Democratic leadership recorded pressuring progressive to leave race
101 replies, posted
I don't think this really makes sense in the light that Republicans took control of both Houses of Congress in 2016. Republicans voted straight ticket like they usually do. You don't go meh over a centrist Democrat like Hiliary but instead want to go far left and vote for Bernie rather than a far right Trump.
They did so because there wasn't a reasonable alternative. No (well ok, maybe a very select misguided few) republican was going to vote for Clinton; many stated that they were considering voting for Sanders.
You do go 'meh' over Clinton if you're on the right and go 'holy shit that dude's so fucking racist' when you look at Trump.
You do indeed go meh over Clinton in that case. But if they wouldn't vote for Clinton they sure as hell aren't voting for Bernie. They'd just sit out like before. Bernie is the closest thing to communism in the USA, Republicans would not ever vote for that on a national stage.
I just stated for the second time I think now that Trump supporters were saying 'maybe I'll vote Sanders'. If Trump lost some of his base to Sanders, which he would've never lost to Clinton, and the Republicans decided not to show up because 'how can I support Trump when the alternative is Sanders and not Clinton' because of the absolute hellfire fury the right side of the spectrum has for Clinton, that I feel would handily result in a Sanders victory.
You're ignoring the fact that minority democrats did not like Bernie and would not vote for him in the primary. You can't say Bernie would draw over some Republicans but not acknowledge he would make other democrats stay home.
Anyway, I think it's pretty clear that Clinton didn't loose because she was a bad candidate compared to Bernie. She lost due to GOP propaganda campaigns, Russian attacks, FBI leaks, etc. All sort of shit went against her unfairly. It's pretty clear that if Comey hadn't released the letter that the GOP Congress leaked about the investigation in the last week then she would've won due to how small the vote gap was. Her polling also collapsed that week because of the damn letter.
Going back to the original topic of this thread.
The DNC isn't doing anything wrong.
I'm out to do other things.
Making the appearance of kicking out progressive candidates in favor of establishment candidates is the thing that is wrong.
They do plenty of things wrong and barely exist on the "left". They're corporatist shills as a whole, and nothing else and being so steadfastly in their camp and refusing to look at the fact they
worked in a organized and concerted manner to bury Bernie is pretty obviously not working out so well. None of your own sources even support you whole cloth.
Hilary wasn't terrible, but she's also a stock standard neo-liberal empire builder. Fuck her, fuck the current incarnation of the DNC and all their political games that have resulted in the specific political scenario america is currently dealing with.
Sanders is not liked by the Democratic base, and I think that your belief to the contrary may be a result of the social circles you primarily communicate with. I don't mean that as a criticism, it's just that, in general, Bernie is beloved among online communities composed primarily of white, left-leaning men under the age of 25 (IE -- Facepunch, Reddit), but his support lags among other demographics. The Democratic base sees him as an opportunist and a rogue who tried to hijack the party to promote an unrealistic agenda with little support outside of his own fanbase. They see that he did so on the back of divisive populist rhetoric, and with no vetted or well defined plan of action to actually put the policy into place. That's obviously not a popular perspective here, but it's not a totally baseless one.
Combine that with the fact that Bernie's position was just as easily exploited by the Kremlin propaganda campaign (and the Cambridge Analytica campaign), which utilized botnets, advertisements, fake news, and other propaganda designed to turn Bernie and Hillary supporters against each other. Regardless of who won the primary, we would have still been facing the same problem -- the spoiler effect from a divided party, with those divisions being deliberately inflamed by a hostile foreign state, while the same actors simultaneously inflamed nationalistic populism among the right wing on a massive scale.
I like Sanders, and would certainly vote for him in the lack of a more "grounded" candidate, but ultimately I'm not convinced that it would have made a difference. The same divisions among the left would have been exploited and inflamed by the same hostile actors, using the same shockingly sophisticated efforts. Either way you cut it, Bernie and Hillary were each others' spoiler candidates. All it took was a handful of leftist voters from the precincts of a few key counties to abstain from voting (or worse, protest-voting for Trump), to make all the difference in this election. It literally came down, in some precincts, to less than ten votes.
Not really how it works. The trend we've been seeing actually is that the Republicans are trending further and further towards fascism, and the Dems are filling the gaps they left.
