Um, no. The social Democrat garbage is no longer the shiny new penny and AOC is no longer the flavor of the month. I prefer a Democratic party that focuses on winning elections and implementing a center left policy. I don’t care about moving some damn window or furthering the revolution.
There may be a few members of Bernie’s Butthurt Brigade that are gloating about reducing the super delegate influence. I only hope that this is a trade off to reduce caucuses which give too much power to fringe cultists.
The Democratic party needs to do everything possible to get rid of fringe cultists like Bernie Sanders. Being “fringe”, that means they only get a tiny fraction of the primary votes anyway. What was it-- a measly 43%? How more “fringe” can you get?
The primary voters were well aware of the attack lines the GOP would use against Hillary as the nominee, but unaware of the lines the Republicans would use against Sanders in October.
Sanders was a Trotskyite candidate for presidential elector at age 39. This is fringe. And the primary voters had no idea.
True, in a Sanders vs. Trump race, you can say that Sanders favored a historically violent Russian leader forty years ago, while Trump favors a currently violent Russian leader today. But Trump being fringe helps him by distracting away from actual issues he doesn’t want to talk about. In contrast, Sanders’s tremendous vulnerability to old fashioned red baiting would hurt him by distracting attention away from issues he wants to talk about.
Compare and contrast to Elizabeth Warren, who was a Republican when Bernie was arguably (and I’d say actually) a communist.
Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are both widely popular which means that by definition they are not fringe candidates. Labeling Bernie a fringe candidate is a not so thinly veiled ad hominem.
Weather either one of them could actually win the presidency in the general election is a separate question. Lots of mainstream candidates have failed to win the presidency.
Trump is also a fringe candidate. Most people don’t care about politics enough to notice the actual policy. It just comes down to body language and whether the press treats them like a real candidate for office.
A fringe candidate who wins an election is an oxymoron. Or, in this case, just a moron.
Fringe does not mean unorthodox or atypical (both good descriptions of Trump). It means that one has support only “on the fringes”, which must be small else it’s not a fringe. When nearly 50% of the voters vote for you, your support is not “just on the fringes”.
The term “fringe” is being used here to imply the candidate (that is, Bernie Sanders) is of little consequence because his support is not significant. That is factually incorrect, given his strong showing in the primaries.
I’m impressed with how many posters are still obsessed with these “bernie bros”, extremely reminiscent of how the right wing still is fighting off Hilary Clinton. Can we agree that it’s the future now, and everything back then already happened and is over? Please?
Has no one noticed that there has since been an enormous wave of progressive populism that Sanders tapped into but did not create, nor is creating now? That there is a huge upsurge in new candidates for all offices, most remarkably women, but also people of (all) colors, young people, Muslims? All wanting and deserving a place at that Democratic Party table? That is what is pushing this super delegate issue. Not the past. The present. The present in which it is absolutely imperative that the Democrats don’t fuck it up this time.
I haven’t noticed a ‘wave of progressive populism’ at all. Bernie and his Bros winning a few white state caucuses and a fluke win in a primary for AOC are hardly a wave. Especially since most of the candidates endorsed by Sanders/AOC have failed miserably. Of course, they can always resort to the tired ‘pushing the window’ narrative.
They still get to vote on later ballots if someone doesn’t get a majority of delegates on the first ballot. So when political journalists are talking about the remote chance of a contested convention superdelegates will still be part of the conversation.
So let’s hypothetically imagine that someone like, say, Joe Biden has more election-earned delegates going into the Democratic convention than his Berniecrat opponent, but not enough to win the race outright. Berniecrat guy/gal started off as a dark horse candidate but gained momentum toward the end and now refuses to concede. What would happen?
With super delegates, the party formally went in behind the leading candidate and declared the race finished. Berniecrats cried and howled injustice, but there was a resolution. It took a while for Berniecrats to forgive and forget, and some apparently never did. But there was enough unity for Hillary Clinton to actually win the popular vote, so while the electoral math did her in, it’s clear that for the most part, voters who lean left at least tried to come to her rescue in the end.
But what if the outcome were radically different? Suppose there were no super delegates, and suppose further that there’s a big push at the convention to do some horse trading in favor of the Berniecrat, even if he had fewer pre-convention delegates? Yes, it is far fetched, but it sure does seem that a lot of Bernie supporters wanted exactly this kind of outcome. So how would the rest of the country - Democrat, Republican, or Independent - have viewed his legitimacy?
Looks that way. That makes them effectively primaries without having to call them that, and sidesteps the perennial problem of the New Hampshire state law requiring its primaries (both parties) to be first in the nation.
