That is also my feeling about him. Better bureaucrat and governor than adept politician.
Actually it wouldn’t make me happy at all as I’d love to see Trump out of office as much or more than anyone here. But if you don’t want to see the next popular progressive candidate be a potential “spoiler” then please shut the fuck up about Bernie not being a Democrat. Parties often endorse people who aren’t members of the party, the Working Families Party and others do it all the time. Would you rather they always nominate their own candidate that could hand the election to the Republicans? I didn’t think so so please quit fucking harping on this. Or the next Bernie will take it to heart and run as an independent or as the Green nominee.
Frankly Dale you really aren’t worth responding to so this will be the last time. You’re just a troll for the Shitbag Party.
You’re analysis is spot on SenorBeef, the only thing I would add is that a large segment of Biden’s (and Hillary’s) support in the primaries is from voters in the South, which has little to no bearing on performance in the general election. So the Democrats get a few more percentage points in Alabama (maybe) - whoopee. Let’s depress enthusiasm in winnable states to perform slightly better in the South - now that’s a winning strategy…
Don’t get high on your own supply. All of these non voters and young voters who couldn’t be arsed to vote for Bernie in the primaries are now going to charge out with their pitchforks and torches and vote for Bernie in November.
Ah, come on troll, you can do better than that. I’m sure you don’t want those kind of people to vote in SC/AL/MS. But, your shitbag was also rejected in MI and FL, losing every county.
So how many closeted Bernie supporters actually voted for Biden when Bernie was still on the ballot? And if they voted for Biden during the primaries, why wouldn’t they vote for him in November?
Where do you get that idea? Bernie couldn’t even win Washtenaw (University of Michigan) or Ingham (Michigan State) counties in the Michigan primary. He couldn’t win Dane County (UW) Wisconsin in their primary. He couldn’t win Boone County (UM) Missouri. I would have thought that all those Sanders supporters who were convinced that he was cheated in 2016 would turn out in force to make sure it didn’t happen again in 2020.
But they DIDN’T vote for him. Otherwise we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
I’ll agree with you about the “consistently politically active” part. But Bernie Sanders himself has said it’s important for that group to vote to defeat Donald Trump. Shouldn’t that be enough motivation?
Ah, yes. The “look how Trump did it” argument. The only problem with that is the “look how Hillary failed” argument. It’s possible to be so polarizing, or just such a bad candidate that a sizable number of people who should support you simply won’t.
So your theory is that people really wanted to vote for Sanders but didn’t because somebody told them they shouldn’t.
If people are that weak-willed how would Sanders have won the election? Wouldn’t Trump or somebody just tell those same people they weren’t supposed to vote for Sanders in the general election as well?
You know what? Don’t bother explaining. I’m done here.
All this Biden talk is reminding me of how I felt the last time Biden ran. No, not 2016, I mean the last time he ran in any serious sense.
It was 1988. Or it was the election of 1988. I think I started following him in 1987.
It was a different time. Ronald Reagan was finishing his second term. The Republicans had veered to the right and they had a definite attitude that they were the new permanent rulers in American politics because socialism and communism were disproven and in disarray, or so it was being said. Liberalism had been repudiated. Yeah, Jimmy Carter had managed to get himself elected for one term but it was entirely because of Nixon’s bad press on Watergate and it didn’t really count.
Joe Biden looked good. In that time, for that time, he looked like a good combo of pragmatic and progressive. And competent. He came across like he knew what he was doing.
Then it came out that he’d plagiarized a speech and he dropped out and the Democratic nomination went to Michael Dukakis, who went on to lose to George H. W. Bush.
I always wish it hadn’t gone down that way. He was the one I wanted in 1988.
Nah, he works under the assumption that all the Democrats would vote for anyone plus extra people for Bernie. However, the segment of people who are into politics enough to post on Facebook or Reddit or Twitter or here aren’t representative of the voting population at large (or else Sanders might be the nominee). Just because someone regularly casts a Democratic ballot doesn’t mean they’ll “vote blue no matter who” – they just won’t bother to vote if it’s someone they dislike.
Wisconsin 63-32, Michigan 53-37, Minnesota 39-30, N. Carolina 43-24, etc. But, uh… sure. [Edit: I’m aware that NC is “the south” but the point is that it’s not a solid red state like “I have support in Alabama”]
I also disagree with the idea that people would flock to Sanders for policy if not for electability. People can like Sanders’ ideas in theory but still not like Sanders. I think he has some good ideas but I have zero confidence in his ability to get them enacted and think he would be a disastrous president overall. Thinking that Medicare For All or free higher education would be a nice thing isn’t going to necessarily make you think that Sanders is the guy you want on the ballot. This is where Sanders really failed in his campaign – he had the votes of the converted but, for everyone else, the argument wasn’t much better than “Oh, you don’t want to vote for Sanders? I guess you just hate poor people then.”
