Mega-Thread: Democratic 2020 Primaries

[Elegiac]

Warren certainly isn't trying her hardest to clear any misconceptions.

Not sure why she should considering Sanders has gotten concessions since 2016 regarding the behaviour of his supporters.

[Benggaul]

And now they're up in arms on Twitter spamming snake emojis and #neverwarren hashtags, lol.

The intersection of personality type between Trump and Bernie supporters is quite large, it seems.

If you drew up a Venn diagram of personality types with the hardcore MAGA Trump supporters and the "Bernie or Bust" group I'm pretty sure it'd damned near be a circle at this point. "My candidate isn't winning so fuck everything!" just pervades their mentality such as it is.

[Theodarzna]

I'm sorry, what? This is literally what the articles say. Bernie said, in a private meeting, that the political calculus wasn't there and he didn't think a woman could beat Trump in 2020. Warren disagreed. That has been the story from day 1. It's literally what she said on stage last night.

It's Bernie's people who are crying about how she's saying Bernie is a misogynist, when she did not say that at all.

Leaking out just a context free "He said a woman couldn't win" and failing to elaborate on that is merely trying to claim plausible deniability. We are all adults here with functioning brains, nobody is foolish enough to sincerely think this wasn't mean to imply he was sexist against woman. If that is what it was, Warren would state as much, but instead she wants to leave room for the imagination. More over, her trying to do this when her polls are sinking and support evaporating looks utterly craven and calculated at best, or at absolute worst its a kamikaze attack in hopes of earning the VP pick from Biden. The fact that she waited two years to be announce this proves she is full of it.

[Fugus]

If you drew up a Venn diagram of personality types with the hardcore MAGA Trump supporters and the "Bernie or Bust" group I'm pretty sure it'd damned near be a circle at this point. "My candidate isn't winning so fuck everything!" just pervades their mentality such as it is.

No, not in the slightest, many of those "Bernie Bros" would have supported Clinton if she hadn't pulled DWS into her campaign after what she had pulled or many of the other stuff. And if you notice, many of those "Bernie Bros" held their nose and voted for her anyways even after all of that and in greater numbers than the "Beta Males for Hillary" did after she lost her primary.

[Elegiac]

Plagiarists complaining about a lack of transparency will never cease to amuse me.

[rogueMatthias]

If you drew up a Venn diagram of personality types with the hardcore MAGA Trump supporters and the "Bernie or Bust" group I'm pretty sure it'd damned near be a circle at this point. "My candidate isn't winning so fuck everything!" just pervades their mentality such as it is.

A big problem in the US is that it's a two-party system where each party contains many wildly different (and oft conflicting) set of values and ideas. AOC recently dismissed Biden by saying that they wouldn't be in the same party in any other country - It's completely true. The Democrats are at least 3 different parties in one now. The US parties just become alliances of groups with wildly conflicting views.

IMO it's quite reasonable under that situation for voters to say "My candidate or bust" as the candidates are so far apart in their beliefs. If you take out political loyalty and beating Trump (which is the only thing holding the Dems together at the moment) then why should a big Bernie supporter want to vote for Biden?

[Gestopft]

They like to spout how they changed 2018.....but 2018's change came from the middle. AOC didn't flip a seat, she primaried an establishment Dem. Good for her, the party needs to be younger and more progressive. But we won the House by winning purple districts that voted for Trump in 2016.

If only I trusted the DNC to estimate the "middle voter" though. Because what bothers me most, as a Progressive, is the party using 'red state' Dems to funnel all of the corporate and Wall Street cash, when that doesn't need to be the case. Because in general, it's not Democrats' stances on economic issues that scare away voters, it's social issues. The "middle voter" is center-left to left on economics and center to center-right on social and identity issues.

Take Claire McCaskill for example: she lost her Missouri Senate race in the same cycle that Missouri voters increased the minimum wage, passed a referendum on campaign finance, and rejected their GoP legislature's right-to-work law- all by very large margins. McCaskill was with Missouri voters on all of these issues, and her opponent against, yet she still lost.

