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Notes -
I Read It So You Don’t Have To
Jake Tapper’s Historic Misnomer in Original Sin
How do you come clean without coming clean? How do you take your team out of a tremendous, historic, catastrophic failure and yet manage to convince everyone involved to change absolutely nothing? How do you protect the power and position of yourself and your personal friends, while letting everyone know that you’re Taking Responsibility? How do you present yourself to society and strongly say Mea Maxima Culpa while avoiding any consequences?
Well, Jake Tapper has gone back to an old standby in Original Sin: you find a goat, you put all the sins of the community on the goat, and then you drive the goat out of town never to be seen again. For Tapper and the Democratic Party, they want to put all the sins of the 2024 election loss on Joe Biden and his immediate subordinates, get rid of Joe, and ride off free of guilt or blame. Unfortunately, for all the promise of the title, Tapper fails to grapple at all with the earlier sins of the Democratic Party which lead them to the Biden presidency. It’s a fakakta head fake, a cheap attempt at a false accountability that leaves Tapper and the rest of the Democratic Party machinery safe to keep doing the same things they were doing before.
Personal opinion: This book was horrendous. I knew it would be bad going in, but my wife wanted to read it so I downloaded it off libgen and loaded it on our shared Kindle account, and we decided to read it together and discuss it. That part was fun. The book itself just made me mad.
What Tapper offers is a mostly-disconnected and somewhat confusing series of anecdotes that add up to what a lot of people around here were absolutely on top of years before Tapper: Biden was cooked. However cooked you think Biden was, you’ll see evidence that it was worse than you thought it was. I won’t bother going point by point, we’ve tortured every incident to death already. Tapper tries to throw Biden a bone here and there, but for the most part he adequately massacres his goat. In the process a few close Biden advisers come in for a bit of trouble. Tapper labeled them the Politburo, and they are the villain of the piece, lurking, a sinister and undefined presence. Everything is ultimately laid at the door of some decision maker in Politburo or with the last name Biden. Joe, Jill, Hunter, and a few close personal aides are responsible for the entire coverup: denying the obvious, blaming the lighting or a cold or a long night, pressuring underlings into silence, making never-specified decisions in the name of the president without his knowledge, and generally operating the entire process of Weekend at Bernies-ing the President of the United States.
What Tapper doesn’t offer is any in depth analysis of actual policy decisions or tactical choices in government. This book is pure politics. He doesn’t at any point question who was where and when during crises in the Ukraine or Palestine. He doesn’t look outside the standard West Wing cast of characters in the political circle of the President, what was going on in the State Department or the DoD, what did the kids get up to when it became clear that daddy wasn’t home? How was it that the SecDef was out of commission for weeks without the White House even knowing about it? Did people start metering what they told the President’s office? Did they feel more comfortable defying the President’s wishes? Well, you won’t find out about it here, instead you’ll get seventeen people telling you separately about how they couldn’t believe how OLD Biden looked when they met him…Except that time after time we get people telling us not that he looked old, but that he looked older. Meaning, it wasn’t a mistake to vote for Biden in 2020, when everyone with a calendar could tell you how old he would be in 2024; it just happened out of nowhere, and there’s no way you can blame the Democratic Party for it.
My disappointment stems from the title: Tapper promises to trace to the root cause of the problem. Everything was paradise until this, then after this everything went wrong. But ultimately, he seems to be aiming to skate by what, to me, seem the obvious candidates for Democrats Original Sin:
-- The Ratfucking of Bernie Sanders: The mainstream of the Democratic Party saw the momentum of the Bernie Sanders campaign, after he won the first three primaries in 2020. Biden wasn’t within 10% of Bernie in any of those primaries. Typically, after three straight fourth place finishes, a candidate drops out, that’s the purpose of primaries. Joe Biden, in fact, had some experience finishing poorly in early primaries and dropping out, having done it twice before. But the Dems needed someone to beat Bernie, and were stuck choosing in a bad field: Klobuchar, Buttigieg, and Warren were all seen as too weak to step up and couldn’t agree on endorsing each other. Facing a split field among moderates, with COVID appearing on the horizon, and with no other unity candidate available, the rest of the field suddenly dropped out and rapidly endorsed Biden. Biden was seen as a compromise candidate because he was so old, he might only run for one term. This was a classic example of the Golem legend: they empowered Biden to protect them from Bernie, but Biden once empowered did not have to give that power up when it was time. The lesson being that you have to let the primary process play out, and that voters will punish you if you refuse to let them vote. The Republicans threw in with Trump in 2016, against their better instincts but to their long term benefit; the Democrats ratfucked Bernie in 2020 and the lack of a real primary left them with a reanimated corpse that finished 4th in competitive races. Tapper mentions Bernie only twice, for a moment, and pays no attention to how he played into the 2020 primary and the selection of Biden. The Original Sin was gutting the primary process and not forcing Biden to compete among voters.
-- Obsession with Identity Politics: Biden, of course, didn’t actually lose the 2024 race, that honor was passed to Kamala Harris. Why was she there? Because she was (marginally) black and a woman. Tapper is pretty clear on this one, and states it directly, but never pauses to question whether a better VP candidate might have been able to salvage the shit sandwich they were handed. Or, for that matter, whether a stronger VP might have pushed Biden to the curb years before. An ambitious, mildly evil VP, like a young LBJ or Bill Clinton, would have stuck a knife in Biden as soon as he looked weak. It’s the lack of a talented VP who could be president, or at least win an election, forced everyone to Ride with Biden until it became obvious that he couldn’t win. And how did we end up with a talentless nonentity of a VP? Because it had to be a Black Woman. The Original Sin was choosing a VP based on identity characteristics, and not based on talent, leaving you in a position where you couldn’t be seen to skip over a Black Woman, but because she had to be a Black Woman she had no chance in the election.
-- Trump Derangement Syndrome: The refrain from Biden and his handlers throughout the process was monotonous. We need to beat Donald Trump, Donald Trump is uniquely dangerous, Joe Biden is the only one to beat Donald Trump in an election (there’s a good chance he retains that honor forever). Democrats convinced themselves that Trump was so uniquely evil that they had to throw out all sense of decency to beat him; this kept them from beating him. Democrats convinced themselves that voters would reject Trump so thoroughly that it didn’t matter they were running an empty shell of what was left of Joe Biden; this destroyed voter trust in the Dems as a whole and cost them the election across the country. The Dems lost the plot completely due to TDS, and started to think they could or should do things they never would have thought of otherwise.