Aye, and that's why I'd give it to Sanders -- because unlike with Clinton, Trump's supporters were also comfortable voting for Sanders. All it'd have taken to win with a split democratic party, assuming it was split nearly the same, would be taking away votes from Trump in just a few locations.
Of course, given all that's come to light thanks to Trump's admin, I might choose to abstain from voting again if I had a time machine just because - and I know it's not a done deal - if all this corruption that's been brought to light gets actually burned down, the democratic base brought to unity against all of it, and the republican party destroyed by abetting it, while we ponder laws to prevent such flagrant abuses whose like we've not seen before Trump, I think the Republic will be much better off for it than letting Trump and all this corruption fester under the surface, waiting for a better candidate to take hold of it and exploit it.
The DNC is full of people who love money. Sanders would have implemented policies that would tax them more. The DNC doesn't like that, so they get rid of him through talking about how the election was won before the primary began (superdelegates), keeping Sanders' policies on the down-low (few debates, as well as their control of the media through donors), as well as primary shadiness that I'm not going to go into. The Russians simply saw this chaos and further extended it. Correct the Record was already doing a great job of making Sanders look bad (Berniebros, and many people online talking him down). The Russians simply magnified this online chaos and made Clinton and Sanders supporters hate each other more. And as such, all the things the DNC did, separate from the Russians, caused Hillary Clinton to win the primary. So at that point, we had the choice between a robotic, milquetoast center-right Democrat and a blathering asshole of a far-right candidate. Through further propaganda and shady business dealings, Trump eventually became the winner. And now we're here in present day.
A big shitshow, really.
The whole argument about whether or not Sanders would've won is irrelevant. The story is that the Democratic establishment sees democracy as little more than an inconvenience necessary to fundraise and legitimize their handpicked candidates. They lie to voters faces with claims of impartiality, orchestrate their coronation behind closed doors, then coerce and shame voters into supporting them. Clinton went as far as to boost Donald Trump in pursuit of this strategy.
It seems to me slightly hypocritical to be a person who would decry things like Citizens United, and all the sundry power of monied interests out of one side of their mouth, then, when examining an institution that pledges neutrality but engages almost openly in a whole range of cash-shuffling that would make a Wallstreet man blush (perhaps with envy), they say it is an undeniable, well calculate maneuver made in the best possible interests.
After all, how can you possibly say that something fair has taken place when you are adamant that money=votes, and can see the way the money moves between hands?
They seem further hypocritical when they are people who jump and rave at the slightest sign of voter suppression, at the merest suggestion that somebody has threatened the very notion of democracy, but when there is proof positive of their forsworn champions quite literally saying that they have suspended democratic choice, they suddenly find a whole range and depth of defenses and justifications for the act.
After that how can you say you stand for some nebulous "will of the people" when the people have their will dictated to them, sometimes years in advance?
It seems that, without naming anybody, there are either some disgusting twists of masturbatory self-gratification at play, or such a desperate and cloying desire to be right, that they complete abandon their morality and ethics as inconvenient baggage.
Either outcome is a ridiculous and disappointing short-coming that I imagine won't end so long as there is an inane and unending spin machine wrapping up the Democratic Comission in a cotton-candy fiber of morality and superiority that hasn't been seen since New England considered itself the only cultured and civilized province in America.
I don't want to rail on over something already said, but that those unspecified persons watch this shitshow of prematurely ejaculated funding, collaboration under neutral premises, and blatant overtures of the Political Machines of the Gilded Age and, somehow with a straight face, grab the anemic, circular polling results driven by those very actions and loudly say, "the results are obvious, America just isn't ready for change," seems baffling to no end.
Bernie Sanders has about a 60% overall favorability among the country and about 80% among registered Democrats.
He won 22 contests after being considered a long shot against the biggest political juggernaut we've ever seen, with the entire media and DNC biased against him in a hugely energetic grassroots movement. I have no idea where this view that Democratic voters don't like Bernie comes from, because there is a mountain of evidence saying otherwise.
It means you poll higher when you aren't running for President thus the fact Bernie polls high right now when he is an incumbent senator doesn't mean he would have an easy time running in a national general election or, like BDA stated, that the demographics outside of white 18-25 year olds would actually vote for him over anybody else in the party.
