2020 Democratic presidential primary thread, pt 3: life is very long

he doesn't make sense as a candidate. the fact that he was the "las centrist standing" was always bizarre, especially because he has a more right wing record than hillary clinton did

at a time when the party is moving left

I see you've learned a lot from these primaries

if kamala or someone won i would have been disappointed but i would understand. this is atrocious.

ie, the party isn't actually moving left (or not as far left as you think/would like)

he can't speak meaningfully to the concerns of the moment. so he is entirely unlike obama as a candidate.

under-40s are moving left

too bad they don't vote

right/left doesn't make too much sense right now anyway when the economy has been placed on government life support. the real advantage of bernie and warren over the other candidates was that they faced the issues honestly and proposed solutions. even if they weren't "politically feasible"--what policy is when republicans control a chamber of the legislature?--they were honest attempts to fix problems such as people receiving $100,000 medical bills. not so, the other candidates.

i get why he did it at the time but one of Obama’s biggest mistakes out of the gate was tapping this soft-brained perennial loser, opening up the possibility for... this

Claire McCaskill was right there

from k3vin's article:

The left embraced two Northeastern liberals with entirely predictable weaknesses with older black voters, and neither Sanders nor Warren did much to connect with those voters.

Sanders and Warren did not focus enough on convincing voters that they were as electable as Biden, even as polls showed Democratic voters were obsessed with picking a candidate who could beat Trump.

Sanders and Warren embraced getting rid of private insurance in favor of Medicare for All, a position that is controversial even among Democrats and was easy for the center left to cast as both impractical and a barrier to defeating Trump.

Neither Sanders nor Warren had effective strategies for defending themselves from attacks from the party’s center left after they surged in the polls.

After his win in Nevada, Sanders did little to engage Democrats who didn’t already support him; in fact, he antagonized them.
Warren was unwilling to drop out and endorse Sanders before Super Tuesday, even as the weaker center-left candidates consolidated around Biden.
Sanders’s campaign apparently planned to win the nomination by getting a plurality of the vote (30 to 35 percent) in a crowded field and it didn’t appear to have a real plan for a one-on-one contest against Biden.

Hence why we're left with Mushmouth as the nominee.

ie, the party isn't actually moving left (or not as far left as you think/would like)

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, April 8, 2020 12:15 PM (two minutes ago)

huh? the platform of the party is clearly moving left (though of course not as quickly as many of us would like). and sanders deserves a lot of the credit for that for his work over the last 5 years, as that 538 article suggests

lol finish the article, alfred

Sanders and Warren embraced getting rid of private insurance in favor of Medicare for All, a position that is controversial even among Democrats and was easy for the center left to cast as both impractical and a barrier to defeating Trump.

medicare for all is a moral imperative

the party that's moving left nominated what many of you believe is a right-wing rapist? how do you reconcile those two positions?

xps

lol finish the article, alfred

― k3vin k., Wednesday, April 8, 2020

I did. I posted the relevant points.

The people are moving left, but The Party Decides

this is otm too:

Like a lot of things, the truth here probably lies somewhere in between these two arguments. Sanders and Warren struggled in 2020 because of big, structural factors outside of their control, but also because of a few major missteps along the way. Anyway, does it really matter if Sanders’s likely loss was 20 percent, 50 percent or 80 percent his fault?

Yes, actually. There is already a discussion underway about what the party’s left wing should do in the future. One view, which fits with the general argument that left-wing Democrats faced structural challenges in 2020, is that time is on the side of the progressives. Younger Democrats tend to support more liberal candidates, so the party could gradually move left as the millennial and Gen Z generations become larger shares of the electorate.

are all tv chefs totally obnoxious twats?

"Time" isn't on the side of anyone, unless corona lockdown lasts for 15 years and miraculously heals the environment.

re. the chef link, ew.

enought ilx for me. good knowing you all.

Maybe hatred for trump will deliver this election to Feely Joe, I suppose we should hope so, because it won’t be campaigning, policy, personal popularity, turnout, ground organizing, or electoral college math that does it

Might also be Trump getting covid and dying, tbf.