But Tapper doesn’t address any of these actual deep sins of the Democratic worldview, because that would require actual change by the Democratic Party, and change might lead to Tapper and his friends being disempowered. Equally, Tapper mostly ignores the great question of the Biden presidency: Why did everything basically run just fine? There is very little in the way of actual policy outcomes that is easily traced to Biden’s senescence. It pretty much felt like all the other presidential administrations I’d seen. What does that say about the capture of the government by the administrative state, if the elected official in charge of the executive branch seems to be irrelevant?
Instead he just blames it all on ol’ Scranton Joe, who will shuffle off to the great used Corvette dealership in the sky and leave the Dems to keep right on sinning just as they always have.
There's some hint that this was precisely the policy the Biden administration (or the Politburo, or whomever you want to point the fingers at) adopted to muzzle Kamala: all the stories that leaked out about "trouble in the VP's office" and how she was a terrible manager and had high staff turnover and was being sidelined by Biden's office so she constantly was the last to know about things going on and never got the chance to make a name for herself (apart from things like being saddled with the 'Border Czar' position which was a poisoned chalice).
So whatever ambitions she may have had, the Biden inner circle/Biden himself made sure to quash so she would not be able to build up the reputation as the dynamic young rival for the next race. Ironically, Kamala herself seems to have picked her VP on the same criteria: Walz because he was not visibly ambitious and would not be a threat and would be content to stand in the background and do as he was told.
It's a common strategy for picking a VP. Obama and first term Trump utilized similar strategies, despite their own talent and charisma. I'm curious to see if Vance has the balls to push Trump out on that ice flow.
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IME, it's not just Democrats who ignore this question. I find people on the right are also reluctant to consider this, and especially unwilling to draw the obvious conclusions.
Can you spell out the obvious conclusions for me?
That even before the questions about his ability became pubilc, Biden had been doing little to nothing in actually governing the country and the decisions were being made by a mix of insiders, cabinet members, civil servants, and whoever could grab the spotlight to get their pet project rammed through.
I think this may well have been the case; does anyone think, for instance, that Joe Biden personally really really wanted Sam Brinton as deputy assistant secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy? Or that the LGBT Pride Celebration with the topless trans people on the White House lawn was a cherished long-time plan of his? There's an awful lot of "he probably just signed what was put in front of him" that seems to be there, even if we discount the autopen!
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Like @FiveHourMarathon said, the capture of the government by the administrative state. That "the elected official in charge of the executive branch seems to be irrelevant" because he is irrelevant. That unelected bureaucrats and functionaries of the "NGO-cracy" run everything, insulated from electoral feedback, and elected officials are mere figureheads. That, as the old saying goes, if voting could change things, it would be illegal.
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Sorry, I have to push back about the VP chosen because Black Woman narrative. This is wrong, and absolutely NOT the "Original Sin". It's true that Biden committed to a woman as VP. But the reason Harris specifically was chosen was loyalty. So we shouldn't be surprised that she never stabbed him in the back, because she was chosen on precisely that criteria!! Being Black or possibly the beneficiary of Democratic affirmative candidate action is mostly irrelevant. Extensive evidence here about the process of selection. If you want to play with counterfactuals, the other women in contention were: Elizabeth Warren, Gretchen Whitmer, and Susan Rice. So the more fair question is if Warren, Whitmer, or Rice were VP, would they have spilled the beans, or pushed back against a doomed re-election campaign?
That the government works fine without the extensive input of the President is a feature, not a bug. The fact that most Americans don't recognize that this has always been the case, even with more attention-hungry presidents, has more to do with how attention-hungry presidents are than the facts of who does the work. The Cabinet and bureaucracy has always done the lion's share of the work. And most Cabinet members, quite honestly, are also at least nominally capable of being president themselves, so it's not as if they are incompetent. And (relative) stability in US governance is partly why the US had such an excellent 20th century (of course far from the entire reason, but it helps a lot).
Ultimately I agree that Tapper doesn't actually want to find the Original Sin too badly. I just don't think there is a smoking gun anywhere. It's a larger Democratic problem, and not even a new one! However, if you insist on identifying, if not a smoking gun, that at least a moment in time that demonstrates the impending problems, you don't need to look any farther than 2016. Hillary Clinton and her campaign is the Democratic Party's original sin. Or, maybe, that Obama decided to make a deal with the devil in the first place? Anyways, nearly every single flaw of the Democratic Party today is visible in nascent form in 2016 already, from the cynical insider takover of the primary process, to the sanctimoniousness of the rhetoric about electing a woman, to the lack of Obama-style vision to help regular people's pocketbooks, to the mistrust of a temperamentally and ethically aloof Clinton herself.
But the American president is not a figurehead, he is meant to be the one running the country. If the Prime Minister's girlfriend is in fact the one making the picks as to who gets a job, that is an unfortunate reality, but the girlfriend was not the one elected to do the job. If the Permanent Under-Secretary for Filing Cabinets is the one running the country while the President goes golfing, that is not what the people decided should happen.
And if that is what happens, then the people should be informed, not laughed at for being too dumb to realise that they have been lied to for decades.
It's unfortunate that so many people believe this, but this isn't really the case. The perception of this has more to do with candidates over-promising on the campaign trail than what civics classes actually teach. Let's check the Constitution and see what kind of language it uses about the President. I'll pick out the most relevant bits:
What kind of vibe do you get from this? He's in charge of the military, pretty much full stop (exceptions for declarations of war), but most of the other duties? Notice how often there's a give and take between Congress, the officers that the President supervises, heads of departments, and the President. Even the foreign policy stuff is supposed to be "by and with the Consent of the Senate". The Constitution is pretty clear that although he's supervising the executive structure, he doesn't have full control. He can appoint a lot of people, but the most important ones must have Senate approval. He can appoint (and nowadays, does extensively) a lot of "inferior Officers", but the Constitution is pretty clear that this is actually Congress' right intrinsically, but that they may choose to delegate to the President (or alternatively the department heads themselves, who are Senate-confirmed, and this is also decided by Law, i.e. both houses of Congress). To me, this doesn't really sound a whole lot like "running the country". The whole point actually IS that a very large number of the actual bureaucracy is a supposed to be a joint effort between the legislative and executive branches, with the whole back and forth between appointments, nominations, confirmations, etc.
