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Outsiders get in all the time. Ed Gainey was a state rep before he became mayor, and he was elected to that post after defeating a 30-year incumbent on the third try. Plus, Pittsburgh's one of the whitest major cities in the country and Gainey is probably the first black guy to get elected to any city office that isn't a council seat representing a heavily black area. He's endorsing Sara Innamorato for county exec. She's another state rep, a DSA member who beat an incumbent who belongs to another prominent local family in a white working-class district. As I alluded to earlier, the ACDC endorsed a vocal Trump supporter and ACA opponent over an autistic LGBT activist. the Trump supporter lost the primary, but if the litmus test for a political system not being a machine would be something akin to a Republican who loves AOC and tweets against Trump's immigration policy winning a GOP primary in the Bible Belt, I don't know what to tell you.
I know Wikipedia should be taken with a grain of salt, but this is not exactly what I think of when I say "outsider".
DSA is an outsider to Dem party like Sanders is an "Independent" senator - formally it's true, but we all know what they'd be voting for. If they are "outside" it's the part of "outside" that the mainstream body can't venture to go without risk losing the independents, but not the part which they disagree with.
Not sure about AOC, but there are plenty of Republicans tweeting against Trump's anything, from his hair color to his politices, real or imagined. That said, if I would discover that there's a Republican Machine in, say, Wyoming, I wouldn't be exactly shocked. I'm not saying there necessary is, just saying it wouldn't be a huge surprise for me if there were.
I think that's conflating national and local political dynamics. If you're part of the Democratic establishment in a solidly blue city your personal political career is never meaningfully threatened by Republicans, it's threatened by challengers from the left. If Trump wins by 1 point you're still gonna win by 19, keep your job and be paying your dues with the party establishment so you can move up over time. If the DSA wins you have to find a different job and all that time you put in at low low level functionary positions was for nothing.
This is anecdotal but I know a former city council member of a solidly blue small Midwestern college town who is still involved in local politics. He hates Republicans, but what he wants to talk about day in and day out is how bad the the local hard left student organizations and Sander's aligned groups like Justice Democrats are. It's a "heretics are a bigger threat then pagane" dynamic.
That's to say that If Pittsburgh election administration is controlled by a corrupt tight knit organization capable of casting fraudulent ballots en masse without any defectors; they're also going to use that power to consistently rig local elections in favor of their organization. If local candidates outside of the democratic establishment can win then either this group is deeply principled enough not to interfere in intra-left fights, or they just don't actually have the ability to rig elections.
Well, as you proved, in local matters there is no unified local control - DSA people watch the establishment types like a hawk for shenanigans. However, both the establishment Dems and the DSA-types are on the same side when it comes to presidential general election politics. So if there was to be fraudulent efforts in presidential elections, you would not expect the DSA to complain about it; to the contrary you would expect them to participate.
Why does the DSA have a capacity to "watch establishment types like a hawk" and prevent voter fraud against them in local elections but the larger and better funded Republican party does not?
It depends on conditions on the ground. In deep blue counties the local DSA chapter is likely to be far better manned, resourced, and organized - at least because more likely to succeed in day-to-day politics - than the local GOP. Likewise, in deep red areas, I would expect the local insurgent right-wing group (Tea Partie, MAGA, etc.) to be at least as well-organized and active in local politics as the local Democratic party operation (though Dems are better at springing grass-roots activism up in inhospitable terrain than the GOP because the left has a longer tradition of activism, more sophisticated techniques, popularity among demographic groups willing and able to forego lucrative careers to engage in activism work, and, at least these days, much more money and PMC support, plus a friendly media and educational environment).
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From 1982 to 2018, the Republicans were subject to a consent decree which prevented them from doing so, and in that time their organization withered.
Also, I suspect the DSA is better-funded than the Republican Party in the relevant jurisdictions.
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But when people claiming there was foul play in the 2020 election point to "machine politics" as evidence, the implication is that this is a well-run political organization that does this kind of thing all the time to maintain their own power and thus already has the mechanisms in place to commit fraud. What you're arguing is that an ad hoc group of political opponents conspired to rig an election due to ideological consensus regarding one issue, despite that fact that none of them had ever done something like that before. That's the opposite of machine politics.
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