When Biden beat Bernie it sucked, but the other candidates dropped out and put their weight behind Biden so it allowed him to get the most votes. That’s not anti democratic, just strategy.
I’d say this go round will be much less democratic if Biden drops out, because registered Democrats more or less all voted for Biden and then all these party insider delegates will actually be the ones picking the candidate.
Don’t get me wrong, I will still vote and advocate for pretty much anyone over Trump, but the Democratic party is not covering themselves in glory here.
In my ideal system we’d have ranked choice voting, so many people can run without risking being a “spoiler”. If an individual doesn’t have enough votes to get a majority, those votes will move on to the voter’s second choice, then third choice and so on until someone has a majority of support.
I’m a long time Bernie supporter, and as I said I’d like to see ranked choice voting because it more accurately captures voter’s preference.
That said, how was the 2020 primary not democratic? If one soccer player passes the ball to another and they score is that manipulating the system? It’s playing the game by the rules. What is the alternative to people dropping out of the primary? Should they be forced to keep running even if it’s clear they won’t win?
You’re right that some rules aren’t ideal. For example, thinking of this current primary my understanding is that if a candidate drops out, their pledged delegates are free to vote for whoever. That’s pretty undemocratic since now the preferences of a bunch of voters is not connected to who the candidate is.
In the case of the 2020 primary, people did get to vote for who they wanted. To me it’s not a conspiracy when candidates drop out because they see there’s no chance they’ll win and they want someone who is sort of like minded to succeed. It sucks because in this case it was someone who I didn’t prefer.
But think of the recent French election - a bunch of centrist candidates dropped out after the first run because they wanted to make sure the far right candidates didn’t win. That meant more far left people won. The far right in France were complaining that this was unfair. But all it really showed is they didn’t have a majority of support in those districts, and the other “team” played the game better.
If one soccer player passes the ball to another and they score is that manipulating the system? It’s playing the game by the rules. What is the alternative to people dropping out of the primary? Should they be forced to keep running even if it’s clear they won’t win?
This is a bad analogy. A better one would be that a soccer player was kicked from the game for a penalty, but as they’re leaving the field - while the game is still active - they kick the ball to one of their own players who then scores the winning goal. That’s totally unfair; the penalized player was already out of the game and shouldn’t be influencing it further, more or less helping to score the winning goal.
A truly democratic election would allow for all voters to be informed and making their own logical choice for president. But instead, we have millions of uninformed voters who are clinging to every word of whatever candidate they happen to associate with first. And when that person doesn’t make the cut, they throw their support behind another specific candidate still in the running. Instead of telling their constituents to make informed, logical decisions on their next choice of candidate, they’re leading their flock of followers to whomever they’re being paid to support after dropping out. And you know these guys are being paid to push certain party-approved candidates. I mean, we just recently learned that the DNC specifically pushed out all their legit candidates so they could throw support behind Biden and crush Bernie.
I don’t think this is very democratic. It’s misleading at best. But until a majority of people actually take the time to properly research candidates, it’s the corrupt system we’re stuck with.
It’s frustrating that Bernie didn’t win, and I think he has the best policies. Democracy works by allowing people to have input on how things are run. If I’m reading you right you feel like a lot of voters aren’t properly informed. Isn’t that on the candidates and their campaigns? If a candidate drops out and tells their supporters “I recommend you follow so and so now” it’s on those people to do their research, but ultimately who are we to tell them we’re wrong?
Democracy is a kind of error correction. Any one of us may be wrong, and we’re all wrong about something. So distributing decision making across many people with different perspectives, experiences and reasoning processes is a way to guard against individual error.
Even with that process unfortunately many times the majority thinking has been shown to be misguided with time and new perspective. We can try to persuade and inform, and should. But many times our cause loses an election, and that doesn’t automatically mean it’s a conspiracy or cheating.
It was incredibly anti-democratic. The superdelegate system is designed to stop democracy from occurring in the party and ensure the candidate is picked by big donors.
You’re right, superdelegates are bullshit. They didn’t play into Biden beating Bernie, although they could have if it was closer. As I understand it the rules have been revised so that superdelegates can’t fuck up the first vote, but could if there are additional rounds. Regardless they should be eliminated.
Surely you are aware that after 2016 the Sanders campaign worked with the DNC to overhaul the superdelegate system, right? Not that it actually made any difference in either primary.
