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Democratic Presidential Primary |February OT| It Can't be Worse than Iowa, Right? (Discussion Guidelines in OP)
- Thread starter Poodlestrike
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Go back and read the entire chain here. My point on this stupid topic introduced by some dumb social media post has been "A caucus is not an election," then someone else brought up Venezeula and Bolivia or some other elections somewhere else in the world. Genuinely, I have no opinion on the state of general elections in Venezeula and they are 100% irrelevant to the topic of the Iowa caucus, which -- again -- is not an election.
Not so, I was arguing about that social media post that suggested that the Iowa caucus needs to be investigated by the United Nations for election integrity. It doesn't. It's not an election. Someone else arguing that the social media post is a true reflection of reality, or whatever, brought up Venezeula, another person (or the same, I forget now) brought up Bolivia. But, yeah, I am surprised that people stan for Venezuelan elections, but beyond that surprise, my point is still caucuses are not elections. They're not general elections. They're not elections. They're a private party event.
Well at least there is one good thing coming out of this. Say goodbye to his electability argument.
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Claiming a caucus doesn't decide anything is a reductionist. Obviously it's very important or we wouldn't have 107 pages discussing it, we are talking about the "Iowa Bump" and which candidates are credible past this. It doesn't decide the candidate for each party but it clearly matters and reducing certain people's chance to vote for their chosen candidate in their own state isn't good.
Yeah you're right, I probably should have said intentionally manufactured but there are still many other systems that encourage the candidates to visit the area but can still be done in a standard voting system. I admit I'm a foreigner looking in on this so I'll be missing the cultural side of this but in our leadership elections (which are the closest to primaries) we have hustings that local party members can attend to ask questions and meet the candidates in a smaller forum and then after the fact you can vote over a certain time period.
I also agree that ranked voting is the best system so why not introduce that? Having a throwback that means taking hours out your Monday night in Iowa in winter surely can't be the ideal solution?
If you can't understand that all of the social media jokes about this are black comedy commenting on how non-existent "irregularities" are always the justification the US imperial machine is using to justify their coup attempts in places like Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile, etc, and are now being seen (but actually seemingly real irregularities, unlike the fake ones in those Latin American countries are) in the Iowa caucus, then I don't know what to tell you.
Yes, everyone knows that these are a party function, not an election. But there's no way that if you're a leftist you can't comment on this.
I only namedropped Bolivia, which to be fair, it's count was going way more smoothly that this "voting process" before being victim of a coup and the US government claimed there was fraud involved.
No need to be concerned yet but we will have an idea how democratic voters feel about these candidates by Super Tuesday.
Yeah, Democrats are this bad. Obama, and Bill Clinton, were extremely gifted politicians, and anomalies for the party.
From 1968-1992/96, Only Carter and Clinton were elected. Then you have Obama in 2008 and 2012. And by 2020, much of his accomplishments overturned or largely watered down. All while losing massively in smaller state and local level races. 2018 at least stopped the bleeding quite a bit.
But jury is still out on if that's sustainable.
I don't know why you're surprised.
Pete's sexuality isn't exactly a large topic of conversation as part of his campaign. He'll blurt out "I was a gay dude who managed to become mayor of South Bend" at the occasional debate, but more often he tends to identify himself as a mayor, war veteran, and now candidate for President who's more moderate than the progressive leaders. I wouldn't be shocked if centrist moderates who don't really pay attention to politics all that much but who also happen to be hyper religious will tune out Pete when they find out he's gay like this woman did.
It's a sad reality but Pete's obviously not running is campaign to be the first openly gay person in the White House because of people like that. Despite that it'd be right up there in historical relevance as voting the first woman into office would be.
I also wonder why the last minute Pete surge. Who are these people that like Pete? Who!?
Nationally he's pretty much always been in the lead, but Iowa polls were much more split, and there were many that did show him in 4th around the level of support he wound up with.
Somehow The Onion called the outcome of this primary back in 2004.
Caucuses are tough to poll, but he was noticeably trending downward in polls over the past few weeks
Worth pointing out (as always) that Gore and H. Clinton still won the popular vote. Our only popular vote loser in more than 30 years is Kerry, who was up against a wartime incumbent and still nearly pulled it off (60,000 Bush voters changing their minds in Ohio would have done it).
The country overall has a natural inclination towards the Democratic Party, but there is systemic bias within the Electoral College that favors the Republicans. Only Obama and B. Clinton were charismatic enough to overcome that and win outright, but even our boring, hum-drum candidates usually win the popular vote.
I think that's worth acknowledging because just taking Republican victories at face value internalizes "well it's actually the Democrats' fault for sucking." Maybe Gore, Kerry and Clinton did suck, but pinning it all on them gives Republicans a pass for cheating a broken system.
User banned (1 week): Ignoring staff post with regard to conspiracy theories
I read it as "We were in the middle of ratfucking Bernie when someone told us that his campaign had an app and was tabulating numbers from all over the state".
I agree, I'd ideally want a ranked choice voting system for primaries and the general election. The caucus is definitely important, so I didn't mean to imply it wasn't, but it's more similar to, like, a debate or major rally than a strict election. Ultimately the caucus only leads to a tiny number of delegates to whoever wins, but the process of caucusing (the whole "First in America Caucus") is part of a larger more important process that does get candidates out to meeting people individually and needing to appeal on a personal level to voters, which I think is important. New Hampshire's primary does that to a degree too, though Iowa more so. And of course there's this dumb bit of political history for why Iowa caucuses instead of primaries in the first place, part of which is that New Hampshire has it in their stupid state law that they're "The first primary," while Iowa can still be like "We're first in the nation!!" because they caucus instead of primary. It's hilariously stupid, but because the whole election process is a people-driven process, and not like a well engineered mechanical machine, I kind of like it.
We're only a couple generations separated from when there were basically no real primaries at all, and no national party cooperation in the primary... The candidate would genuinely be selected in a smokey room at the national convention. It's so dumb from a like .. engineering level, like if you look at elections like holistic software design, the idea of caucuses would be such a major flaw in the requirements, but if you look at it as a system of people coming together to hash out political agreements over generations, I actually like the caucus system... At least, I like it's small, messy, influential place in the primary process. I wouldn't want every state to have a caucus instead of a primary election, but I'm okay with two states doing things differently as part of an overall process.
What I don't like is that the Iowa Democratic Party completely shit the bed in its most important election event every 4 years, and arguably the most important Democratic caucus since 2008. To hire a company to build an app that they didn't adequately test or vet or verify is just an utter debacle and embarrassment for the national Democratic party.
Biden was doing no favors to himself.
I haven't been following politics that long, but I've never seen so many blunders at once every time a candidate opened his mouth.
And it's no wonder we're partly in the state we're in when people just need to cling to conspiracies to justify possible losing or poor performance. Especially in a state that has fucked up caucuses before.
As a NIN fan and an institutionalist, this comment both made me grind my teeth and chortle
You're right. You know, we really need to abolish the Electoral College to enact progressive change. That and adding states (PR, DC) should be one of the big focuses of the Democratic Party.
Most recent polls before the caucus had Pete and Bernie ahead 🤷♂️
lol, sorry. I was making a poor joke. Should have made that more clear. Or clear at all.
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