That is, the people with the levers of power are still chosen by an indirect democratic process. That's why the US is a representative democracy, we are supposed to elect people with good judgement, and then there's a series of checks and balances between those people as they hash out the details amongst themselves, so to speak, with periodic input from the electorate. Even the design of the elections, famously, is intended to strike a balance between responsiveness to public will (which is good) and resistance to fads (which are bad). Of course the two are difficult to distinguish, so you kind of want the best of both worlds: that's why there are two houses of Congress, for example, and you'll notice a lot of this "Advice and Consent" is specifically given to the Senate, which is the more long-term outlook of the two (six year terms, with only a third up for election at one time in any given cycle). Again, that's by design!
The modern fact that the Senate, specifically, has devolved way too much power to the President is a known issue, and publicized if you're paying close attention, but not really a Constitutional one per se. They could claw back a lot of this power if they wanted to, even now.
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? Trump's not running again. It's impossible for someone else to beat him in an election.
Biden was, and is, personally a moderate strongly aligned with the black political machine and not on the best terms with the progressive wing of the party. That is, uh, not how he governed.
Assuming Trump doesn't run for president, he could still run for something else, Welcome to Moosewood style, and then lose.
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If you want something else in the same vein, but even worse, check out Dave Winfield's book Dropping the Ball, where he goes through a laundry lsit of things wrong with professional baseball, from steroids, to unhealthy ballpark food, to high school baseball players getting worse girlfriends than football and basketball players, and then proceeds to blame it on nobody at all, saying that everyone in the game from Bud Selig on down is doing a great job. Anyway, to address your points:
You could have made that argument in 2016, when the superdelegate field was stacked against him, but they changed the rules in 2020 specifically for that reason, ran a competitive field, and he still lost. Anyway, Sanders did not win the first three primaries; he won one primary and two caucuses, and in Iowa and New Hampshire the totals were close enough that he was still behind in the delegate count. This may seem like a pedantic distinction, but caucus states always seem to give outsiders a better chance, likely because of the low turnout compared to primaries. And while Biden did abysmally in the first two contests, he finished second in the Nevada caucuses. It made no sense for him to drop out at this point, as his star was rising and he had been consistently leading polls in South Carolina by a wide margin. And he ends up crushing it in South Carolina, moving into the lead in one fell swoop. Mayor Pete, meanwhile, has been trending downward, and it's pretty clear he has no purchase with black voters. It made no sense for him to stay in for Super Tuesday so he could get walloped in the South. It made no sense for Klobuchar to stay in at this point, either, as her campaign never really picked up speed. Had they both stayed in the race, I doubt it would have made much of a difference. Klobuchar wasn't winning any more delegates. Pete may have peeled some off in 5 of the 15 states that were contested on Super Tuesday, plus a few in California and Texas because there are so many of them, but winning anything was unlikely, and he would have bowed out immediately afterwards anyways. Pete was an outsider who debated well and overperformed in early states with low delegate counts. He was never expected to challenge for the nomination, and if it wasn't for a couple of fluke performances in heavily white areas nobody would be talking about any kind of Bernie screwjob. Sanders went head to head with Biden and lost, that's all there is to it.
It's identity politics, but not something you can blame them for. Nominees have a history of picking running mates for reasons not entirely related to their qualifications for the office (of which there really aren't any). Bush picked Quayle to shore up his support in the Bible Belt. Trump picked Pence for the same reason. W picked Cheney to counter suspicions that he was a lightweight. Kerry picked Edwards to shore up support among conservative Democrats. Obama picked Biden to compensate for his lack of experience. McCain picked Palin because unexpectedly picking a woman might have provided the miracle his campaign needed to win that race (which backfired, but nonetheless; also see Mondale picking Ferraro). And now we come to 2020, and the Democrats are running an elderly white man in the era of peak woke, four years after they lost a race in part because their candidate wasn't perceived as progressive enough, months after winning a campaign in which the nominee's biggest rival was a self-described socialist. They can be forgiven for wanting to shore up the progressive wing by running a woman of color with progressive tendencies, but not so progressive as to be at odds with the platform. I agree that they should have known at the time that vice president would have been a more important office than it normally is, but I don't see this as a huge blunder. You try to win the election you're running now, not the election you might be running four years from now.
Sure, but what else was he supposed to run on? His record? Biden's best chance was to keep the coalition that won him the presidency in 2020, and the best way of doing that was by reminding them of all the bullshit they'd be dealing with if Trump won again. The Democrats warned that something similar to this was going to happen, and Trump managed to exceed even the wildest expectations of Democrats, with talk of a third term, shipping people to Salvadoran prisons, talk of invading Canada, talk of firing Jerome Powell, the Epstein business, DOGE, tariffs, and countless more examples to name. His approval rating dropped like a rock upon taking office, and he's net unfavorable in every category. That there are people out there who are surprised by any of this boggles the mind. The biggest mistake they made was that once Kamala was the nominee, they didn't roll out a whole new agenda. She could have been sold as the way forward for Democrats, but in the end there was nothing but a few lukewarm proposals that didn't get any serious traction. You can blame that on the tight schedule, but I would have thought that by September they would have had a clear policy platform that was different enough from Biden's that Kamal could call it her own.
No, they can't. Because they didn't just run "a woman of color with progressive tendencies."
They ran Kamala Harris. Who was the worst candidate in the history of American Presidential races since WW2 (pre-WW2 Presidential stuff is really a completely different dynamic. It's kind of funny it almost parallels the deadball / liveball demarcation for baseball).
The "meta" of what @FiveHourMarathon wrote can be summarized as Democrats Often Neglect Reality (DONR PARTY). They professional politicos simply ignore the obvious. Not always, necessarily, in favor of something else (i.e. identity politics) but just because acknowledging a harsh reality is often jarring and uncomfortable.
Kamala Harris was bad as a candidate. Her interviews were atrocious. Her stump speeches were too volatile - she'd be doing well in one part of one speech but then nosedive in another part. Her "unrehearsed" interactions with her own voters/fans were awkward and seem bizarrely staged even for American politics. She had an awful laugh (which is something you can modify). This is America in 2024. Social media is understood. In fact, it's a cornerstone of mass communication, including politics. Beyond that, the "5 second clip" has been happening since the 2000s. You either have to be psychopathically on-the-ball sharp 24/7 (and this is why I still think Newsome is in the mix for 2028) or you have to develop a brand wherein gaffes and flubs are kind of part of the deal - this is what Trump has been doing ever since his first word salad speech in 2016.