[eschatological]

Leaking out just a context free "He said a woman couldn't win" and failing to elaborate on that is merely trying to claim plausible deniability. We are all adults here with functioning brains, nobody is foolish enough to sincerely think this wasn't mean to imply he was sexist against woman. If that is what it was, Warren would state as much, but instead she wants to leave room for the imagination. More over, her trying to do this when her polls are sinking and support evaporating looks utterly craven and calculated at best, or at absolute worst its a kamikaze attack in hopes of earning the VP pick from Biden. The fact that she waited two years to be announce this proves she is full of it.

That's only the message if you only read the headline. Every article I've read said that it was a private conversation in which Bernie said he didn't think a woman could beat Trump in 2020.

Is it Warren's fault if Bernie Bros take a headline, don't do any in-depth reading, and then froth at the mouth like the Trump supporters they supposedly so vehemently despise?

Replacing one rabid political fanbase for another isn't something I care to do. I'm a Democrat who opposed Obama on many things - I don't want a Democratic President who I can't criticize lest his fanboys come for me like rabid dogs.

- - - Updated - - -

If only I trusted the DNC to estimate the "middle voter" though. Because what bothers me most, as a Progressive, is the party using 'red state' Dems to funnel all of the corporate and Wall Street cash, when that doesn't need to be the case. Because in general, it's not Democrats' stances on economic issues that scare away voters, it's social issues. The "middle voter" is center-left to left on economics and center to center-right on social and identity issues.

Take Claire McCaskill for example: she lost her Missouri Senate race in the same cycle that Missouri voters increased the minimum wage, passed a referendum on campaign finance, and rejected their GoP legislature's right-to-work law- all by very large margins. McCaskill was with Missouri voters on all of these issues, and her opponent against, yet she still lost.

The problem is, the social issues are moral stands. It's hard to tell the Democratic establishment to just give up on rights arguments because the average American voter doesn't want to hear about "other" people. That's what happened during Civil Rights, and the Democratic party lost the South forever because of it. Should we have not done it then to consolidate that middle voter who thought blacks should still be segregated and unequal?

[Theodarzna]

That's only the message if you only read the headline. Every article I've read said that it was a private conversation in which Bernie said he didn't think a woman could beat Trump in 2020.

Is it Warren's fault if Bernie Bros take a headline, don't do any in-depth reading, and then froth at the mouth like the Trump supporters they supposedly so vehemently despise?

Replacing one rabid political fanbase for another isn't something I care to do. I'm a Democrat who opposed Obama on many things - I don't want a Democratic President who I can't criticize lest his fanboys come for me like rabid dogs.

First, that is the point, its a political attack knowing full well a lot of the public will only read the headline and plenty of news sources are going to misrepresent the issue.

Again, you and others are being completely disingenuous about this. At this point its basically gaslighting, screaming out in pain even as you stab someone.

[Dacien]

Leaking out just a context free "He said a woman couldn't win" and failing to elaborate on that is merely trying to claim plausible deniability. We are all adults here with functioning brains, nobody is foolish enough to sincerely think this wasn't mean to imply he was sexist against woman. If that is what it was, Warren would state as much, but instead she wants to leave room for the imagination. More over, her trying to do this when her polls are sinking and support evaporating looks utterly craven and calculated at best, or at absolute worst its a kamikaze attack in hopes of earning the VP pick from Biden. The fact that she waited two years to be announce this proves she is full of it.

This is politics, after all. I'm not surprised. But the part that trips me out is the reflexive support for Warren because she's the correct gender. Like, we don't really know at this point, but we believe Warren because she's a woman and we believe women. Even the moderators of the debate proceeded as if Warren was absolutely truthful.