This is what kills me about that argument. Yeah the idea of super delegates is scummy, but that’s all it ever was. An idea. It wasn’t implemented. People of concocted this fiction where the vote was stolen. It’s just nonsense.
Because the people still voted brother. The people made a choice with their votes. They chose between Biden and Bernie and they chose Biden. Nobody changed their votes. You can argue that Biden wouldn’t have won if the others have remained in, but it was a straight up vote.
I think they’re talking about this round. The Democratic primary meant nothing because Biden isn’t running anymore suddenly and they’re the one picking the candidate.
It’s still obviously a better choice than Trump by far, but there’s no way the DNC didn’t know Biden’s condition for this long. This was pure politics, manipulation, and undemocratic. There wasn’t a choice on who the candidate is, only which pre-selected candidate you don’t want to be president.
Very underhanded of a tactic, but undeniably an effective one, despite everything, I can acknowledge that at least.
If she at least picks AOC as vice president, I’ll actually go through the hassle of voting from abroad again, since I don’t live there anymore.
The First Amendment isn’t just freedom of speech; it’s also freedom of association. So, people have the right to form political parties, and they will form them unless forced not to.
There are always going to be two big parties, due to the fact that the US uses first-past-the-post voting. FPTP creates a two-party system. This is called Duverger’s Law.
Democrat here. Didn’t vote in this primary as, if I recall correctly, I would have had to write in anyone other than Biden. Didn’t see the point, although I would have liked someone else. The party needs to get it’s head out of its ass and start doing some of the long-term planning Republicans were doing pre-trump.
This is essentially cardinal/approval voting with a runoff step. Except it’s less efficient, because the nature of the systems necessitates a manual runoff step rather than leaving it as a contingency or engineering a mechanism that automatically simulates one based off of ranked choice. It also fails to accommodate the possibility of a 3-way tie.
Sounds like we’re all jumping in to tell you about how RCV is the bare minimum improvement over FPTP. Approval Voting is arguably the best. It’s so simple your ballot will always be counted, no matter how you fill in the bubbles. It’s very popular in Fargo and St. Louis.
"Voters in RCV can’t always safely vote 1st choice for their honest favorites
Ranked Choice proponents often make the inaccurate claim that “With RCV, voters can honestly rank candidates in order of choice. Voters know that if their first choice doesn’t win, their vote automatically counts for their next choice instead. This frees voters from worrying about how others will vote and which candidates are more or less likely to win.”
In fact, you can only safely rank candidates honestly in RCV if your favorite either has no chance at all or is a very strong candidate. There is no guarantee that if your favorite is eliminated your next choice will actually be counted."
Basically if the “green” party or whatever gets big enough to oust blue then instead of the green splitting and most if not all of green voters going to blue and blue winning, blue splits and then it’s down to what the blue voters put as secondary. If the blue voters were 50/50 green/red then it’s very possible red wins (which is the worst outcome for a green voter. Most greens would prefer blue over red.)
However, saying all that, I STILL would choose RCV over FPTP. I just wish STAR would get some recognition since RCV actually doesn’t solve all our issues. RCV does have one thing that STAR doesn’t, and that’s that more people know what it is and it has been used in real elections.
If the blue voters were 50/50 green/red then it’s very possible red wins (which is the worst outcome for a green voter. Most greens would prefer blue over red.)
If most greens would prefer blue…then why are they voting for red in the first place?
If you vote for something you don’t want, and you get it, isn’t that your fault? That isn’t a flaw in the voting system.
If what you say is true (most greens prefer blue over red), then it shouldn’t be 50/50 in the first place. It would be 60% blue and 40% red or something like that.
When Biden beat Bernie it sucked, but the other candidates dropped out and put their weight behind Biden so it allowed him to get the most votes. That’s not anti democratic, just strategy.
I’d say this go round will be much less democratic if Biden drops out, because registered Democrats more or less all voted for Biden and then all these party insider delegates will actually be the ones picking the candidate.
Don’t get me wrong, I will still vote and advocate for pretty much anyone over Trump, but the Democratic party is not covering themselves in glory here.
In my ideal system we’d have ranked choice voting, so many people can run without risking being a “spoiler”. If an individual doesn’t have enough votes to get a majority, those votes will move on to the voter’s second choice, then third choice and so on until someone has a majority of support.