How in the hell do you run Kamala Harris knowing all of these things? She's a dumpster fire of a candidate. But when you Just Say No (I LOVE YOU, NANCY) to reality ... anything can happen.
Harris running can be laid at Biden's feet, because he insisted on a second term and then had to be dragged out and knifed in the back by the party in order to dislodge him, by which time there really wasn't anyone else they could run, never mind that the funding by donors had all been earmarked for the Biden/Harris campaign and there was a real fear they'd have to pay it all back if they went with a primary.
The party didn't do itself any favours by then acting the opposite of the 'open, transparent, democratic' process by making her a fait accompli candidate before any race could start, but they were - to be fair to them - really hobbled by their own past bad decisions in humouring Biden (mostly for the "who the hell else do we have? and who else can beat Trump?" considerations).
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I was saying this loudly and from the beginning. She basically had a classic "fork in the road": do I stay the course and hope that Trump is too unpopular to win, letting me win by default, or do I try to do something notable to make me stand out, and run a more traditional campaign? She took the first road, and I was screaming the whole time that it was the wrong one.
In fact, the sloooooow roll-out of a nearly non-existent policy platform was excruciating to watch. Did you know I asked my (liberal, news-reading) family about if they could name 3 policy proposals Harris had? They could name ONE. ONE policy! In a major election! That's insane! They should be the demographic most knowledgeable about this kind of stuff, my mom phone banked for Obama twice and they are both white college-educated liberals (since ~2005). I'm a self-admitted news junkie, and I could only name three!
After reading "Original Sin", the impression I get is (1) she was really beholden to Biden and his supporters, e.g. a lot of his ex-staff or people connected to him ran her campaign, so she could not afford to piss off any Biden loyalists in the party and (2) she's indecisive: she takes a long time to make decisions, doesn't handle input from others well, and is constantly second-guessing decisions. See the Call Her Daddy appearance where she or her campaign were so terrified by the prospect of not being in complete control of the outcome, they picked this instead of an appearance on Joe Rogan. And she didn't even go on the podcast! Instead they spent campaign funds on "we'll mock up the studio in a hotel room, fly you out, and you feed her pre-screened questions where she gives prepared answers" for something that was essentially preaching to the choir: Harris already had the young white liberal college-educated female podcast audience as voters, she didn't need to chase after them.
So if she decided to strike out on her own, that would leave her wide open for "so why didn't you do any of this when you were VP? why weren't you speaking out and disagreeing with those policies?" and she just hasn't the flexibility to handle that sort of questioning without being prepared fifty ways from Sunday with soundbites from focus groups.
Hence the lack of any actual policies - the need not to be openly in dissent from the Biden administration, the need not to state anything definite that would piss off any of the million little splinter groups that would go for her throat online, and being hobbled by the 2019 run where she did tack too far to the left (and then left herself wide open on "yes I would use government money to pay for gender reassignment surgery for illegal immigrants who are criminals locked up in jail", for instance).
I feel like (1) is partly a consequence of necessity: you have a major deadline, and so it doesn't make much sense to do a major re-org. Though of course staffing decisions at the top matter. Which brings us to (2), and I think that's probably very, very true. I remember reading even way before, during her own primary campaign, about how chaotic her organizational and decision skills were. That is, she'd constantly change her mind after listening to a few advisors outside the actual structure (such as her more-talented sister), and that chain-of-command was always super up in the air, and that made for constant inefficiency and poor messaging. So ultimately, yeah, I agree that it's fundamentally a Kamala issue, and she never really was going to take road #2, the road less traveled.
So to be clear, I think when people say that she was in an unwinnable situation, they are super wrong. The logic for what she actually chose was pretty attractive, but we shouldn't mix up the attractiveness of a choice with its actual truth. As someone who closely follows political polling and focus-grouping, Road #2 is what an advisor would recommend to you, almost every time, even if the political establishment as a whole would recommend road #1, the play-it-safe road. You actually can still do a roll-out of Kamala-specific policies even with a Biden-staffed crowd! Yes, Democrats writ large would moan and complain a lot, because that's their nature, but the actual core political machinery is usually still pretty good at following marching orders. She (or more specifically, a better-organized, more decisive version of her) could totally have pulled it off.
Still, again, she was chosen for being loyal, and a marginal GOTV help, and being loyal somewhat runs counter to ambitious competence. I do wonder if her selection, designed to bolster Biden rather than to be a protégé of any kind, was an early sign that Biden didn't actually intend to step down after one term, in retrospect...
She should have taken the second option, but I think it's a case of "there is no there there"*, Harris just did not have policies of her own (on a national scale at least). So a mix of being pushed not to change horses in mid-stream (don't drop Biden's policies) and not genuinely having anything to replace them (as mentioned by others, very very late in her campaign before her campaign page put up any tangible polices, unlike Hillary who had pages upon pages of policies for all sizes and all comers).
Was it unwinnable? Hard to say: we've seen that as Harris ran her campaign (and her staffers who really should have their feet held to the fire over this - that podcast has way too much whining over 'we had no time, it was so unfair Trump's campaign had all that money and time, things just happened and there was nothing we could have done') it wasn't winnable. She did get handed the rough end of the stick with Biden's campaign collapsing too late to do anything to prepare a better one of her own, and her failed run in 2019 left way too many hostages to fortune. But she did go on to make unforced errors, and her campaign staff for social media ran a terrible campaign, just awful.
*Ironically, a remark about Oakland by Gertrude Stein who grew up there and later returned to visit.
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Yeah, before the election I asked my liberal Guardian reader uncle about what Kamala stood for and what made her so promising a candidate, and he said "well, I think she'll do a lot to protect women's reproductive rights".
That was it. More abortions. Nothing on healthcare, housing, education, law and order etc. Just abortions for some, miniature American flags for others.
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Which policy could they name? And which are the three?
IIRC they both said she wanted more green energy stuff generally (power generation, that is), which I counted. My mom also said... "something about housing? I don't really know and can't remember" which I didn't count because it was too vague. She was right though, that was one I named, the first-time homebuyer credit. I also could name the expanded child and childcare tax credit, and her vague gestures at tightening the borer. After thinking about it a little longer, I think I was able to remember some plan to negotiate Medicare drug prices, but Trump also had some similar-sounding version of the same plan, so I wasn't sure if that counted - or if the border tightening counted either, since she was basically forced into it.