[Endus]

This is a poor understanding of the situation. The U.S. has been dragged right not because of the failure of left-leaning individuals, but because of the country's history of isolationism which led into antagonistic opposition to a country which was, on paper, left-wing (even though that government could have been more aptly labeled authoritarian or fascist). Like mentioned, we put up very progressive candidates in the 80s, and got annihilated. The hippies of the 60s literally betrayed the cause because of the deregulatory excesses of the 80s during which they all got filthy fucking rich. And it all started well before any supposed "capitulation" by the left.

That antagonism and propagandizing exacerbates the point I was making, but it doesn't contradict it. Just presents another reason for left-wingers to abandon left-wing principles and lean increasingly rightward, by buying into that propaganda.

Also, the hippies of the '60s was, largely, just youthful rebellion, not an actual cultural shift. That is why they "grew up" and became bankers and stockbrokers; they were just fucking around in their youth before "settling down". Not all of them; some really did believe in those views, but most of the rest were just being counter-culture for rebellion's sake, and gave it up once the fad died down and they grew out of it. It was never an actual ideological shift, in either direction, for the majority.

We've gone with more moderate candidates in the past 30 years, and it was a necessary adjustment. The Democratic party, post Civil Rights, was on the brink of extinction as the Dixiecrats went permanently to the GOP, and the GOP painted itself as the "big tent" party.

Those Dixiecrats were right-wingers, moving to the right-wing party. Even beyond the racism, the Democratic Party had largely been the conservative party, in the decades before the Civil Rights movement. That was the era where the two parties split back apart, with the GOP leaning hard right with the Southern Strategy, and the Democrats leaning leftward. The Dixiecrats were a relic of the old guard, and their shift had as much to do with their conservativism as anything else; the Civil Rights issue was the straw that broke the camel's back.

We have, since Clinton in '92, been slowly pushing more and more left with each candidate. And yes, I consider Hillary to be left of her husband, if not Obama, who coincidentally helped push her left as well.

Clinton wasn't particularly left, to begin with. Obama may have been a shift leftward from there, but I can't really see Hillary as even further left. The biggest criticism against Clinton in the 2016 election was that she was too conservative, and it turned off a lot of left-leaning Democratic voters, leading to relatively low turnout at the polls.

My contention is always that she was fairly left (as seen by her attempt at universal health care in '94)

Frankly, the idea that a push for universal healthcare is "fairly left", when universal healthcare is a largely nonpartisan status quo in every other developed nation on the planet, that just underscores my point. That you see it as "left-wing" at all is literally a description of the narrowly right-wing Overton Window I was talking about. To go back to my number scores; universal healthcare is a policy that sits around a 5 on that scale. You seeing it as "left" is because the American Overton Window goes from 6-10, these days, and left-wing views are off the table entirely, and even centrist positions like universal healthcare are considered unfeasibly left-wing.

That was literally my point.

[eschatological]

First, that is the point, its a political attack knowing full well a lot of the public will only read the headline and plenty of news sources are going to misrepresent the issue.

Again, you and others are being completely disingenuous about this. At this point its basically gaslighting, screaming out in pain even as you stab someone.

I'm sorry, you're saying I'm gaslighting by not accounting for the rabid overreaction of a demagogic political base who has no depth to their analysis of anything? That even though every article about every leak about this so-called scandal was talking about a very specific assessment of political calculus, I'm the one gaslighting for Warren's surrogates who surreptitiously leaked the story to create the rabid overreaction?

That's like saying I invited raccoons to destroy my garbage cans out because I dared to throw out my trash.


And last I checked, you weren't a Democrat, or voting in this primary, so what exactly are you trying to debate here?

[Theodarzna]

I'm sorry, you're saying I'm gaslighting by not accounting for the rabid overreaction of a demagogic political base who has no depth to their analysis of anything? That even though every article about every leak about this so-called scandal was talking about a very specific assessment of political calculus, I'm the one gaslighting for Warren's surrogates who surreptitiously leaked the story to create the rabid overreaction?

That's like saying I invited raccoons to destroy my garbage cans out because I dared to throw out my trash.


And last I checked, you weren't a Democrat, or voting in this primary, so what exactly are you trying to debate here?

