I didn’t say the national presidential primaries were clean and fair. I said that local primaries are. And that is true.
Regardless, nothing you said changes the fact that when it came down to actual votes in the primary, those who voted in the Democratic primary seemed to prefer moderate neoliberals over social democrats and progressives in 2016 and 2020.
All this complaining about the primary process amounts to useless hand-writhing because no amount of calling for reform or argumentation is going to change the system. Calling for people to be “up in arms” is a useless activity because being angry by itself means nothing. If you want change, you need power. If you want power, you need to get it by playing within the rules of the current system.
So vote in the damn primaries to get the party to nominate progressives and tell your mates to do the same. Start or sign ballot initiatives to move to nonpartisan blanket primaries and ranked-choice voting.
Exit polls in the 2020 primary showed that voter’s had really only one issue that drove their vote, and that was electability. Corporate media absolutely pounded out the message that Bernie was less competitive with Trump than more establishment candidates. That was disinformation because Bernie and Biden performed almost identically in polls against Trump. Bernie was the clear favorite when it came to platform and policy.
Getting people actively engaged or “up in arms” is how you win elections, including primaries. That is a lesson the establishment understands when facing off against progressives, but consistently fails at in general elections, at least since 2008. It’s not a waste of anything to get people energized, even on a losing issue.
Quit fucking lecturing progressives on the need to vote. Progressives vote more consistently than any other group in the US political spectrum. You are just furthering establishment disinformation. They want people to think progressives are flaky and unreliable so they can continue to win the electability argument in primaries. Progressives don’t just vote. They make up almost the entirety of the grass-roots Democratic ground game, and the vast majority of individual donors.
I didn’t say the national presidential primaries were clean and fair. I said that local primaries are. And that is true.
Regardless, nothing you said changes the fact that when it came down to actual votes in the primary, those who voted in the Democratic primary seemed to prefer moderate neoliberals over social democrats and progressives in 2016 and 2020.
All this complaining about the primary process amounts to useless hand-writhing because no amount of calling for reform or argumentation is going to change the system. Calling for people to be “up in arms” is a useless activity because being angry by itself means nothing. If you want change, you need power. If you want power, you need to get it by playing within the rules of the current system.
So vote in the damn primaries to get the party to nominate progressives and tell your mates to do the same. Start or sign ballot initiatives to move to nonpartisan blanket primaries and ranked-choice voting.
Putin won with actual votes too.
Exit polls in the 2020 primary showed that voter’s had really only one issue that drove their vote, and that was electability. Corporate media absolutely pounded out the message that Bernie was less competitive with Trump than more establishment candidates. That was disinformation because Bernie and Biden performed almost identically in polls against Trump. Bernie was the clear favorite when it came to platform and policy.
Getting people actively engaged or “up in arms” is how you win elections, including primaries. That is a lesson the establishment understands when facing off against progressives, but consistently fails at in general elections, at least since 2008. It’s not a waste of anything to get people energized, even on a losing issue.
Quit fucking lecturing progressives on the need to vote. Progressives vote more consistently than any other group in the US political spectrum. You are just furthering establishment disinformation. They want people to think progressives are flaky and unreliable so they can continue to win the electability argument in primaries. Progressives don’t just vote. They make up almost the entirety of the grass-roots Democratic ground game, and the vast majority of individual donors.