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Relevant context from WP:
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How much of that is due to small changes in policy positions, and how much of that is due to the entire liberal establishment utterly stonewalling any effort to find out?
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I think this in various forms is why democrats won’t be winning anymore. Not so much that it’s TDS, but that the entire strategy of their politics is negative, not just because they don’t like Trump or the Republicans. They’re negative in the sense of *negative space”. We aren’t evil like those guys, those guys want to do [insert evil thing here]. But that’s not a vision. There’s nothing to build toward, no city on the hill, no “once we do these things your life will get better.” Republicans, whether you agree with them or not, absolutely have an idea of what they want, why they want it, and how it’s supposed to make the median person better off. It might or might not work, but they absolutely have a plan, and furthermore a plan to actually do what they said they wanted to do. So when people go into the booth, they know if they vote Republican, Theres a actual agenda that’s supposed to help them, where a democrat mostly is going to thwart that plan in favor of the status quo. If you’re looking for change, you want republicans, even if you’re not completely sold on what those changes are, at least it’s not the stuff you already know doesn’t help.
This is because when democrats can articulate positive visions they're hyper-unpopular('defund the police' 'protect trans kids'). Trump, for all his faults, is very good at articulating ideas that are popular, even if they're bad('no tax on overtime').
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The Democrats' positive vision is more socialism and it's pretty popular with a lot of young people. The worsening economy will only fuel this fire.
I don't think the DNC is a socialist party, hence why they had to bring out the big guns to stop Bernie getting the nomination.
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So where exactly are they talking about it? They don’t say that as their agenda in most public facing platforms. Kamala didn’t run on “let’s be more socialist” nor was there a Socialist Agenda 2025 that would get that to happen. Kamala and most of the apparatus ran specifically as Anti-Trump, referring to the agenda as dangerous fascism, scaremongering about white Christian nationalism and Project 2025. They started calling JD Vance weird. And keep in mind that this was the Presidential Election Campaign, and they were pouring everything into winning, but they never really said “we want universal healthcare” or “let’s build a bunch of infrastructure” or “the government should raise the minimum wage.”
To me, this points to one of two things: either the agenda is unpopular and they know it, or they don’t have an agenda to run on. It just doesn’t make sense to say that socialism is popular and they want socialism, but they are running on Orange Man Bad Evil Fascist With Kooties.
Biden was running on "I beat Trump before" and Harris was running on "I'm not Trump" plus a helping of "I'm Black and Asian and a woman". Seemingly they brought Walz in as "well those racist sexist white guys need to see a white guy to vote for" which, God Almighty, no wonder they lost; if their view of being moderate is "let's pander to the deplorables" then they really are out of touch:
I don't know why Vance is "terrifying" (is it because he's Catholic?) rather than "he's a hick with no idea of how to govern" or "he's a blood-sucking capitalist".
An aside, but I still don’t understand this phenomenon either, how he came to be seen by so many people as the image of the “evil right” (as opposed to the “dumb or incompetent right”). My very liberal mom absolutely hates him, almost as much as she hates Trump, and I remember a lot of my lefty friends making offhand comments all through the election about how despicable he was. He’s far from unusual in being pro-life; I can see why pro-choicers hate him but not why they seem to hate him with such passion, or indeed to fear him. Was it just the cat lady comment? I think this image predates that, honestly, but I’m just not sure where it came from or when it started. Was there a particular hit piece or something like that? Maybe it’s his relative youth, it gave the lie to the comforting idea that the right is dying out with the elderly?
Incidentally, my idiosyncratic-but-liberal fiancée actually likes Vance quite a bit, she sees him as flawed but sincerely wanting to help the country. We are Catholic so maybe that helps get over the fear factor, lol. At one point, I think shortly after the VP debate, she even commented— much to my surprise— that she would gladly vote for him over AOC in a hypothetical future election. Although she despises Trump so I’m not sure if he’ll be tainted by association in her mind by the time 2028 rolls around.
Vance is smart and utterly ruthless. That scares people.
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I wonder if it's because, Walz' attempts at "they're weird" to the contrary, Vance doesn't fit the "rich evil and dumb" or "poor evil and dumb" story about Republicans. He wasn't born rich, he made his way as an outsider into success, and despite anything else they can throw at him, he's smart (not a genius, but not Cletus the Slack-jawed Yokel either).
He's supposed to be either the dumb redneck MAGA voter who is a failure by the Elite Coast metrics and so can safely be dismissed, or made his way out of dumb redneck hillbilly hell, went to the Big City and got a college education, and then adopted the classical liberal to mildly progressive values and so ended up in the Democratic Party. That was supposed to be his trajectory after "Hillbilly Elegy" where he did not glamorise the rural culture he was raised in: religiose, working-class, poor and mired in drug addiction and mediocrity (Alexander Turok should love that). That he did not do this, I think, is what is seen as a betrayal. That's why he has to be excoriated.
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Well, it's in the paranthetical!
He seems like an actual smart guy and he's virile and articulate. That means that he's perceived as having the ability to implement right-wing policy without the dysfunction that follows Trump. Trump is considered a "gross old pig baby with cheeto spray-tan" -- that's how he's described in caricatures -- but Vance is a handsome guy with an Indian wife. He could win moderates, even some women, in a way that Trump struggles with.
But he also comes from the VC world, and there's a lot on the left that's incredibly skeptical of capital, seeing it as a spooky, hidden power base that influences the world without many checks or balances. So not only is he smart, but he's a capitalist, "striking from a hidden base" to influence the world. I'm guessing he prompts the same kind of "this guy is spooky" vibes that Republicans often feel about people like Soros, and Democrats have long felt about the Kochs.
I have a friend who doesn't like Trump, I think she sees him as a pig who's not focused enough to solve problems without making a mess of things. Her guy in 2024 was DeSantis.
I do wonder if we'll see an increased vote total for the GOP among women after Trump's off the ballot, and particularly once he's passed off this mortal coil and doesn't wield influence over the GOP.
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Well, if to be conservative you need to be either stupid or evil, and you don't think someone is stupid...