Gaslighting in that anyone with half a brain can read what is being done, and here you are saying "You are just crazy!" in response. It is hardly an overreaction to see someone shamelessly try to smear someone and in a low down and dirty way.

Bernie Sanders was a Feminist when Warren was a Republican fighting for Reaganomics, more over Bernie Sanders won as a Socialist when Warren was still giving talks at the Federalist Society advocating for deregulation.

[Endus]

I refer you to Endus' post who explained quite well how this sort of thinking is one of the main reasons why US politics keep leaning right... while the rest of the modern world has moved on.

To sum up something that was implied and apparently went largely unnoticed, my point is that a primary is a time for every voice to be heard, and put on the ballot, and put to a vote. If that means Bernie gets the most votes, so be it. Primaries are where you set the direction and the Overton Window for debate.

The general election, that's where strategic voting comes into play. Not the primaries. If you're gonna refuse to vote for Bernie Sanders because he's "too far left", you're implicitly stating you think he's as bad an option as Trump, and thus cannot decide. If you don't think that, even if Bernie Sanders isn't who you want as President, you vote Bernie.

Elections work through participation. Not bothering to vote is an implicit statement that you support both candidates equally. If you find one more objectionable than the other, democratic principle states you vote for the least bad option. Democracy is not about "getting your way", and throwing an ideological tantrum and refusing to participate because you didn't get the option you prefer, that's how democracies die. Because you let fringe groups control the entire election process, despite not having majority support.

[eschatological]

-snip-

I don't deny that the political spectrum in the U.S. is shifted right. I deny that A) it's the fault of capitulating leftists who just kowtowed to the propaganda, and B) that the answer is pushing it in extremis in the opposite direction.

The history of this rightward shift in the U.S. is literally historical in nature. The USSR was actually antagonistic, something that can't be denied, and by virtue of them being left wing on paper, it pushed the politics of this country right. Even Civil Rights was seen by many in this country as a Communist plot to dilute American power.

As for the right approach - this is a fight for inches, imo. It is a consistent strain every day. I'm the most progressive person I know. But I grew up in a blue collar, rust belt upstate NY town, and if I had lived 80 miles south in PA, I'd be in the midst of swing voter territory. Most of my friends, while being blue collar union workers and thus tending towards Democratic politics, need to be gently nudged left on almost everything, as opposed to dragged kicking and screaming. If they're dragged, they're just gonna sit down and refuse, because if there's one thing that defines American culture, it's that mythos of the rugged, free individual.

[Dacien]

Elections work through participation. Not bothering to vote is an implicit statement that you support both candidates equally. If you find one more objectionable than the other, democratic principle states you vote for the least bad option.

A lot of people applied this principle towards plugging their nose and voting for Trump, yet many people here will tell you that the only noble thing for them to have done was not to vote.

[eschatological]

Bernie Sanders was a Feminist when Warren was a Republican fighting for Reaganomics, more over Bernie Sanders won as a Socialist when Warren was still giving talks at the Federalist Society advocating for deregulation.

The problem is, no one has said Bernie Sanders isn't a feminist. And to read into this leak as anything more than politicking is hilariously dumb.

And yes, Warren was a Republican. As she tweeted last night, she still has Republican brothers. She has changed her mind. She talks about it extensively, about the idea logical appeal underpinning Reaganomics, and how she had to break free of that. Guess what - 90% of America believed full-throatedly in Reaganomics as well. Ask Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis about it.

[Theodarzna]

The problem is, no one has said Bernie Sanders isn't a feminist. And to read into this leak as anything more than politicking is hilariously dumb.

And yes, Warren was a Republican. As she tweeted last night, she still has Republican brothers. She has changed her mind. She talks about it extensively, about the idea logical appeal underpinning Reaganomics, and how she had to break free of that. Guess what - 90% of America believed full-throatedly in Reaganomics as well. Ask Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis about it.

