this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2026
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The primaries for 2026 don't start until March, with some happening as late as September, so we're well within the time period to be critiquing various candidates before the finalized candidates are chosen. It's not like this is being said in October 2026 when all the primaries are already over, no, none of them have even begun.
As I may remind you, in 2024, we didn't actually have a primary for the Democratic candidate for President. So no voters really had a choice in the matter at all. Quite a large number of Democratic voters felt strongly that the national party heavily put their finger on the scale for the primaries in 2016 and 2020 as well, so there's a history of feeling like the primaries may have less real voter input than people would hope. (DNC lawyers never argued in court that they didn't put their finger on the scale for Hillary Clinton, they argued that it was legal for them to do so, and that since it was the lawsuit should be thrown out, which it was. We never got to find out if that was true or not, but they certainly hammered it in court that whether it was or not, it was legal for them to do so.)
I still have seen very little evidence that statements like this "disincentivize" voters as much as I see people claiming it does. Are there polls to back up this idea, that people choose not to vote because they have been convinced it doesn't matter due to Democratic inaction and people discussing that inaction?
I mean we're literally talking about a party that shut down the government over healthcare, one of the longest in history, and then rolled over for literally nothing at all. We're talking about a party that has members pushing to give ICE more funding while they're killing people and who fold and accept Tom Homan taking over as though he will somehow be better than Greg Bovino instead of kicking ICE the fuck out of their cities. We're talking about a party that gave police nationwide more funding after the George Floyd police riots where police nationwide brutalized peaceful protestors. We're talking about a party that codified, legalized, and normalized some of the worst crimes of the Bush administration, and literally set the stage for the surveillance state and police state that is now turned against us because they didn't want to appear "soft on terrorism." People like myself were screaming bloody murder during the Bush administration that these kind of tools could eventually be taken by a despot and turned against us, and those of us still paying attention kept saying so when the Obama administration didn't shut any of it down and instead kept it around for convenience because they were so sure such a despot would never be elected.
How is that the fault of voters who have the audacity to talk about those very real issues?