Mega-Thread: Democratic 2020 Primaries

[Jehct]

1> Her career shows much more willingness to work with others, which is a necessary component of being an effective President.
2> She has incredibly solid and implementable platform policies. Bernie's may be similar, but they're more pie-in-the-sky and less itemized, in general.
3> Sanders has demonstrated a manipulative streak, exploiting the DNC for his own aggrandizement, while demonstrating little desire to actually work in tandem with Democrats in general. He's only been a member of the Party when it's been convenient for his Presidential aspirations.
4> Bernie trends towards anti-market approaches, of government control rather than management and regulation. I'm a liberal market socialist; my leanings lie closer to Warren's more market-oriented approach (though this is a matter of degree; I'm not in full agreement with Warren here either).

It's not like this is some new shift, for me. I've been posting about my liking Warren for POTUS since 2015, here, at least;

Thank you for explaining all this and your reasoning. I appreciate that.

[DarkTZeratul]

Ad hominem.
The content and arguments made are solid. Plenty of evidence provided.

The static image says "WARREN THE SNAKE." That tells me about all I need to know about the content and arguments therein. Namely, that it's probably a load of bullshit that supposes that Bernie is the One True God and everyone else is a secret conservative.

[Theodarzna]

No, it actually won't. But thinking that will be dangerous for Biden's campaign. Sanders lost. No one is "alienating" any one else's supporters. Do you what those other candidate supporters are doing? Getting behind the winning candidate so we can defeat Trump.

Given the narrative of "Bernie Bros" how is the point of not alienating voters suddenly invalid in this case? I mean if mean tweets and snake emoji's are like this insane toxic environment that makes one reject policies they claim to support and instead back candidates that are anathema to their stated policy beliefs over mean tweets and allegedly "Toxic followers! Who lack civility!" yet being a public asshole to Sanders voters round the clock is not a big thing and its really only bad if they point it out? Sounds super hypocritical.

What @Bodakane is talking about--feel free Bodakane to correct me if I'm misreading this--is that acting toxic will drive Sanders voters away. You reject that, but you've used that Bernie Bros canard over and over again and the very logic of "Bernie Bros" schtick is that "Mean toxic supporters alienate people and you just can't support a candidate whose fans post mean tweets"

It is hypocritical to go against what Bodakane is saying whilst also repeating the Bernie Bros meme. Which operates on the same logic "That mean hostile supporters justify not voting for a candidate even if its one you would otherwise support". Heck the whole logic of the Bernie Bro meme itself justifies Sanders voters NOT voting for the Democrats in general.

[Edge-]

Ad hominem.
The content and arguments made are solid. Plenty of evidence provided.

Sorry, I'm not remotely inclined to take a 4chan star remotely seriously on literally anything. Call it an ad hominem if you want, but I've wasted too much time giving these chucklefucks the time of day whenever some rube shares their garbage and then says, "BuT ItS WelL SOurCeD AnD YOU'Re JusT AD HominEM AttACkiNg"

Why the hell do you routinely use the most garbage of sources? Like, holy shit. Find sources that aren't scraping the Vegemite off the bottom of the barrel, dude.

Still waiting on those poll links from the screencapped tweet from weeks ago, by the way. Or is that just another piece of bullshit you'll sling and then scurry away from when asked to provide receipts.

The "no step on snek" image and Warren mask over Hillary already speaks volumes about what the video may contain in terms of the "quality" of her analysis.

[DarkTZeratul]

You are not the judge of sources. If you prefer CNN and Politico as sources then you are part of the problem.

Your arguments right now are literally ridiculous, fallacious and worthless.

By all means, keep going. You're doing wonders to prove the validity of the horseshoe theory.

[Edge-]

You are not the judge of sources. If you prefer CNN and Politico as sources then you are part of the problem.

Your arguments right now are literally ridiculous, fallacious and worthless.

That's fine. Want to be taken seriously? Don't use 4chan meme girls as a source. Don't use random Twitter screencaps as a source.

Find something or someone credible. Memers may have big audiences, but that doesn't mean the know a fucking thing.

But if you want to break down some of her arguments so I don't have to waste time watching a stupid video that probably contains a ton of jump cuts, have at it.

[Theodarzna]

You are not the judge of sources. If you prefer CNN and Politico as sources then you are part of the problem.

Your arguments right now are literally ridiculous.

The static image says "WARREN THE SNAKE." That tells me about all I need to know about the content and arguments therein. Namely, that it's probably a load of bullshit that supposes that Bernie is the One True God and everyone else is a secret conservative.

