we could have had Bernie, except Warren was a backstabbing scumbag. oh well. we got what we deserved: suffering.
If you mean her rhetoric, she was just playing the game of politics, and I don't fault her for that.
If you mean not dropping out after it was apparent the moderate candidates were going to coalesce behind Biden, yeah, fuck her.
Would dropping out have done anything? Biden got over 50% of the vote. Burnie and Warren together were only around 33%.
A lot of issues come with the fact that success tends to snowball in primaries, hence why candidates always try to eke out early wins in Iowa, and why Super Tuesday is so important.
https://www.politico.com/2020-election/results/super-tuesday/
This right here, I lived in Georgia in 2020, our votes in the general mattered quite a bit, but by the time we held our primaries it was clear Biden was going to be the nominee even if Bernie won Ga. So my only voice was “not fascism”
Not sure how long "not fascism" will be on the ticket at this rate
That backstab is why I now vote against her in her Senate primaries. It’s deeply frustrating, because until that point, I really did think she was one of the best possibilities for being a sane and effective presidential candidate.
I would still vote for her, given her voting record and policy proposals she supports/ed, but I will say the $40 I donated to her campaign are the only political donations I've ever regretted making.
I could not have a beer with her, either I'd be thinking about bringing it up the entire time. Actually, I would have a beer with her just to ask her what the hell happened? How does she feel about her legacy? What did it feel like to be the OG Fetterman?
Honestly at this point I would suck it up and vote for her too u_u
The Democrat party ironically won't have any reason to actually compete UNTIL the GOP dies completely because they would be forced to confront their internal progressive vs chud factions, which would split into their own two new political parties.
In the general? Absolutely. But that’s a low bar.
If she was the most compelling primary candidate? Also, likely. Also, still a low bar.
But as an expression of my deep and fundamental dissatisfaction with how she kow-towed to the DNC leadership, I don’t plan on supporting her tenure in the senate.
Who are you voting for, then? It seems that she is running unopposed in the primary and she is such a sure winner for the general election that other parties are probably not going to run serious candidates but settle for someone just campaigning for the attention.
Iirc I left it blank in the most recent primary where she was on the ballot. Still voted for her in the general because the other candidate was Republican.
To be clear, I fucking detest the two-party system that forces me to employ such voting calculus.
The left is constantly punching itself in the dick with purity tests. You’d think they’d realize that’s half the reason why they’re constantly spinning their wheels. Liz would be the most left wing president since FDR
Democratic primary debates were fire in 2020 Liz Warren slaughtering Bloomberg live on TV was a highlight
Edit: years
2020, you mean. 2016 was Hillary and Bernie in a room with a lock on the door.
I wasn't too fond of Warren until she showed some teeth in the 2020 debates. It was a treat to see her take down everyone on stage.
Shame she [checks notes] didn't even win her home fucking state in the primaries while the moderates were all throwing their support behind one candidate. Still not sure what level of delusion prompted her to stay in considering that was in-line with what she was polling.
The Bernie and Biden debate was what I always thought political debates should be. They presented different viewpoints on how to solve problems and had productive discussion about it.
Fixed, yeah, she should have dropped out and let the moderates and progressives go 1v1. We had some of the best moments and memes when the field was open early on.
Wait, are even primaries FPTP in America?
Wtaf
Worse - it's patchwork. Some states are FPTP, some are proportional.
I assume that means the primary equivalent of the electoral college gives its votes out proportionally. But honestly even then that's absolutely nonsensical. The end result has to be just one winner. That's how a presidential system works.
It really should be runoff voting. Whether full multi-round runoff or just IRV depends on the logistics of it. But wow. Even the UK—which joins America in failing at democracy by using FPTP on national elections—manages to use a runoff process when selecting the leaders of its 3 largest parties.
It gets complicated because the parties can hold their primary elections however they want, independently by state because various rules mean you need a Democratic party for each state, plus the national party. So each state does it differently to some degree. Some vote for the candidate, and the delegates are assigned to vote for the winner, some get a proportion of the delegates, and in some the voters vote for the delegate based on who they support.
They use that process to assign delegates who go and vote on who the national party will select for the national election. If the first election there doesn't yield a majority winner, they keep voting but now the delegates can switch if they want, and members of party leadership can also vote. That hasn't happened in quite a while though, since it's much easier to know the counts accurately before the convention and do your politics by getting people to drop out and endorse you.
by getting people to drop out and endorse you
Out of interest, what happens to delegates pledged to vote for a candidate who has dropped out between winning their state/a proportion of their state and the day of the convention? Do they have to cast a useless vote for a non-candidate, or can they free-vote on the first round?