The point of the leak was to imply via innuendo that Bernie Sanders is misogynistic and sexist against women. Notice team Warren isn't denying that innuendo, they aren't saying "Full stop, Bernie Sanders isn't sexist!" I would honestly respect team Warren if they had the guts to just go all out and say that, but hiding it, playing footsy with it and trying to have plausible deniability will putting the innuendo out there and lying by omission makes Warren look like a complete simpering coward. Hell, if it was even worth noting why wait till now if the revelation or claim wasn't a political tactic? Why not reveal two years ago when the iron was hot?

[Endus]

I don't deny that the political spectrum in the U.S. is shifted right. I deny that A) it's the fault of capitulating leftists who just kowtowed to the propaganda, and B) that the answer is pushing it in extremis in the opposite direction.

Ignoring A) for a moment, basically no one is calling for a push to an extreme-left point of view. My views are fairly left-wing, and they aren't "extremist". B) just isn't something anyone was proposing, to begin with.

The history of this rightward shift in the U.S. is literally historical in nature. The USSR was actually antagonistic, something that can't be denied, and by virtue of them being left wing on paper, it pushed the politics of this country right. Even Civil Rights was seen by many in this country as a Communist plot to dilute American power.

Yes, that's "historical", but it's a history of anti-left-wing propaganda. To frighten left-wing supporters into quieting themselves and their views, for fear of being painted as "commies" or the like.

Again, literally my point. What was pushing the politics rightward was the unfair demonization of left-wing views, and the left-wing supporters who did not fight back against that misrepresentation, but allowed the propaganda to continue.

Would they have won that fight? Maybe not. But they didn't even try.

Yes, that stuff came out from the right wing, pulling the Overton Window rightward. My point is that the left wing made no attempt to counter that propaganda push, and let it continue without much contest.

As for the right approach - this is a fight for inches, imo. It is a consistent strain every day. I'm the most progressive person I know. But I grew up in a blue collar, rust belt upstate NY town, and if I had lived 80 miles south in PA, I'd be in the midst of swing voter territory. Most of my friends, while being blue collar union workers and thus tending towards Democratic politics, need to be gently nudged left on almost everything, as opposed to dragged kicking and screaming. If they're dragged, they're just gonna sit down and refuse, because if there's one thing that defines American culture, it's that mythos of the rugged, free individual.

Sure, I'm describing a decades-long decline as a propaganda regime dug itself ever-deeper into the American psyche. That's not gonna get fixed overnight.

But the first step to doing so is admitting the problem exists.

- - - Updated - - -

A lot of people applied this principle towards plugging their nose and voting for Trump, yet many people here will tell you that the only noble thing for them to have done was not to vote.

It means those who did so are Trump supporters. They knew he was a lying, manipulative con man of a business magnate, with a deep history of racism and deceit, and voted for him anyway, because Hillary Clinton seemed worse.

They get condemned because of how thoroughly ridiculous a position that is, on its lack of internal merit. They don't want to take responsibility for their own poorly-informed decision, and that's not gonna happen; they're gonna wear that.

The problem is, no one has said Bernie Sanders isn't a feminist. And to read into this leak as anything more than politicking is hilariously dumb.

It's also projection; they won't consider nuance and context, so they presume nobody else will, so any comment that can be misconstrued in the worst way must only mean that worst thing, if the guy is on "the other side". Conversely, only the best possible way, if they're on your side.

Considering the surrounding context to determine meaning and intent simply doesn't occur to them.

[Blur4stuff]

Months ago Warren was my 1st choice and Sanders was 2nd. She stumbled on healthcare so I swapped them. After last night I don't think she's even in my top three.

I know trolls (foreign and domestic) love stirring this kind of shit, but it also seems clear at this point that her campaign did this, perhaps with her complete knowledge and support. She flat out fucked up last night with how she handled it. We can't afford those kinds of mistakes in the general election.

Although, when this first broke it felt like it had Obama's people's fingerprints all over it to try and drag down Sanders to give Warren an opening. I don't know if that had anything to do with it, but either way it backfired.