This post I guess fits for you.

How can people hate former MRA darling ShoeonHead whilst screeching about Bernie Bros which the whole Bernie Bro canard is the exact same logic MRA Youtubers and Skeptosphere types used against Feminism to launch their careers?

The whole logic of concern about "Bernie Bros" is the exact same logic of an MRA calling all Feminist cancerous because of mean tumblr posts and Amanda Marcotte articles and a "#KillAllMen" tweet thread. In the end the logic of "These people are mean and toxic to me and make me uncomfortable, thus their cause and message must be evil and bad and I hate them now" is the same.

Essentially the logic of your Bernie Bro concern is the same logic of the MRA. "Someone tweeted a snake at me or my favorite person? Welp, the Poors shouldn't get healthcare because someone on the internet said something that made me feel uncomfortable."

I am curious what the distinction is between these people who complain about "Bernie Bros" and say Sargon of Akkad/Applebees who says Feminism is Cancer because of what is found on Tumblr blogs.

[kaid]

The static image says "WARREN THE SNAKE." That tells me about all I need to know about the content and arguments therein. Namely, that it's probably a load of bullshit that supposes that Bernie is the One True God and everyone else is a secret conservative.

With shit like that video bernie followers wonder why warren did not back bernie right away. They seemed to act like bernie was entitled to that endorsement and her followers even though they treated her like poop for months.

[cubby]

So I'm clear, insulting, shouting down and generally ignoring all their concerns will have no effect on how you want them to vote? Interesting detach from reality.

You are the one mocking the Democratic nominee when he comes out with a very highly Presidential address. You tell me who's detached from reality. I'm not shouting down them, in case you missed reading that the first time. I'm yelling at you, because you're becoming part of the problem, by helping Trump win.

This all started by you mocking, AGAIN, Biden's behavior, not on policy, but on looks. Ignoring his stutter (did you even know he had one? - more facts for you to digest).

I've shown plenty. I've explained plenty. I've done considerably more than your side has in showing, explaining or done to illustrate why Biden is the right choice or the Dems are not responsible for being capitulating wusses.

No you haven't - not this issue. You keep shrilling that "everything is the same as 2016" - when that is not only outright fiction, it borders on lying. NOTHING is the same as 2016, you just think that because your candidate didn't win. And because your candidate lost, you think that everything else is going to be repeated. And it's not.

I given you plenty of facts, you ignore them.

We're getting into the "no, you are" bullshit. So let's try this another way. Everything I've quoted from you in this session has been devoid of facts. If you listed something, concrete, that points to Democrats repeating mistakes of 2016, please link it for me again, because I missed it. Otherwise, be open to the idea that you are pushing your feelings rather than objective facts, because your candidate lost.

Remember, this session here started because you mocked Biden. Not criticized his policies. Made fun of him. Like a school yard bully. And I've been 100% consistent on this - we cannot do that, period. Criticize policies and positions, hell yes. But not personal attacks.

Oh, yeah - you avoided the question - did you know Biden had a stutter? Do you know how that affects speaking habits?

[Shadowferal]

If you prefer Trump regardless who is in the D column, then you're part of the problem.

[Theodarzna]

If you prefer Trump regardless who is in the D column, then you're part of the problem.

Hey mate, a bunch of Democrats said mean things about Sanders, and insulted me and made me uncomfortable.

If the logic of the "Bernie Bro" works against Sanders than it sure as hell works against Biden, the DNC, and half the posters in this thread.

[Edge-]

The Democrats were warned they had had their choice: "Bernie or Trump". They seemingly want to choose Trump.

"WHY WON'T YOU LIKE US WHEN WE THREATEN TO HOLD YOU HOSTAGE?!?! IS IT SOME ESTABLISHMENT CONSPIRACY!?!?"

Seriously, look at yourself in the mirror.

[jonnysensible]

lmao the tankie accelerationist gets thier news from random youtubers and the grayzone. You might as well start linking rhizzone maoists.

Absolute information pollution. Brainworms stuff. Its seriously bad.

[Shadowferal]

You do not need to try and apply horseshoe theory to me. At this point I'd rather Trump win the presidency than Biden.

The whole "Bernie or bust" routine was done in 2016...and is finished.
The goal this year is to get the mentally challenged manchild off his throne.

[Sorshen]

You do not need to try and apply horseshoe theory to me. At this point I'd rather Trump win the presidency than Biden.

The Democrats were warned they had had their choice: "Bernie or Trump". They seemingly want to choose Trump.

