapping on him so their talking points are immediately irrelevant.
Having worked in party politics, people do not understand the delegate process even when it works the way they want, and people don’t understand it is set by the state party rules not the national parties. This is one of many reasons why I don’t really believe in 2 dominant parties as a good political system under democracy.
But I will say there were a lot of people in 2016 who were hoping that delegates could be convinced to change votes at the convention and still hope to get their candidate in (Bernie). Suddenly that seems unfair to some of the same people.
The economist said that this is absolutely legal but will “feel” undemocratic.
I honestly think no one had a perceived choice anyway this election, the party always supports the incumbent no matter what. Yes he could’ve stepped out earlier and then there could’ve been a real contest.
But this was a much smarter political move and winning elections is all politics (plus I think he did not want to drop out until now)
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This sounds an awful lot like a Fox News talking point considering there is no spokesperson for BLM and a lot of the biggest organizers for Kamala Harris have been HBCU aLum groups, AKA and other black institutions.
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Update it sounds like a Fox News talking point but it is true!
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Perhaps hypocritical of me, but that’s the part that bothers me the least. If we’re going to play grabass with the nomination, then at least we are doing it in a way that’s politically effective, instead of the usual ‘democrats shoot themselves in the dick, 254th edition’.
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Yeah I got an email from them demanding a vote.
Which I semi-get because they’re 99.9% Kamala is a Cop rhetoric
I am choosing to see this as the Democratic Party doing what the non-far right did in France: bite your tongue, drop your worst polling candidates so you don’t split the vote, coalesce around the least bad option, then as soon as the facists are defeated we can go back to ripping into the centrists for their bad policies (or ripping into the progressives for their bad policies depending on your stance). It isn’t “democratic” in that it involves party elites deciding who the general public can vote for without asking the general public, but it’s effective (hopefully for us as well as France).
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Yup. I’ll also say that I don’t really perceive the party primary process as terribly democratic anyway.
A couple of extremely rural states with few voters get an outsized impact due to the timing of their elections, and some even in use a caucus method which is extremely reliant on the people who have the ability to show up on a weekday for hours and hours. The states that are important in the primaries are often not important in the general, making it a worse predicter of general election success.
The states and platforms for the party are different in every state! Leading to inconsistencies. In several states the primary percentages don’t even correspond to the delegates assigned, who are apportioned winner-takes-all for some states. Plus, the people who run to be delegates are people that can afford to self-fund a very expensive trip to a (usually) different city.
Plus, we have super-delegates and unpledged delegates who don’t have to vote based on the will of the people.
It’s all just a very messy system. But I guess “democracy” (republic in this case) always is.
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I fully blocked them and the entire 2016 convention from my brain.
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I really wish I could but it’s the source of half my trauma from when I worked in politics. Our state’s delegation almost got kicked out before the vote, no joke.
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Wait, what? How? 
It’s complicated but essentially protest action by vocal Bernie supporters in our delegation
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This is all very interesting from an entirely different political system where we dont choose who each party picks as the representative. We do vote for some senators as individuals but our PM is just the leader of the party and the party chooses, and then we make our displeasure known with satire.
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Yeah, ok so that all sounds lovely and organized, but do you get couch fucking memes?
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Not something I ever thought I’d read or witness 
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I just… How is that even a sentence! Lol
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A few years ago we did have a seat sniffer?
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Hahaha we swapped prime minister’s like 6 times in 5 years or something at one point.
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I certainly barely understand this myself. It’s been helpful to get a little reminder of how it actually works. The primary ballot should say “please vote for the candidate that [x number of delegates in your state] may vote for at the convention but actually they don’t have to 
”
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