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And the Tim Walz thing backfired -- a lot of the right started talking about his history and views and he turned off a lot of the moderate white men they were trying to get. And then he got creamed in the debate with Vance, which counteracted Trump's embarrassing performance against Harris ("they're eating the cats of the people who live there").
I personally noticed Trump getting a big boost from moderates in the months leading up to the election; I know people who hated his guts who were angry at the Democratic party after the Biden debate, and people who were horrified when Trump was shot and considered voting for him for the first time.
Trump won because Biden died live on stage, and because Trump didn't. The election was televised.
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It's making a mistake to assume that the DNC messaging of 2024 is the same as the DNC messaging of 2025. I think it's fair to say that the DNC has realized "orange man bad" is not a winning campaign strategy, but they're busy trying to figure out what the hell their new campaign strategy should be. As a result of this, they have largely split into two different camps which are battling for control over the party. In the blue corner, weighing in at 100 pounds soaking wet, but holding a nasty improvised shiv labeled "decades of political experience", we have the Old Guard of the party. The Nancy Pelosis, the Chuck Schumers, the Jake Tappers. Their vision of moving forward has not yet crystalized, but they'll be damned if they let go of control of the Democratic Party before they've been dead in the ground for a week. In the red corner, weighing in at also 100 pounds soaking wet, but fired up and full of energy, is the Progressive Wing of the party. The Zohran Mamdanis, the AOCs, the Deja Foxxs, the David Hoggs. GenZ or Zillenials and they've decided Socialism is the way forward, and if they have to gut skin and quarter the Old Guard to do it, they will.
It is an ugly fight, where the party apparatus is being tugged in two different directions and the controllers of various fiefdoms are being forced to choose sides or be left powerless. But it is a fight, and it is happening. While the DNC as a whole has not yet chosen a new direction, there is a growing and power-hungry faction within the DNC that has chosen Socialism as their way forward, and they're going to fight it out until the bitter end to try and drag the DNC over to their point of view.
God forgive me, I nearly want this side to win the internal battle, just for the pure amusement value. The DNC had to re-do their vice chair election (and kick out Hogg) since the "three genders" vote was screwed-up. Just contemplate with me, for a moment, an electoral ballot for state and national elections that instructs the voter to pick "one of any other gender after you pick one of the male gender and one of the female gender candidates".
I think the blue corner will probably win, since they already have their hands on the levers of power, and they might just be the more sensible of the two options.
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It's also a credibility issue. You can only run on building infrastructure or fixing Healthcare and then fail to do it so many times before voters conclude you are either lying or incompetent. Ironically Trump benefited from being outside the establishment in this regard, as while he didn't have any credibility in delivering government results, he at least didn't have the stink of repeated failure to deliver that both parties have accumulated.
This is the I think accurate point the abundance bros are making: it's not actually enough to be in favor of things people want, you have to execute as well. And simply allocating funding doesn't count as executing!
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Well yeah, Biden was plenty coherent in 2020. He was actively campaigning and participating in debates. He was old, but not mentally gone and reflects more on a general political problem where we keep electing seniors. Trump is 79 now himself, and he'll be even older than Biden when his term is up (and if we count his sometimes stated desire to try for a third term, he'd be like 86).
And it is a general issue, just last year there was a sitting congresswoman found in an assisted living facility! https://abcnews4.com/news/nation-world/texas-congresswoman-who-last-voted-in-july-found-living-in-assisted-living-facility-kay-granger-dallas-fort-worth-republicans-democrats-congress-term-limits
At these ages decline happens fast and you can go from perfectly coherent to a drooling mess (or even just dead, as the Dems keep learning from their seniors dying in office) but I think there's not much to change this as long as olds are the main voters and rich olds are the main money movers in politics.
Biden was not uniformly coherent in 2020. He did accomplish stepping up in a few select debates and appearances, probably as a result of extremely planned napping schedules and drug dosing. It was obvious to anyone who wasn't on his side or influenced by mainstream media that he was already severely impaired. The tale of 2024 is that his impairment became so ridiculous that it was not possible to conceal.
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A note on the "so who was actually in charge?" question:
The deception that Biden's posse engaged in rankles me, but I think that Biden's level of competence didn't really matter much when it came to the well-being of the US. The global US/Western order can run itself just fine on autopilot for years. The President and the Sec Def could both be literal pieces of wood and nothing particularly bad would happen to the US. The US doesn't face any significant foreign threats that need any kind of quick, decisive thinking. The US is so powerful that to even have a foreign policy is largely a luxury for it, not a need. There are some urgent things that need deciding occasionally, like should the US bomb Iran to stop it from getting nuclear weapons or not, but all that stuff can also run on autopilot or be farmed out to foreign protectorates like Israel. Note that no US Presidential administration for many decades now has pursued a fundamentally different foreign policy from any of the other ones, Trump's included - the foreign policy differences between GWB, Obama, Biden, and Trump are minor in the grand scheme of things. There is a well-established foreign policy consensus that requires only very minimal executive steering. The only actual threat that the US faces from overseas is getting nuked, but the mechanisms by which the US prevents hostile minor countries from obtaining nukes is, I think, pretty well-greased at this point and can largely run itself.
A note on Bernie:
Bernie winning the first three primaries in 2020 was an artifact of the particular order that the primaries are done in. Even after he won those first three primaries, I thought that he would get destroyed in the South and on Super Tuesday. He has just never been popular enough to win the Democratic nomination without pretty particular circumstances coming together.
Nobody is popular enough to win a major party nomination without pretty particular circumstances coming together. Maybe Dwight Eisenhower.
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If there's one criticism of Harris that's untrue, it would be that she's insufficiently ambitious. The VP just doesn't have a lot of formal power to do anything, and even leaks will get found out in a non-Trump administration if they're consistent. The VP is just utterly at the mercy of the head honcho, and this was doubly true in the uncertain times around Biden's dropout since plenty of people wanted to have a mini-primary.
Every new administration tries to give the VP a prominent role after the election, and then like 2 months in they do something embarrassing, and the President's office just goes, "yeah, that will be a one-way trip to Siberia." Are there signs of life from J.D. Vance?
The framers almost immediately knew the VP was a dead office, I wonder why they didn't just significantly alter it when they passed the Twelfth.
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She is ambitious, but I get the sense more in the context of California. Had Biden not decided to run for a second term, I wonder if she would have concentrated instead on running for Governor of California, as Newsom would probably then be gearing up for the presidential primary challenges?