I mean... even Bernie disagrees with your statement.
That being said, he should've been more aggressive in his campaign and not call his opponents friends, because they sure aren't trying to be friends.

[Theodarzna]

I mean... even Bernie disagrees with your statement.
That being said, he should've been more aggressive in his campaign and not call his opponents friends, because they sure aren't trying to be friends.

So? Bernie doesn't have a whip to demand what voters think, he has a good set of policies. And thus gets support, no policies, no votes.

[cubby]

The whole "Bernie or bust" routine was done in 2016...and is finished.
The goal this year is to get the mentally challenged manchild off his throne.

Exactly. I find it interesting that people are still pushing that narrative, and then claiming "our ilk will be the reason Trump wins again".

That should be the ONLY goal this November. Literally everything is secondary.

[Edge-]

The adult thing to do is to not 'ad hominem' the source, just because you don't like it or it has it's origins in 4chan.

Put forth arguments against the content, not the messenger.

The "adult" (are we children?) thing to do is ignore known terrible sources that are a waste of time, actually.

I mean, if I link some 30 minute Alex Jones/Infowars video...are you gonna watch the whole thing? Or are you going to ignore it because Jones is a fucking unhinged conspiracy nutter?

[Levelfive]

If that were really the case, Bernie would've won the nom in 2016, surely?

Sexism among voters has an influence, but it does not overcome Democrats in general being ideological cowards. They routinely pick the "safe" option, and routinely that option bites them in the ass come the general election.

1980/'84? Centrist Walter Mondale was the Dem option, lost to Reagan.
1988? Dukakis was a safe bet, lost.
1992/'96? Clinton won. Clinton was also seen as a bit of a wild card, a sax-playing libertine. He legislated more moderately, but the appearance was not so. Also, Ross Perot was spoiling the Republican vote at the time, by 19% of the popular vote in '92.
2000? Gore "won", but lost. Also, Gore was pretty damned centrist on basically every topic but climate change.
2004? Kerry. So aggressively moderate.
2008/2012? Obama, hope and change. Seen as progressive, legislated more centrist, in retrospect.
2016? Clinton, hard-centrist. Lost.

So yeah. If there's something the last 40 years shows, it's that moderate centrists who don't fire up the Democratic progressive tend to lose in the general, consistently. The only two winning streaks in there were Clinton and Obama, and they didn't fit that image at the times of their elections, at least.

- - - Updated - - -



I wouldn't use "messaging". The proper word is "propaganda". If we're entering a stage where you have to out-propagandize the opponent, because the electorate is too stupid/uninformed/apathetic to make a proper choice, democracy as a system is already collapsing in on itself and you're an election away from catastrophic failure.

Starlord is absolutely right, which the the data show:

"Roughly one-quarter of Sanders’s support in Democratic primaries and caucuses in 2016 came from #NeverHillary voters: people who didn’t vote for Clinton in the 2016 general election and who had no intention of doing so. (The #NeverHillary label is a little snarky, but it’s also quite literal: These are people who never voted for Clinton despite being given two opportunities to do so, in the primary and the general election.) This finding comes from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, a poll of more than 50,000 voters conducted by YouGov in conjunction with Harvard University. The CCES asked voters who they voted for in both the primaries and the general election; it also asked voters who didn’t vote in the general election who they would have chosen if they had voted. Here’s the overall breakdown of what Sanders primary voters did in November 2016.2
What Bernie Sanders primary voters did in November 2016

Voted for Hillary Clinton 74.3%
–
Voted for Donald Trump 12.0
–
Voted for Gary Johnson 3.2
–
Voted for Jill Stein 4.5
–
Voted for other candidates or voted but didn’t recall 2.5
–
Didn’t vote but said they would have voted for Clinton 1.6
–
Didn’t vote and didn’t say they would have voted Clinton 1.9
–

Voters in shaded categories are #NeverHillary voters.

Source: COOPERATIVE CONGRESSIONAL ELECTION STUDY

About 74 percent of Sanders’s primary voters also voted for Clinton in November 2016. Another 2 percent didn’t vote but said on the CCES that they would have voted for Clinton if they had voted; it doesn’t seem fair to consider them anti-Clinton voters, so we won’t include them in the #NeverHillary camp. The remaining 24 percent of Sanders voters were #NeverHillary in the general election, however. Of these, about half voted for Trump, while the remaining half voted for Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, another third-party candidate or didn’t vote.3

Overall, Sanders won 43 percent of the popular vote in Democratic primaries and caucuses in 2016. If 24 percent of that 43 percent were #NeverHillary voters, that means Sanders’s real base was more like 33 percent of the overall Democratic electorate. That isn’t nothing — it could easily carry the plurality in a divided field — and there were plenty of Clinton voters who liked Sanders, so he could pick up some of their votes too. But it does jibe with polls showing that Sanders and Warren together have around 30 percent of the Democratic primary electorate in 2020 and not the 43 percent that Sanders got in 2016.

