Baron Von J

Yes to both halves of the question.

if we all wait around for the Dems to save us. If the Democrats want my vote, they need to put AOC on the ticket. If they want to run actual progressives,

This right here is what I’m saying. Anybody who meets the requirements can declare their candidacy in the party primary. We don’t need the party to turn around and say “oh hey here’s a bunch of candidates for you to pick from.” Was AOC given to us by the party? NO! She just up and ran against an incumbent because she saw Bernie do it. And the voters in the district showed up and voted for her. Fuck what “the party” wants and use their process to get what we want! It’s not up to the party to put someone on the ticket, it’s up to that someone to register to be on the primary ballot and the god damn primary voters to show up and vote!

The DNC playing favorites in 2016.

They did, but it didn’t matter, because more people showed to the primaries to vote for Clinton than did for Bernie. She had more pledged delegates, elected by the primary voters, going into the convention and the superdelegates didn’t even need to vote for her to win the nomination. The party even changed the convention rules starting in 2018 so that the superdelegatees don’t even vote unless the pledged delegates (the ones elected by the primary voters) can’t elect a candidate in the first vote.

More likely I won’t be able to vote by then because I’m trans.

Stay safe and know that you are still valued and welcome by millions of people.

Edit, I didn’t it down votes you by the way that was somebody else. We can disagree without a petty down vote war

Agree on that. Cheers!

I don’t think they’ve participated in them consistently enough and in a large enough scale for it. Either that or there simply aren’t enough progressive voters to defeat the centrists and neoliberals. In which case splintering into a third party essentially means permanent Republican majority. Everybody wants to cite Bernie as proof that a progressive isn’t allowed to win when the reality is simply that more people voted for Hillary in 2016 (not a single superdelegate vote was needed to give her the win at the convention, and the DNC changed the rules in 2018 onwards so that superdelegates don’t even vote in the convention unless the pledged delegates can’t elect a nominee in the first round) and the same is true of Biden in 2020.

Indeed I agree. Which is why I’m advocating for progressive candidates to run in the Democratic party primaries, and for the progressive voters to actually support them in those primaries.

I call bullshit on the vote splitting.

So you’re either voting a right-leaning candidate or a left-leaning candidate. If there are multiple candidates from one of those two halves of the spectrum on the ballot where the recipient of the most votes wins, the vote for that half is split and lowers the threshold for the most popular candidate from the other half.

And so far, the Democrats have been fucking useless. So what we vote for a useless Democrat, or a fascist, or split the ticket and maybe someone worth a shit will win.

So don’t vote for them. Get a progressive to run in the next primary and then go vote in the primary to replace the useless person. When I advocate for voting in the Democratic primaries, it’s not to support incumbents like Pelosi and Schumer. They can fuck all the way off for failing so badly. It’s to utilize the infrastructure and ballot access that the Democratic party has that no third party can come remotely close to competing with. After decades of existence neither the Green party nor the Libertarian party were on the ballot in all 50 states in 2024. By all means, go 3rd party in local, even county, races when they have a chance in the polls.

The primaries are open to any candidate who meets the requirements (ie filing deadline and signatures from the district, etc). Don’t rely on a party to provide you a candidate. Fucking go participate in the process to select better candidates (but they also have to actually fucking run in those primaries, too).

In 2016, folks voted against Hillary. Get that, many folks saw Hillary as the greater of two evils and voted for Trump.

90% of Bernie voters stayed with Democratic party and voted for Hilary

https://www.npr.org/2017/08/24/545812242/1-in-10-sanders-primary-voters-ended-up-supporting-trump-survey-finds

If Bernie had been on the ticket he could have pulled votes from both of them and then maybe Hillary would have won Trump would have won or Bernie would have won. We don’t know.

But he wasn’t, because progressive voters didn’t show up enough in the primaries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdelegate#2016_election

Sanders initially said that the candidate with the majority of pledged delegates should be the nominee; in May 2016, after falling behind in the elected delegate count, he shifted, pushed for a contested convention and arguing that, “The responsibility that superdelegates have is to decide what is best for this country and what is best for the Democratic Party.”[46][54] Ultimately, Clinton won the nomination without relying on the votes of superdelegates; she led Sanders by a substantial number of elected delegates (from primary and caucus votes), as well by a substantial margin in the popular vote.

More people voted for Hillary, so she was the nominee. And that’s my point. You can overcome

It’s time progressives break ranks with the duo poly. And if that means splitting the ticket then so be it.

It doesn’t fucking have to mean splitting the vote. Just fucking vote for progressives in the god damn primaries!