How is it not anti democratic? It’s a group of elites collaborating to manipulate the system. The party primary system itself is antidemocratic.
These are our elites and they doing for us best for us!
I’m a long time Bernie supporter, and as I said I’d like to see ranked choice voting because it more accurately captures voter’s preference.
That said, how was the 2020 primary not democratic? If one soccer player passes the ball to another and they score is that manipulating the system? It’s playing the game by the rules. What is the alternative to people dropping out of the primary? Should they be forced to keep running even if it’s clear they won’t win?
You’re right that some rules aren’t ideal. For example, thinking of this current primary my understanding is that if a candidate drops out, their pledged delegates are free to vote for whoever. That’s pretty undemocratic since now the preferences of a bunch of voters is not connected to who the candidate is.
In the case of the 2020 primary, people did get to vote for who they wanted. To me it’s not a conspiracy when candidates drop out because they see there’s no chance they’ll win and they want someone who is sort of like minded to succeed. It sucks because in this case it was someone who I didn’t prefer.
But think of the recent French election - a bunch of centrist candidates dropped out after the first run because they wanted to make sure the far right candidates didn’t win. That meant more far left people won. The far right in France were complaining that this was unfair. But all it really showed is they didn’t have a majority of support in those districts, and the other “team” played the game better.
This is a bad analogy. A better one would be that a soccer player was kicked from the game for a penalty, but as they’re leaving the field - while the game is still active - they kick the ball to one of their own players who then scores the winning goal. That’s totally unfair; the penalized player was already out of the game and shouldn’t be influencing it further, more or less helping to score the winning goal.
A truly democratic election would allow for all voters to be informed and making their own logical choice for president. But instead, we have millions of uninformed voters who are clinging to every word of whatever candidate they happen to associate with first. And when that person doesn’t make the cut, they throw their support behind another specific candidate still in the running. Instead of telling their constituents to make informed, logical decisions on their next choice of candidate, they’re leading their flock of followers to whomever they’re being paid to support after dropping out. And you know these guys are being paid to push certain party-approved candidates. I mean, we just recently learned that the DNC specifically pushed out all their legit candidates so they could throw support behind Biden and crush Bernie.
I don’t think this is very democratic. It’s misleading at best. But until a majority of people actually take the time to properly research candidates, it’s the corrupt system we’re stuck with.
It’s frustrating that Bernie didn’t win, and I think he has the best policies. Democracy works by allowing people to have input on how things are run. If I’m reading you right you feel like a lot of voters aren’t properly informed. Isn’t that on the candidates and their campaigns? If a candidate drops out and tells their supporters “I recommend you follow so and so now” it’s on those people to do their research, but ultimately who are we to tell them we’re wrong?
Democracy is a kind of error correction. Any one of us may be wrong, and we’re all wrong about something. So distributing decision making across many people with different perspectives, experiences and reasoning processes is a way to guard against individual error.
Even with that process unfortunately many times the majority thinking has been shown to be misguided with time and new perspective. We can try to persuade and inform, and should. But many times our cause loses an election, and that doesn’t automatically mean it’s a conspiracy or cheating.
It was incredibly anti-democratic. The superdelegate system is designed to stop democracy from occurring in the party and ensure the candidate is picked by big donors.
You’re right, superdelegates are bullshit. They didn’t play into Biden beating Bernie, although they could have if it was closer. As I understand it the rules have been revised so that superdelegates can’t fuck up the first vote, but could if there are additional rounds. Regardless they should be eliminated.
Surely you are aware that after 2016 the Sanders campaign worked with the DNC to overhaul the superdelegate system, right? Not that it actually made any difference in either primary.
This is what kills me about that argument. Yeah the idea of super delegates is scummy, but that’s all it ever was. An idea. It wasn’t implemented. People of concocted this fiction where the vote was stolen. It’s just nonsense.
Because the people still voted brother. The people made a choice with their votes. They chose between Biden and Bernie and they chose Biden. Nobody changed their votes. You can argue that Biden wouldn’t have won if the others have remained in, but it was a straight up vote.
I think they’re talking about this round. The Democratic primary meant nothing because Biden isn’t running anymore suddenly and they’re the one picking the candidate.