The Democrat Party in its current form needs to either die or reform. It'd be much more approachable for myself and other leaning-Republicans if they went the route of the Democrat-NPL or DFL. Their current form, like the Republican party, only exists to further business interests for their respective contributors. What they should be aiming at is reform on the local level, and not national level. State Banks, introducing housing renovation loans, invest in artisan craftsmen/craftswoman, begin programs which finance homegrown industries, buy certain businesses and turn them into state enterprises.... This list can go on forever, but the reality is that none of the current parties in this country seem willing to address actual issues, and are stuck on creating drama in some endless loop
Okay... but when both he and Clinton were running for the primary, Sanders polled higher. What are you saying here?
The post I was quoting was talking about what he was polling after the election. We have already extensively talked about the polling during the primaries and why it isn't a fair marker of a general election result so why are you asking again?
I don't understand the "Sanders would have lost" mindset at all. Clinton supporters supported Clinton on name recognition. Like... I can't name any of her policies right now that weren't "Sanders policy but toned down".
Besides. Clinton lost to Trump. You don't think a more principled, not bought-out, non-corrupt, actually decent human being would have a lesser chance against the blathering idiot currently sitting in the Oval Office?
That's kinda funny seeing as though Bernie had no plan for carrying out his policies and it was a huge criticism of him during the campaign. Clinton had some of the most well developed and thought out policies for a campaign in history. The media refused to report on any of it though. I hate that Republican propaganda worked so well against Clinton that even democrats believe it, she isn't the evil person you are claiming.
I thought you were leaving to do other things.
Seeing as you're sticking around though, do yourself a favor and read this article. It was published in February 2016, well before the election. Like Matt Taibbi and a handful of others, Nathan Robinson is one of a handful of political commentators whose insight borders on clairvoyance.
https://static.currentaffairs.org/2016/02/unless-the-democrats-nominate-sanders-a-trump-nomination-means-a-trump-presidency
Here is the simple truth: The Democratic Party would rather have Donald Trump as president than Bernie Sanders. It was true in 2015-2016, and it is true today. They gambled, and they lost. We lost.
That was 9 hours ago.
She takes contributions from massive corporations. That's enough for me to have extreme reservations about voting for her. Trump is the same type of capitalist, just much more of an asshole about it. I agree Clinton was the lesser evil. But because that's ALL she was, Trump won. Sanders was the only good candidate in the entire race.
I usually agree with you, but in this case you are dead wrong. It's one thing to catch a glimpse of the campaign from cable news and social media, but being there on the ground was a very different experience. All throughout 2015 and 2016 we were dealing with news reports that intentionally minimized Sanders' support, oftentimes preemptively writing him off in the lead-up to a primary or caucus, meanwhile many of us (including myself) would canvass undecided voters in deep-red districts and just get blown away by the amount of support for Sanders among Independent voters and even Republicans. These were people who were just starting to get interested in Trump, who would never in a million years vote for Clinton, but said they would vote for Sanders over Trump if given the chance. It couldn't have been more different than the narrative being spun on cable news. It just didn't square with reality.
time to vote, kids: bad principles party or no principles party?
Super delegates are a myth amiright
A political party's job is to select the candidate who has the best chance of winning a general election, not a primary. A candidate may do very well in a primary but fail abysmally in a general election. In this regard the writing was on the wall from the very beginning. A party has a duty to be honest with itself and recognize pitfalls, and if it can't do this, it has lost touch with its voters and with the country.
The Democratic Party could have chosen Sanders on the floor of the national convention, because the pledged delegate votes were nonbinding. (Don't even get me started on Superdelegates.)
I'll concede this: Pre-October 2016, few could have imagined Donald Trump winning the presidency. For most of the general election campaign, Hillary Clinton was the solid frontrunner. Stifling Sanders and propping up Clinton may very well have seemed like a winning strategy, right up until the fatal 5-point-shift in late October. It's easy to do political autopsies with the benefit of hindsight; during the campaign, not so much. But If these errors seem obvious in hindsight, shouldn't the DNC also have learned from their mistakes by now? Shouldn't they be working as fast as possible to correct those mistakes, to win back their voters' trust and goodwill, and to empower progressive candidates?
Not necessarily.
I'm betting their platform for the coming election will change from 'At least we're not Republicans.' to 'At least we're not Trump!'
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