But Biden did decide to run, and she was brought along as VP, and I imagine everyone expected either "we win and things go the same as before for a second term" or "we lose and I go for governor" and not the whole implosion and being left with no real choice but to shove Kamala out there as their candidate.
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Harris isn't blameless, but she surely has less blame than the surrounding figures, particularly those that actually made Biden's presidency so unpopular like his Chief of Staff and Secretaries of various departments. She is a classic case of a schoolteacher level intelligence person being elevated far beyond her competence (in this circumstance due to race and willingness to sleep with older men). But she doesnt even know that. Her whole worldview is predicated on her being incapable of learning that.
AAND on top of that all she was the VP, which is typically a useless and powerless position.
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Surely the anecdote about Biden telling her "no daylight, kid" and Harris agreeing to put that albatross on her neck displays either a lack of ambition, or a degree of loyalty to a ship already 9/10 sunk that overrode the ambition.
I'm not familiar with that anecdote. Is this article an accurate summary? If so, I don't see how that's really related to ambition. She couldn't forge her own path that much when she was the nominee because 1) Biden was fairly popular with Dems, and her campaign was all about not rocking the boat to hold the fractious coalition together, and 2) people wouldn't believe her anyways since she was the VP.
I don't get how here strategic choice on the campaign trail is reflective of her ambition.
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I feel like we've heard more from Vance in the last six months than we heard from Harris for her entire term. Maybe some of that is at the President's discretion (giving speeches to NATO and such), but I think Harris could have been more visible if she wanted. Vance is posting that-which-Trump-is-probably-contractually-bound-not-to to X, and had that notable incident on Bluesky recently.
Yes, this is mostly Harris' fault, although her advisors were always quick to blame Biden. Most notably, she asked to be put in front of something significant, and Biden gave her immigration. Then, she turned around and complained about being put in charge of a "no-win" type of issue, and sulked about it. Biden's advisors then got mad and thought she was being ungrateful. However, you could perhaps imagine a world where Harris actually took that lead on immigration and pushed for more border enforcement - might that have deflected later attacks by Trump against her? Actually, quite plausibly. Instead she did some tours of Central American countries to try and pressure them to stop the flow and tried her best to dodge media attention about it. (Ironically this was at least mildly effective, as far as I'm aware, but selection bias means that it's hard to take credit for this kind of thing).
At any rate, the bad feelings about the immigration assignment meant that Biden's camp dragged their feet about giving her something else. She was also eventually put in charge of "voting rights" (federal level) as a portfolio, but IIRC they never managed to pass anything. Instead she just spent the whole time accusing Republicans of various things, which I think most people easily tune out. If she had managed a win there, maybe she could have talked about it more.
Immigration was always going to be a mess, given the Democratic Party's agenda there - they rely on the votes of immigrant citizens and being seen as the compassionate party that wants to help your cousin Manuel to come join you here, as well as all the "kids in cages" campaigning they had done, so they can't very well turn around and go "back to your side of the border, no we don't care if you drown crossing the river!"
So she pretty much was handed the poisoned chalice and no real plan as to what to do with it. On top of that, she was using her own "my family are immigrants" backstory to win votes, and she was struggling with the Copmala perception so probably wanted to soften that (nationally, being pro-law'n'order isn't a handicap, but if her ambitions were to run for Governor in California, it very much would have hampered her there).
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Harris was out there too, it was just on more "typical politician" stuff like holding speeches on the migrant crisis. Trump's administrations have both been anomalous in how much you heard about non-presidential actors, e.g. Jared Kushner was practically a household name in Trump 1 but almost nobody heard of Mike Donilon during Biden's term, despite the latter being almost certainly more important and influential than Kushner ever was (and Kushner was quite influential!).
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This is true, but also still feels atypical. This goes back into childhood ignorance, but I remember precisely zero about George Bush Sr's VP except people clowning on him. Al Gore I remember precisely zero about during his term as VP. Dick Cheney was always more of a shadowy figure, presumed to be pulling the strings from the shadows, but rarely out in front doing anything visible to the public. The only thing I remember about Joe Biden as VP was when he got in trouble for saying "Shylock" and the ADL came out and said he was up to date on his
protection moneydonations and that he was absolutely not an antisemite. Oh, and when Obama put him in charge of curing cancer during a State of the Union address. Pence did fuck and all during Trump's first term.That Vance is out there, regularly, and seemingly successfully, advocating the President's agenda feels atypical across all my life experience. He gives on strong podcast "Debate me bro" energy that might just be an artifact of the times we live in.
You don't remember the hysteria about he was going to be running the gay torture camps as he set up the theocracy that Trump would oversee? The fact that he did the job quietly was much more of an achievement than you think, including hosting our gay Taoiseach and his boyfriend during St Patrick's Day visits! That, and the mockery over the Pence Rule which was really common-sense for the crazy times we're in.
I think we should be more reassured about the fact that "this guy will kill us all!" messaging of the time then turns out years afterwards to be "that guy? sure he did nothing!"
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Will this obviously wrong and tired narrative ever go away? Bernie doesn't win because people don't want a leftist candidate, even in the primary let alone the general, he would get slaughtered. His path to victory has always required all the more moderate candidates to split the more popular policy platform in so many ways that he could sneak through with a plurality but not majority. Deciding not to let the less popular candidate win by avoiding creating the specific conditions that they need to win without getting the popular vote is not "ratfucking".
On the other hand Bernie was the only candidate in both 2016 and 2020 that had any form of genuine charisma and generated genuine excitement. And his platform at a times was almost what Trump used in 2024. If he hadn't bent the knee to the identarians he could have won if the stars align.
He was a populist promising improbably handouts to the kinds of people who dominated the social media sites when he was running. Really not surprising he appeared popular.
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Bernie obviously wasn't a Condorcet winner even among Democrat primary voter preferences, and probably would have done even more poorly in a general election, sure. But the non-creepy-to-the-public solution to this problem is to switch to an election method that's more clone-proof, not to get all the clones in a smoke-filled back room together to play "draw the short straw" or whatever. (As a point of fact I dispute the collusion interpretation in this particular case - Klobuchar was getting creamed when she dropped out, Buttigieg too, and Warren was getting creamed well before she dropped out - but in theory "Deciding not to let the less popular candidate win" can be a good sort of strategy to collude on in a plurality race, if only you don't mind how creepy it is to see collusion in an election.)