It’s still obviously a better choice than Trump by far, but there’s no way the DNC didn’t know Biden’s condition for this long. This was pure politics, manipulation, and undemocratic. There wasn’t a choice on who the candidate is, only which pre-selected candidate you don’t want to be president.
Very underhanded of a tactic, but undeniably an effective one, despite everything, I can acknowledge that at least.
If she at least picks AOC as vice president, I’ll actually go through the hassle of voting from abroad again, since I don’t live there anymore.
I don’t think so the post before that specifically bought up Biden versus Bernie. Which didn’t happen in 2024.
Yes! Ranked choice voting. And get rid of the party system!
You can’t get rid of the party system. Not without violating the First Amendment, anyway.
I’m sorry, what? How would the eelimination of the two big-tent political parties contravene freedom of speech?
The First Amendment isn’t just freedom of speech; it’s also freedom of association. So, people have the right to form political parties, and they will form them unless forced not to.
There are always going to be two big parties, due to the fact that the US uses first-past-the-post voting. FPTP creates a two-party system. This is called Duverger’s Law.
You lot have got rid of other amendments before, right?
Prohibition was added and removed,so that’s a wash. Slavery one is still kinda there if you count private prisons. Hmmm.
Republicans are doing their best to get rid of 15, 19, 22, 24 though, and probably 1 if they can get away with it.
“beat Bernie” is generous. I’d use “had Obama call Bernie and say some shit we still don’t know about”
What does that mean? Biden got more votes than Bernie
Democrat here. Didn’t vote in this primary as, if I recall correctly, I would have had to write in anyone other than Biden. Didn’t see the point, although I would have liked someone else. The party needs to get it’s head out of its ass and start doing some of the long-term planning Republicans were doing pre-trump.
There was a “no confidence” option, and that’s what I chose.
Ah, I wasn’t aware. Thanks for the tip - I’ll be sure to use it the next time I need to.
What is that?
Ranked choice is just a patch. The real ideal system is PR system with coalition and a parliamentary prime minister instead of president.
STAR voting would be better.
This is essentially cardinal/approval voting with a runoff step. Except it’s less efficient, because the nature of the systems necessitates a manual runoff step rather than leaving it as a contingency or engineering a mechanism that automatically simulates one based off of ranked choice. It also fails to accommodate the possibility of a 3-way tie.
I’ll personally take any improvement I can get, in both primaries and general elections.
Sounds like we’re all jumping in to tell you about how RCV is the bare minimum improvement over FPTP. Approval Voting is arguably the best. It’s so simple your ballot will always be counted, no matter how you fill in the bubbles. It’s very popular in Fargo and St. Louis.
Ranked choice voting doesn’t get rid of the chance of a spoiler, though. We’d need to go to STAR for that.
How is this better than ranked choice? I’ve never heard of it
https://www.equal.vote/star_vs_rcv
"Voters in RCV can’t always safely vote 1st choice for their honest favorites Ranked Choice proponents often make the inaccurate claim that “With RCV, voters can honestly rank candidates in order of choice. Voters know that if their first choice doesn’t win, their vote automatically counts for their next choice instead. This frees voters from worrying about how others will vote and which candidates are more or less likely to win.”
In fact, you can only safely rank candidates honestly in RCV if your favorite either has no chance at all or is a very strong candidate. There is no guarantee that if your favorite is eliminated your next choice will actually be counted."
Basically if the “green” party or whatever gets big enough to oust blue then instead of the green splitting and most if not all of green voters going to blue and blue winning, blue splits and then it’s down to what the blue voters put as secondary. If the blue voters were 50/50 green/red then it’s very possible red wins (which is the worst outcome for a green voter. Most greens would prefer blue over red.)
However, saying all that, I STILL would choose RCV over FPTP. I just wish STAR would get some recognition since RCV actually doesn’t solve all our issues. RCV does have one thing that STAR doesn’t, and that’s that more people know what it is and it has been used in real elections.
If most greens would prefer blue…then why are they voting for red in the first place?
If you vote for something you don’t want, and you get it, isn’t that your fault? That isn’t a flaw in the voting system.
If what you say is true (most greens prefer blue over red), then it shouldn’t be 50/50 in the first place. It would be 60% blue and 40% red or something like that.
Thank you!
So STAR is a type of ranked choice, one that makes perfect sense afaict.
Missing details like this got us where we are today 🙃