I will say this, I won’t get off the couch to vote for Newsome. As he has already proven that he is perfectly willing to throw me under the bus for power.

If the alternative is measurably worse, then you are just making easier for them to win by reducing the number of votes they need to receive in order to win.

Progressives will be trying to build an alternative to the corporatist zionist dems.

But how? There are already multiple parties beyond the big two. Minor parties who have existed for decades. But only 3 of them were on the ballot in more than 10 states in 2024. There’s just no way, in voting math, that a new party can just drop in and take place. Local and county seats (your link about SF LatinX group), sure. But state and federal 3rd parties are a pipe dream.

If there are enough progressives to beat a Democratic candidate (not even win the general but just beat the Democratic candidate), then there enough to win the Democratic primary. And then there will be a chance to beat the Republican rather than splitting the vote. And if there aren’t, then splitting the vote just means more MAGA.

If that means progressives finally surging to run and vote in the Democratic primaries then great. Reminder that the Tea Party movement wasn’t ever a 3rd party, and a significant contributor to its success was the billionaire Koch brothers pouring money into state legislatures first, and US Congress second. A new minor party won’t succeed much beyond county level without nationwide electoral reform (ranked choice), and only 26 states have voter-led ballot initiatives (the rest require the legislature to approve direct ballot propositions).

also think the 2020 primaries is complicated in just that the moderates that dropped out weren’t polling super well anyway so them dropping out didn’t give Biden as much of a boost as much as just him being Biden.

It’s an interesting event to think about. Because if it did solidify numbers that weren’t they with all the candidates still in, then that means a ranked choice system still should have put Biden as the winner. And if it didn’t really provide Biden extra numbers he needed to win, then it was coordinated messaging against the rising movement, and it worked but also turned away voters they needed to hold onto in the long run.

Started a Tea Party like movement? Or started saying we need one? Because he did not start one at all.

The Republican Tea party movement started with Ron Paul running in the 2008 Republican primaries, and that having an impact on the kinds of Republicans who won the 2010 primaries and became part of the House flipping that year. Bernie started a progressive movement for the Democratic party by … running in the 2016 Democratic party. And that had an impact of more progressives running in the 2018 primaries (hello Squad) and helping flip the House that year.

If he had we would have Democrat voters coming out in primaries more, and kicking out establishment Dems more if they don’t adhere to the parties core beliefs. He may have wanted to start one back then, but it was a false start because people lost a lot of steam when he wasn’t the candidate. Sure there were a lot of progressives elected in the next midterm, but that should have been a continuing trend, instead of something that plateaus.

Well maybe progressive voters should have kept at it, then. It’s a long road to change an organization that big. I would actually put the moment as being in the 2020 primaries when a bunch of the moderates dropped out to coalesce for Biden before super Tuesday when it looked like FPTP was helping Bernie. But that just again speaks to the fact that not enough progressives were coming out to vote.

The Left has lost steam with their movement because they don’t keep their eye on the ball, we get distracted with infighting and splitting our votes with third parties instead of relentlessly pursuing our goal of remaking the party, something the Tea Party movement did extremely well at.

Ok we’re on the same page mostly. The Tea Parties continued momentum was, in no insignificant part, thanks to the billionaire Koch brothers co-opting it by funding a bazillion primary challenges to win over state legislatures towards their goal of calling a Constitutional Convention to rewrite it in their anarcho-capitalist ideals. They weren’t quite as interested in the US Congress or the presidency.

So, I still maintain that Bernie already started the movement in much the same way that Ron Paul started theirs. Just by running in the primary and inspiring both voters and candidates to go out to the primaries.

Dunno if running in the Republican primary would be worth anything because Republican primaries are very MAGA and if you aren’t that then you won’t get the nom at all.

Sometimes just getting a platform to speak your ideas is enough to get things going. Progressive ballot measures did well in 2024. Conservative voters can change their minds when confronted with first hand experience. Bernie convinced a Fox News studio audience to like Medicare for all. And even losing the primary after that, the exposure could very well help you get the signatures to appear on the general ballot as an independent.

Dude should be saying we need our own tea party movement where we take over the Democrat party. Not that we need to fracture ourselves even more.

He already started it in 2016.

That said, I think there is an argument for independent runs in purely local politics in areas that only have Republicans run for things and have a hatred for Democrats they can’t seem to move past.

Yes. Or even run in the Republican primary (might be easier to get on the primary ballot than to get on the general election ballot).

I don’t think they will this time. Republican representatives have already had to stop holding town halls because their districts are so pissed off at Musk and DOGE.