They're not going to switch, partly because even the people who try to improve election methods these days don't seem to be very smart about it (IRV is only one form of RCV, and it's not clone-proof either), and partly because any party insiders who are smart about election methods are probably smart enough to realize that escaping Duverger's law is a bad thing for political party insiders.
But making people sit through these sorts of weird "your favorite candidate dropped out before you even got a chance to vote" races is still a self-inflicted wound. If you put Democracy in the very name of your party, you're signing a "we'll be good at democracy" check that you'd better not bounce. The drop-out-when-you're-losing-badly system and even the smoke-filled-back-room system are probably improvements over plurality voting at democracy's job of trying to pick a good leader (though in hindsight it's hard to see how they could have done much worse), but they're not an improvement over plurality at democracy's equally-critical job of convincing your voters that they were the ones who picked the leader.
Imagine what the primary could have looked like under approval voting. Plurality's "Buttigieg dropped out before 46 states could vote because Biden had nearly half of South Carolina's voters" kinda looks pathetic, doesn't it? Even if the final outcome were unchanged, "Buttigieg stayed in until the end, but he only had 70% approval and Biden had 80%" would have been much more inspiring statistics. It's arguable whether we can do that in a general election without a constitutional amendment, but a party can do whatever weird superdelegate shit they want in the primary, and they ought to be able to make their primary better too.
I do agree that another voting system might be useful but it's not even the first past the post thing, it's also that they do every state in sequence. It's actually pretty hard to design a system around this kind of thing, especially because the primary isn't just about the voting but had also kind of morphed into a narrative building function. If you get rid of them and ran it all at once then you'd have the campaigns be very driven by polling which has its own problems.
Switching voting systems would help a little bit with the issues with sequencing too. Right now, typically a handful of states decide which handful of a large candidate pack are "serious candidates" for Super Tuesday, Super Tuesday knocks it down to 2, and everybody else just gets to pick between those 2. With something like approval, the ordering of votes still matters (because you still have to vote tactically, and what that means depends on who the front-runners are), but it can be hard to impossible for an earlier state to "knock out" a candidate who's more popular in a later state. If the race's narrative and polling all looks like it's A vs B, but everybody in your state would prefer C, with plurality it's not safe to vote for C unless you don't have a preference between A and B, but with approval you can turn your A vote into an {A,C} vote without risking getting B elected, your opponents can turn your B vote into a {B,C} vote without risking getting A elected, and C can actually win.
On the other hand, running a campaign is expensive. If the early states like A and B, but later states would prefer C, even if you have enough C voters to make C the winner, you have to hope that C knows this and is willing to risk the expense of waiting on all of you. You're right that everything would be driven by polling.
What we ought to have is an app where everyone ranks the field from day 1 of the campaign and can change at any point. Then we could get real time feedback on messaging. Of course the end problem is even if you were made godking of the docratic party you still have to implement a system like this where 95 year olds who can't handle technology more complicated than a television remote or deal wit the disengenuous claim that poor black people don't have cell phones.
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You didn’t like Bernie, that doesn’t mean that other people didn’t. You probably didn’t think Trump had a snowball’s chance in hell at winning either. If Bernie was so unpopular, why did the Democratic Party have to undertake heroic action every single primary to thwart him? And even if Bernie couldn’t win, it would have been better to let him take his shot, lose bigly, and put the issue to bed for good instead of creating a permanent Lost Cause myth and losing the left wing of the party for good.
Lots of people like Bernie. After Super Tuesday, when the vote was no longer split between anybody but him and Biden, he still got millions of votes, something like a third as many primary votes as Biden. But "a third as many as Biden" isn't enough to win a Democratic primary, and he's much less popular with independents and Republicans than with Democrats.
The 2020 "heroic action" mentioned originally was that three candidates who were doing much worse than him or Biden dropped out of the race after (significantly after, in Warren's case) their trajectory became apparent, and picked someone to endorse instead. That's not heroic action by the Democratic Party, that's just what losing candidates do to make the loss less expensive and less embarrassing.
For other less inactive forms of Party action, though? Insanity happens at this level, where people have orders of magnitude more power than average but not much more brains than average. Why did Clinton push the "pied piper" strategy with Trump? Because she didn't think Trump had a snowball's chance in hell at winning either. If her fans overestimated Bernie's odds in the primary too, well, clearly they're just not the best estimators.
3 to 1. Even counting the earlier votes from when the pro-Biden block was split, it was still 2 to 1.
What would it have taken? 5 to 1?
Despite my expression of annoyance with Duverger's Law in another comment, I do admire the way it selectively encourages people who are bad at math to disenfranchise themselves. Though this is another way in which plurality fails "democracy's equally-critical job of convincing your voters that they were the ones who picked the leader", the "democracy's job of trying to pick a good leader" thing is important too. It may be for the best that people who can't hack game theory end up with less influence over mechanism design.
Gave me a nice chuckle. Honestly, one of the things I admire about Approval Voting is that - on an individual level - there's almost no such thing as regretting your vote. The simplicity is refreshing. Vote for two people, even if you prefer one? The non-preferred one wins, but you still voted for them, so your vote "worked" as intended. Don't like someone? Don't vote for them. Like someone so much that you wouldn't be happy with any other? That's fine too, vote for them only! "I am okay with X person elected or I am not" is admittedly a little reductive, but is that really worse than the current system? I voted for Gary Johnson in 2016 as a protest vote, even though I infinitely preferred Clinton to Trump. Strategically, I felt a little bad about it, but it seemed like there was no other way to be seen. Even then it was a little out of character for me, an avowed moderate and work-within-the-system type, but I guess it does represent how bitter I was feeling about the way Clinton wrapped up the primary with a little bow (not even re: Bernie, I was more annoyed with how she preemptively pushed all other candidates out before the primary even started via a combination of threats and influence peddling. Plus, I guess, I hate her as a person, so that too)
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They didn't. Refusing to do something stupid that is required for him to win is not a heroic effort. Bernie is not entitled to the people representing the more popular platform splitting the moderate lane 4 ways so that he can win with a minority of the vote. "why didn't you let the guy that your base didn't want lose so that his followers, who never liked you anyways would whine less" is jot a serious argument.
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Trump nominally ran in the primary for the Reform Party in 2000 and lost to Pat Buchanan.
That jeopardy clue is going to hit so hard one day.
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