We should be so lucky

Hatred for Trump depends entirely on5 the economy and death toll

so uh fingers crossed for Great Depression II: Electric Boogaloo I guess
too bad Joe's gonna be Hoover rather than FDR

the party that's moving left nominated what many of you believe is a right-wing rapist? how do you reconcile those two positions?

xps

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, April 8, 2020 12:21 PM (thirty seconds ago)

are you responding to me or the amalgam of all the bernie voters you've argued with on the internet? I am my own person with my own POV. I agree with you that biden is essentially an amoral weathervane, one who for obvious reasons is not the person for this moment but is better than the alternative.

you have to be nice to me or i wont vote for democrats https://t.co/VA6F3w57oP

— Garbage Ape 🗑 🦧 (@GarbageApe) April 8, 2020

still find the argument that Biden has no beliefs/ideology ridiculous, he's taken a lead on every shitty idea that he hasn't been made to answer for. He's committed to the neoliberal project/austerity/centrism/whatever you want to call it as much as anyone on Earth. He has been consistent about this for five decades, there's no flip flopping in his past.

i've said it before and i'll say it again: weighing in on the credibility of people's sexual assault survival stories should be a bannable offense

― here 1st (roxymuzak), 8. april 2020 18:08 (twenty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

What the fuck do you call this:

'violently angry at being asked to vote for the lesser of two rapists

― here 1st (roxymuzak), 8. april 2020 17:45 (forty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Ban yourself, please.

are you serious?

He's being an ally

Fred B serious question not trying to troll: can your own family even stand you?

at the end of the day I feel like Biden winning has less to do with policy and more to do with the fact that people just really, really want politics out of their lives, they will take a boring and crappy administration if it means having to not think about this for another 4 years

I got baaaaf news for them

d*

baaaaf

Sanders and Warren did not focus enough on convincing voters that they were as electable as Biden, even as polls showed Democratic voters were obsessed with picking a candidate who could beat Trump.

didn't those same shows also show sanders and warren resoundingly winning over donald trump in head to head matchups, ahead of even biden at some points?

I did. I posted the relevant points.

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, April 8, 2020 12:22 PM (seven minutes ago)

homie the whole point of that article is that those bullet points are reductive and only tell part of the story. fortifying those talking points instead of exploring their nuances is something that party apparatchiks (a term you introduced this board to) do to stifle discussion. when you and I posted on these politics threads a decade ago you were someone who was much more comfortable with heterodoxy

apparently the Family Feud voters don't read polls! they just stick their thumb in their ass and guess.

go to choir, fred

fred how on earth is that post helpful

Fred loves hleping

didn't those same shows also show sanders and warren resoundingly winning over donald trump in head to head matchups, ahead of even biden at some points?

― let me be your friend on the other end! (Karl Malone), Wednesday, April 8, 2020

as k3vin pointed out upthread, the article's complicated, and in the end it was many things coalescing.

homie the whole point of that article is that those bullet points are reductive and only tell part of the story. fortifying those talking points instead of exploring their nuances is something that party apparatchiks (a term you introduced this board to) do to stifle discussion. when you and I posted on these politics threads a decade ago you were someone who was much more comfortable with heterodoxy

― k3vin k., Wednesday, April 8, 2020

You may be right, dude. Let's say political events particularly dangerous to my ethnic and sexual background has forced me to be starker about choices. Few people have; in some of your posts, I'd suggest you have too. So I apologize for concentrating on excerpted points.

Few people haven't become starker, I should've said.

part of the disappointment with biden is that if the establishment/DNC types were going to go with a nominee, they could have picked any number of people who would have better (much better, in some cases)

ranked:

harris
booker
klob (uuuugh)
gillibrand
biden
pete

Let me also say that I'm comfortable in this present crisis saving the heterodoxy for art, history, and choice of amaros. I'm at war with the GOP.

Karl, the DNC picked Biden?

nah, they’re donors did

their