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This is correct. Ultimately, the Democratic Party will only be changed through primaries. Not town halls or performative third party voting, but filling the party up with people who think differently.
And that means it's time for everyone to actually give a shit about voting in primary elections instead of just old people who keep choosing the worst candidates.
Not just voting, but running for election.
While I agree, I'm a "child of the internet" so pretty much any opposition research on me would have me murdered by probably everyone.
Maybe I should run. I could unite the left and right in their disgust of me lol
Judging by Trump, I bet your reputation matters a whole lot less than you think it does.
Maybe the real Modern Warfare was the blackmail material we created on ourselves along the way
Oh! NOW I remember why I didn't give my real name and all my friends and activities and locations and menstrual cycles and everything to BlackmailBook when they demanded it of me to view the link my grandma sent me.
JFC Why won't this fucking thing burn to the ground.
But the corporations that donate to the party don’t want this.
And as long as privately ran organization owned by those rich people (the DNC) controls the primaries then they can choose what ever candidates they want. Like how they chose Hillary despite Bernie having more support in 2016. This is why the DNC has stopped doing primaries.
When did they stop? If you're talking about last time around, unfortunately Biden didn't drop out early enough for them to have one. We will definitely have primaries coming up. Will the DNC try to put their finger on the scale? Surely. But that just means we got to show up in bigger numbers than they think.
Bernie had provably more individual donors than any canidate in US history.
There's no amount pf voting that makes the DNCs chosen canidate lose the primary.
They are a private organization that doesn't have to even have a primary, the primary exists to hold up the illusion of choice.
All you have to do is raise money without corporations.
How hard could it be?
Edit: /s ffs
It's one election, Micheal. How much can it cost? 10$?
That will never happen regardless, as long as money influences politics, both parties will never represent the people.
Then join the international boycotts and prevent Americans from having money. No money, no influence.
Well, then, just duck your head down and try to survive then, because that's all that's left. The system is what it is and it's not going to change without violence, so it can either be co-opted from within as my suggestion, or we can all sharpen our knives and hope the next government is better rather than worse than this one.
Only so far as they continue to hold and respect them. We're now 0/3 on that front, so... yeah. It's not impossible, but they'll fight you every step of the way and then some. Creating/hijacking a third party and strategically contesting election will probably accomplish your goals faster. Remember that the only reason the GOP was taken over twice was because the party leadership approved of it.
Yeah people forget that the Democrat party doesn't need to even hold primaries, let alone respect the outcome. The DNC admitted to pushing Hillary to the forefront and were the ones that dragged Biden out of retirement because it seemed like Bernie might win the second time. The good politicians seem like exceptions.
Need to start promoting working families type party.
I'm not talking about Presidential primaries. I'm talking about state and local. Make it so the Democratic Party is full of progressives, socialists, social democrats, whatever your favorite brand of left-wing politics is. I'd be dammed careful about communists because that word is a fucking non-starter with the American electorate. Hell socialism is as well but it's not as poisonous as communism. When the party is full of... I don't know the proper term because every word I think to use (leftist? Lefties, maybe?) has been co-opted to mean a specific ideology. But make it so the Democratic Party as a whole leans further left, and those people have to be tapped to fill key roles because their presence is so large.
You are absolutely wrong about creating/hacking third party. Ross Perot couldn't pull it off despite spending about 80% what the major parties spent and capturing nearly 19% of votes in a vastly more friendly media environment. In order to achieve just that lofty level of irrelevance, a third party candidate would have to spend about $350 million and buy Fox News or Facebook. Third party isn't going to happen. Presidential primary isn't the place to start.
This is way. Democrat voters want change, but they're not speaking to the system in a language it understands. The party changes not from the top down, but from the bottom up. That only happens when people with different views stand for, and win, lower level positions. Every voice changed lower down on the totem pole changes the presure on the people making decisions further up. Ultimately enough movement lower down means the top eschalons are pushed out and replaced too.
Whether it's possible to find enough candidates to start filling the party, I don't know, but just focusing on the primaries (or lack thereof) for the top job is missing the wood for the trees.
I volunteered this election with our state house district committee of the Democratic party. The grassroots is effectively neutered and you can believe that they are carefully managed to be sure nothing rises up that the national party cannot control.
The Democrats are managed opposition.
Thank you for putting the effort in. The party apparatus isn't going to want to change, but I'm not sure that it's managed opposition as such, so much as those who are 'in' being happy with their lot and doing what they feel they need to to stop that being taken away.
There's two ways to use that to change the situation, either demonstrate that their comfortable position will be taken away if they don't change their politics, or take it away by finding a candidate you can rally enough support behind. Neither is easy, and both require getting people involved en-mass at the lowest levels of politics, which is going to be hard work with the party pulling against you. It's not impossible though, AOC and Sanders are both candidates of a different stripe and have, so far, held their places. Imagine how different things would be if they were replicated even a few times?