She was deeply unpopular with Republicans

Deeply unpopular with MAGA Republicans. In the wake of the insurrection there was a real chance to pull the Republican party out of MAGA voters’ hands and they blew it.

So what did bringing her, and the other Republicans that the campaign chose to platform, into the tent; what did the campaign get for it?

I think they wanted to show that it was ok for Republican-leaning voters to abandon Trump and that they (the Harris campaign) welcomed Republicans shifting left (serving on the select committee and supporting Trump’s impeachment was certainly a shift left for an otherwise pro-MAGA politician). They clearly didn’t get anything for it.

You think platforming her says this thing over here.

No the Harris/Walz campaign thought that.

If you can just break down further why you think the Cheney example doesn’t support, I’m interested.

I don’t disagree with your overall point about platforming Cheney or the Harris campaign shifting right. I just think Cheney lost her primary because she was perceived by the MAGA voters to have shifted left on policy.

Liz Cheney, an incumbent who lost her primary with 27% of the vote.

Just to put that in context, she lost her primary because she dared to side with both the public and the Democratic party in opposition to the insurrection. She lost her primary because MAGA hates her. I’m not defending the choice to bring her up on stage on the campaign trail, but I don’t think this particular fact really helps your argument.

Voters rejected Biden during a primary so hard he dropped out

No they didn’t. The primaries were over and he won them. He dropped out like 6 weeks after the primaries were over, and he won them (second place was Uncommitted with 4.25% of the votes). Credible candidates just generally don’t contest an incumbent president, and contested conventions generally don’t produce a winning nominee.

I think if all the non-voters put this much fervor and conviction into voting in primaries (all primaries, I’m not just assuming all non-voters would show up to vote left) we’d be much better off as a nation.

I guess the show isn’t popular enough in the community for the reference to be recognized.

You have three tools in your instance settings at https://lemmy.world/settings: the Show/Blur NSFW Content options in , and blocking users/communities/instances, setting your feed to only view Subscribed communities and just don’t subscribe to any NSFW ones. The first is dependent on posters ticking the box to mark their post as NSFW. If you see a NSFW post that is not marked as such, report it. Admins on their instance should address the matter. The second option isn’t NSFW-focused in any way but you’re in control of it. You could block instances that are primarily intended for NSFW content, such as lemmynsfw.com, and then block any individual communities on other instances, and lastly if there are specific users who just seem to refuse to stop posting unmarked NSFW content and their instance admins won’t do anything about them you block those users.

You probably can’t expect to fully pre-emptively block all NSFW content, because someone might post something without marking it correctly. Could be by accident, could be they just don’t care. But reporting them gives a chance to fix it rather than blocking an otherwise safe community or user.

How did the sponsors even think this would work? Just like “hey please can you just put out a memo that you changed your mind?” Are they asking the court to re-adhudicate the same case? Do they have new evidence? Is the resolution compelling the state Senate to be the plaintiff in a new law suit that they want the court to allow to skip all the lower courts? Like what the fuck even is this?

They could have had an actual election at the convention instead of just anointing someone who wasn’t even running in the primary.

I’m assuming you mean having all the primary voters vote again. Sure that would have been great but I think the logistics of it make it a non-starter. There was only a month between Biden dropping out and the convention. Are you going to limit it to just the voters who voted in the first primary (which is actually the law in my state)? I would expect law suits of this happened, and probably law suits of it didn’t, too. There were only about 30 days between Biden dropping out and the start of the convention. How are you going to organize and execute that in 30 days?

And the electors are basically low tier nerds who did the bidding of the head nerds and didn’t have an actual vote, or give it to the second place finisher.

The delegates were pledged to the candidate who won the primary in their state. Second place was Uncommitted. Third (Phillips) and fourth (Palmer) place dropped out (which against goes back to the logistics of having a second primary). The convention was open to new candidates to declare, and they did, and Kamala won the vote at the convention.

They just assumed that everyone would be okay with it because the DNC is a private organization that can do whatever they want. They don’t have to care what voters think.

This was an unprecedented situation where you essentially had no primary candidates left in the race after the primary. There was no possible outcome where everyone would be happy.

I didn’t say that. I said they had primaries (which I learned Florida and Delaware did not), challengers could run, and delegates voted for Harris. All of those things are true. What is also true but I didn’t mention is challengers were still able to declare ahead of the convention after Biden dropped out (correct me if I’m wrong but I believe some did).

The problem was that there were no better candidates to vote for. Which is the fault of the candidates who could have run but didn’t. I’m not blaming the voters for candidates not running. An incumbent dropping out after winning the primaries is unprecedented. An expectation of organizing a second primary is just unrealistic.