Depends on the state, and when exactly the candidate dropped out.
Basically the state holds a primary, and then a little later they have a state convention to assign delegates.
If they drop out before the delegates are picked, the delegate selections are usually reallocated to the remaining candidates. If they drop out afterwards, their delegates may be expected to vote for them anyway in the first round, or they may be free to vote as they please depending on the state. If the candidate has endorsed another candidate, the delegate is often expected to vote for the endorsed candidate.
"Expected" is important because their votes aren't disqualified if they don't adhere to expectations or anything, they just risk their state party being mad at them and if they're someone with continued interest in party involvement, that's a great way to make them not want to involve you. This is in contrast with the electoral college where faithless electors can see their votes not count unless they're cast according to the election outcome.
In both cases, electors or delegates are chosen for a mix of loyalty and dedication, usually as sort of a minor honor or reward, so it's not common for them to go rogue against expectations.
It's why there's an advantage to staying in the race longer: you get to pick the delegates you won, even if you drop out afterwards, and you can use that to get the frontrunner to involve you in their campaign in exchange for an enforcement.
“Expected” is important because their votes aren’t disqualified if they don’t adhere to expectations or anything
Oh boy. Yeah, the clash between convention and rule is something I'm familiar with. In Australia, like America, our federal Senate technically represents the state, not the people (which is the job of the House of Representatives). As such, historically, a vacancy caused by death or resignation was filled by someone chosen by that state's legislature. By convention, they would choose the person nominated by the previous Senator's party. Crucially, in 1975 my state's legislature was run by what was effectively an authoritarian dictatorship using gerrymandering and other political tricks, as well as police brutality to hold on to power for 19 years. In '75 it was 7 years into that reign, while the federal government had the most left-wing leadership in the country's history. When one of their federal Senators died at a time when the Senate was already on a knife-edge, my state's legislature took the opportunity to break from convention and nominate someone who would not support the incumbent federal government.
This in turn provided the opportunity to break another convention. This one's a little more difficult to explain, but it has reverberated so strongly in Australian political history that it is known as simply "The Dismissal", or the less catchy "1975 Australian Constitutional Crisis." In summary: when the Senate failed to pass the government's budget (something made possible in part thanks to the unconventionally-appointed Senator), the normal thing to do would be for the Prime Minister to go to the Governor General (the monarch's official representative) and request a new election, or a special kind of election called a "double dissolution" election. Australia normally elects only half its Senate in an election, but with a double-dissolution it re-elects the whole Senate. By convention the Governor General is entirely a figurehead, and just goes ahead with what the Prime Minister requests. In this case, instead of doing that, he fired the PM and appointed the minority leader as the new PM, at which point the previously-opposition Senators turned around and passed the exact same budget they were previously opposing. Incidentally, there are strong reasons to believe that the GG's actions here were in part influenced by CIA involvement, including the fact that in the lead-up to it the US sent someone nicknamed "the coupmaster" as their Ambassador, and the fact that the government had been threatening to close down the important CIA base at Pine Gap.
These were in Australia, where because we use the Westminster system there's a tradition of conventions being much, much stronger than they tend to be in America.
Anyway, thanks for sharing the details of the American process. I appreciate it.
Bloomberg came in to stop Bernie not Warren same reason she ran. Whats that lady smoking.
Since 1993, with the exception of Obama (1961), every president was born either 1942 or 1946. Sanders and Warren are both born in the 1940's too.
Just stop voting fossils goddammit.
That's easy to say but when there are laws in place to protect the entrenched two-party system and they're choosing who you get to vote for, it should be plainly obvious that we're just being given an illusion of choice.
Look at Trump's term, then at Biden's. America as a whole didn't really change. The talking heads sqwaked about different topics but ultimately we're no different as a country than were 8 years ago. It's a lot of finger pointing in the end but ultimately when one side gets in, the rich get tax breaks. When the opposite side gets in, the same rich tax the poor harder via increased prices at every register. Either way, their wealth increases and they get richer.
The only way forward should be sweeping, drastic change which is often the platform both parties run on, yet neither are ever held accountable for failure to deliver on those promises. The fact that we live in a country as vast as the USA while somehow only having a choice between two different shit sandwiches is utterly ridiculous. I'm tired of eating shit!
Oh yeah well y'all could have elected me for mayor of poop city in 2003 and instead I only got 5 votes. Lost by 2.
"Oh, this is calamity! Calamity! Oh no, he's on the floor!"
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