A Socialist party would not only not have a chance in hell, the votes it would siphon off would lead to a resounding victory for the Reich Wing. A strong Socialist candidate (or several) in the Democratic Primary wouldn't win either, but would drag the debate to the left and force/enable the more moderate candidate to support the kinds of goals and programs that used to define the Democratic Party in order to win, without being labeled and dismissed as "Socialist" by swing voters. However, we've already seen what happened when leftists decided to sit out the General election because nobody was good enough for them.
The problem is that they'll, again, fight you every step of the way. An ideological takeover will have to happen over their dead bodies, and meanwhile they'll keep demanding concessions so they don't expel you from the party and disallow you from running for primaries. The crux of the issue with the ideological takeover route is that this contradiction will lose you legitimacy in the eyes of your supporters as you're forced into compromise after compromise in order not to alienate the neoliberals, and they'll give you fucking nothing in return.
Uh... obviously you can't win an election with only 19% of the vote?
That's exactly my point. No third party candidate will ever do that well again because the environment that enabled him will never exist again. He had 20% of all TVs tuned to his little whiteboard fireside chats in an age when there was nothing else to do.
No third party that isn't self-funded by a multi-billionaire is ever going to have the money to spend like a major party, but even if they did, they would never have 20% doing nothing but watching and listening for 30 minutes, but even if they did they will still fucking lose. Horribly. Without a single electoral vote. Just like Ross.
Ross did that well because of disappointment with the political establishment, which... gestures broadly. He also had clear issues that held back his campaign, issues that someone running for 2028 or 2032 will be able to fix. Also while the environment of 1992 won't exist again, the environment of 2025 didn't exist in 1992. In the words of (maybe) Winston Churchill: Never let a good crisis go to waste.
Not just presidential matters. Local and state are much less fucked with. A 3rd party in first past the post just creates a split of neolib/socialists while the fascists remain united. Division in the American system is just a way to have the other party win. Republicans allowed the Tea party because that is what they wanted as well. Neolibs won't allow a split progressive/socialist with the exception of Bernie (because how do you fuck with Vermont).
If you start local and strategically spread (or create a mass movement and go for the jugular) you can remove the neoliberals from the equation and make socialists and fascists the only two choices.
Or work to implement ranked choice voting. The more localities use it, the more comfortable people get with it (the primary anti-ranked choice argument is it's "too confusing for voters"), the more chance it has to be adopted by more states beyond the current Maine and Alaska beachhead.
And. And work to implement ranked choice voting. The FPTP system is the root of all this. The reason you can't realistically consider voting for a third party, and why those who did (or sat home since they had nothing realistic to vote for) handed power to Trump.
But all that will take time and is not going to help in the next couple of elections. So there also needs to be a short to medium term plan.
At the presidential level, yes the DNC has been terrible with candidates. However they aren't in charge of the other races. They can give money, but they can't stop Socialists and other leftists running in primaries and winning them or general elections from school board to senator and everything in between. They can make it harder for these people to win, but they can't stop or control city, county, or state elections. We need a base of elected officials pushing them to change their tack.
Okay I could be wrong, but can they not make up excuses bar whoever they don't like from primaries? Or make up other excuses and run their own neoliberal candidate and split the vote anyway? They just... nominated Harris in 2024 so clearly they're not obligated to even hold primaries.
The DNC doesn't control state elections, the local democratic parties do. It is up to the state parties to run their primary (or caucus) as they choose. The DNC can influence primaries with spending, but they don't make the rules for state-levrl primaries.
Presidential primaries are the weird ones because they're spread over all the states. Otherwise candidates just need to do whatever to get on the ballot(usually gather signatures) and then win the election. Parties can throw their weight behind one candidate in particular but that's not the same as declaring a winner. AOC got into Congress by beating a party backed incumbent in a primary.
If I stay home, that'll show those Democrats
No, it changes by having a chair that cares more about beating Republicans than beating progressives...
And we have that now
The fight over the party was over more than a month ago when the Chair election happened.
Neoliberals lost, the party of today is not the same party as 2 months ago, the chair is basically a dictatorship with all the power and zero accountability
Guess we'll see. The only thing I've seen Dems (as a party) do in the past month is roll over and show their belly.
You're talking about elected politicians.
That is not the DNC.
Party leadership isn't the DNC.
For the past 30 years they've been intertwined, because we kept getting neoliberal chairs and the party leaders are neoliberals. And they worked together to prevent progressives from gaining ground.
Ken Martin wasn't born yesterday, you can look at Minnesota and what they did under his leadership as state chair, and the type of politicians who got to office with his help.
He's not perfect, but he won't stand in the way of progress, and that's all we need to get a non-neoliberal to the general in 2028.
The first time I read your comment, I thought you said it won't be fixed through primaries and was genuinely flummoxed as to what you thought primaries were for.
Having read what you actually wrote – now –, the world is much more coherent.