You might be tempted to think that these #NeverHillary voters are leftists who thought Clinton was too much of pro-corporate, warmongering centrist. But relatively few of them were. Less than a fifth of them voted for Stein, for example. Instead, these voters were disproportionately likely to describe themselves as moderate or conservative. Among the 31 percent of self-described conservatives who voted for Sanders in the Democratic primaries, more than half were #NeverHillary voters, for example. A large minority of the independents and Republicans who supported Sanders were #NeverHillary voters as well.
#NeverHillary voters were conservative, not super liberal

(Chart here)

A more complicated way to characterize the #NeverHillary vote is via regression analysis. Using the CCES — which permits fairly intricate regression model designs because of its large sample size — I took all of Sanders’s primary voters in 2016 and evaluated a host of variables to see what predicted whether they were #NeverHillary in the general election.

The most significant variables were, first, whether the voter was a Democrat, and second and third, two policy questions that have proven to be highly predictive of voter preferences in the past: whether the voter thinks that white people benefit from their race and whether the voter wanted to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Non-Democrats, voters who didn’t think whites benefited from their race, and voters who wanted to repeal the ACA were much more likely to be #NeverHillary voters. Voters who were rural, poor, who lived in the South or the Northeast, who were born-again Christians, who were conservatives, and who were military veterans were also somewhat more likely to be #NeverHillary, other factors held equal. Black people, Hispanics, women, liberals, millennials, union members and voters with four-year college degrees were less likely to be #NeverHillary voters."

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...s-chances-now/

I would have attributed some small part of that to sexism until I read this and started get a real sense of its magnitude: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/o...sultPosition=2

Both of these are required reading if you want to have a better sense of what's driving Democratic voters.

ETA: Democrats have actually won 6 of the last 7 elections. The whole "people don't like moderates thing" doesn't really hold up.

[Bodakane]

You are the one mocking the Democratic nominee when he comes out with a very highly Presidential address. You tell me who's detached from reality. I'm not shouting down them, in case you missed reading that the first time. I'm yelling at you, because you're becoming part of the problem, by helping Trump win.

This all started by you mocking, AGAIN, Biden's behavior, not on policy, but on looks. Ignoring his stutter (did you even know he had one? - more facts for you to digest).




No you haven't - not this issue. You keep shrilling that "everything is the same as 2016" - when that is not only outright fiction, it borders on lying. NOTHING is the same as 2016, you just think that because your candidate didn't win. And because your candidate lost, you think that everything else is going to be repeated. And it's not.




We're getting into the "no, you are" bullshit. So let's try this another way. Everything I've quoted from you in this session has been devoid of facts. If you listed something, concrete, that points to Democrats repeating mistakes of 2016, please link it for me again, because I missed it. Otherwise, be open to the idea that you are pushing your feelings rather than objective facts, because your candidate lost.

Remember, this session here started because you mocked Biden. Not criticized his policies. Made fun of him. Like a school yard bully. And I've been 100% consistent on this - we cannot do that, period. Criticize policies and positions, hell yes. But not personal attacks.

Oh, yeah - you avoided the question - did you know Biden had a stutter? Do you know how that affects speaking habits?

Yes, i know about his stutter.

No, when I said he was losing his mind I was not talking about his stutter. I was talking about things like thinking it makes sense to talk about his hairy legs in a swimming pool, et all.

No, Biden was not my first choice, like you it was Warren.

Yes, i did explain how it was the same. You ignored it. We are putting forth the same type of candidate, with the same type of policies and experience, that is closer to old school republican than liberal and we are doing it because we think it is the safe pick. That is the strategy we used in 2016, it is the strategy we are using now. Politically there's virtually no difference between Hillary and Biden. She was an unlikable woman and he's male gaffe machine, other than that, virtually the same thing. Regardless if you understand it or not, that is how the independents in the swing states will likely see it. Once again, i challenge you to explain why those people voted for Trump over Hillary and why those reasons are different now that Biden is the nom. You better hope against hope they just hate Trump more than they are angry for the Dems not listening.

No, this session started because you, in your fervor, misconstrued something and went nuclear over it, just like you've been doing with Bernie supporters.