Exactly.
There should be no right to be in the debates by current status. Current status already gives you a leg up. If you don’t do the work organizing, having a message or style that resonates with enough voters to get on the board, and doing the retail politicking in Iowa to get some polls there that get you a news cycle or so (see Buttigieg), then too bad so sad but you are not cut out for what the whole cycle will bring. You need to get out of the way.
Radical (or not-so-radical) idea for the Democrats: run on these 7 issues that aren’t just popular, but are incredibly popular with the entire population:
Weed should be legal.
Workers should have representation on corporate boards.
The credit-card interest rates are too damn high.
Government officials shouldn’t be allowed to own individual stocks or become lobbyists right after leaving office.
The government should directly finance the development of new drugs, and then allow the breakthrough pharmaceuticals to be sold cheaply without a patent.
All workers should be able to take up to 12 weeks of paid time off following a serious medical injury or childbirth.
There should be a Green New Deal (of some sort).
The DNC is seriously considering banning Iowa and Nevada from having “virtual caucuses” where voters can “attend” by voting in advance by phone. The DNC says it’s worried about hacking.
What I want to know is, how soon before some progressives claim that the “real” reason is, “Now that the Superdelegates can’t vote on the first ballot, the DNC has to find a way to get its appointed choice Biden nominated, and since a significant number of college students vote progessive, why not make it harder for them to participate by requiring that they travel to a caucus site and then back to their schools in order to vote?”
A harder argument to make since Biden, at least in the last Selzer poll (WHEN is the next one getting done?!) did much better in the virtual side and the great on the ground organization of Warren’s team is expected to deliver outsized on the in-person side. The change, if it happens, would favor Warren and hurt Biden.
Team Warren is smiling today!
The caucuses are anti-democratic anyway, and shoudl be done away with.
Okay, I’ll ask - in what way? How is it that much different from a transferrable vote system, where you rank the candidates, and if your first choice doesn’t get at least 15% of the vote, your vote goes instead to your highest-ranked candidate among those that did?
The only problem I see with it is, the “multi-round” aspect - first there’s precinct caucuses, then, IIRC, county, then district, and finally state, and I think each one works pretty much the same way.
Bullock seems like a good guy, but he’s kinda like the Democratic version of Bobby Jindal. Everyone thought this guy might be the shizzle and that he had some sort of secret sauce, but on television the guy just sounds like a fuckin hick.
He sounds like a smart, sensible hick, which is precisely why he would be a great nominee.
No. Just current, not former—except in the case of vice presidents.
I tend to agree with your perspective on politics more than probably anyone else here, but on this we have a yawning chasm of disagreement. The system Nate Silver proposes already strikes me as a significant compromise from what I would ideally wish to see, which is to simply go back to the smoke-filled rooms (but presumably without any actual smoke in the 21st century). The Democratic primary electorate has given me no confidence at all that they are smart about selecting nominees, and it’s ridiculous to have these early states have so much impact (especially since Iowa is very narrowly tailored to a few unpragmatic white liberal activists). I would have much more confidence in people like Carville, Begala, and Brazile to choose a good ticket rather than relying on a weird pseudo-democratic system where people vote their hopes rather than their fears, and the result is that our worst fears become more likely to come true.
But since I know my ideal system would never fly in the face of all the howls of protest that would inevitably ensue, I would just like to see the more sensible potential nominees get as long as possible to make their case.
I would endorse this entire platform, except that a lot depends on what “of some sort“ means. It would have to be a lot different from what AOC proposed.
#3 should be expanded to essentially outlaw payday lenders—but to pick up the slack for needs that come up, people should be able to get direct federal low-interest payday loans from the post office and have them automatically repaid over time by reductions in their IRS tax refunds.
For #6, would this be one of those deals that applies only to employers with 50 or more employees? If not, how would a small business with two or three employees handle this mandate without going under?
Nah, I disagree: The folksy shitkicker schtick went out in the 2000s with the Dixie Chicks.
If something went “out” less than 30 years ago, you can bet it’s still “in” with the kinds of voters we need to appeal to.
… I want you to think about your candidate, his or her electability, and who’s going to win this race.
[COLOR=White]___Your candidate might be better on, I don’t know, health care, than Joe is, but you’ve got to look at who’s going to win this election. And maybe you have to swallow a little bit and say, ‘OK, I personally like so and so better,’ but your bottom line has to be that we have to beat Trump.
___So I think if your goal — I know my goal — is to beat Donald Trump, we have to have someone who can beat him.[/COLOR]
Translation: “We want you to settle.”
Yes, and people have been treating Jill Biden’s eminently sensible advice as some kind of mini-scandal, which once again shows how clueless most Democrats are being.
ETA: Which, by the way, includes the plurality who think Biden is the most electable. I know it appears that way in polls, but I don’t believe it is a justified belief in terms of how the general campaign would play out.
“Eminently sensible advice”? That he is the only candidate capable of defeating Individual-1? To me, that sounds like desperate pleading more than anything.
I already said that I don’t think he’s at all the most electable. But the general advice, to set aside your ideal preferences and “settle” for someone with broad appeal to the middle of the electorate, is what I think is eminently sensible.
Sorry, but this advice stinks. You think ‘electability’ will get marginal Democratic voters to show up next November? Yeah, “Vote for Biden, he’s electable” will get them to the polls in droves. I bet he even wins Maryland. :rolleyes:
There’s nothing electable about ‘electability.’ That’s the fundamental problem with Jill Biden’s advice, completely aside from its self-serving nature: “don’t vote for candidates who take stands that motivate you and get you excited about this election, vote for my husband who bores you and everyone else silly, but is ‘electable,’ whatever the fuck that means.”
TRUMP will get them to the polls in droves. There is no chance this will be an apathetic electorate like 2000 or 2016. Your argument is of dubious merit in an average cycle and is completely beside the point now.
“Electability” this early is basically a wild guess. It’s mostly a wild guess even up to the convention. We don’t really know about electability until after the fact.
How do you define ‘worker’?
Nonsense. You can’t measure it precisely to an arbitrary degree, but you can get rough measurements from polling (like antipathy to socialism or wanting to ban private insurance) and add that to common sense. If I saw you somewhere, I might not be able to state your exact height to the inch, but I would probably be able to tell if you were kind of short, kind of average, or kind of tall.
People who say you can’t really tell who is electable just happen to always be the ones who support candidates that other people with a pragmatic, commonsense approach judge as less electable. It’s motivated reasoning.