Yep. I hit a nerve. How’s tricks Barack Obama?
I’m on record here saying I would vote for anyone that gets the Dem nomination. On record saying I would vote for a small soap dish over trump. So, I’m voting for the dem nominee.
Correct me if I am mistaken, but don’t most Bernie Bros skew to the younger demographic? Are the most likely to be under employed working non-career jobs, living at home and lacking any kind of meaningful health insurance (unless it is on the parents plan)?
Maybe the way to reach Bernie Bros is that even if it is warm shit versus cold shit, trump has a proven track record of reducing those covered by insurance and the government safety net. Obama/biden have a track record of blowing all their political capital in year 1 on getting tens of millions of Americans on healthcare. If nothing else, Covid should teach us that having some kind of meaningful universal health care is important. It is a stark choice: protest vote that will make the safety net even more nebulous if trump wins, or go all out to elect someone that will fight for the safety net.
You want out of your parents basement? You want to roll the dice on a startup? You want to be a starbucks barista while working on your youtube channel? You want healthcare if covid decides to flare up for the next few years or a new pandemic comes sneaking out of the backwoods somewhere? It would sure as fuck be preferable to have some kind of safety net backstop. Shit I’m not even asking for public support, register and choose which will fuck you over the least.
Buttigieg and Klobuchar dropped out exactly one day after it was clear “narrative” wasn’t enough to win South Carolina. Stop with the “centrist” conspiracy bullshit, anyone with a calendar can see how fucking stupid it is.
I guess we’re doing this, despite the obvious troll. (People don’t join for this sort of thing without an ulterior motive.) So I’ll play.
SenorBeef: Yes, in theory, someone could lose the primary but have been the more electable candidate in the general. But that requires that they appeal to those who would not vote in the primary. I don’t see any sign of that.
Since Bernie’s supporters are mostly Democrats or independent, and there was no reason whatsoever to pick the Republican primary over the Democratic one, I would expect that all of Bernie’s enthusiastic supporters would vote for him in the Democratic primary. Yet, while Bernie got an early lead, these people didn’t show up.
Bernie’s plan to win depended on those enthusiastic supporter, giving him enthusiasm above that of Trump’s enthusiastic supporters. But he was unable to get them out to vote for him. He also failed to even really try to make the case to more rank-and-file Democrats that he was the better choice.
As such, I can’t see any path for him based on his performance in the primaries. Maybe if it were closer, like in 2016, where maybe he was the better candidate. But not in 2020. As much as I want the US to push progressive policies, both more progressive candidates lost.
If Bernie had managed to make an upset in all of this, then maybe we’d throw out the traditional ideas of electability. It would show that things were genuinely different this time. But that didn’t happen. So the conventional wisdom the Dems, as the leftmost party, already havsall your voters from the left and needs to pick up people from the center seems to hold.
I continue to think I can get neverTrump conservatives and independents to vote for Biden. I think the former would never vote for him, and the latter would have split the vote.
On the other hand, I do acknowledge the enthusiasm gap for Biden. My only hope is that his VP pick can make up for that, and that it, combined with enthusiasm against Trump, can win the day.
The one thing that won’t win is telling Biden supporters they’re bad, any more than that would work on Bernie supporters. The game is over. Biden’s our man. We NEED to actually be enthusiastic for him, and stop infighting.
Hence, again, why I think the OP posted like they did. I don’t for a moment think that someone would spontaneously show up here of all places and start arguing about Biden vs. Sanders. Either they’ve been here before and liked the Pit, or they just wanted to stir up shit–possibly both.
Really? So can you tell me that you honestly believe that if the media spent the last two years praising Bernie as electable and Biden as unelectable that the primary results would be the same? Probably not because I doubt that your’re that dumb.
Anyone who doesn’t believe Buttigieg was presented with a gangster deal is an idiot. “Ya know, this career of yours could have a mighty fine future, be a shame if we had to kill it”.
Lest anyone think anything more of you than a standard issue paranoid conspiracy theory lunatic.
Racism is a pretty big issue and if money won the election then Hillary would have won the last time around.
Yes both parties live in the real world, that requires them to have similar policies on some things. They are both political parties in a capitalist democracy, and both believe it is better to be poor in America than poor in Russia or China or Cuba. Capitalism, for all it’s faults, has been the vehicle for bringing more people out of abject poverty than all the government programs in the world combined (with the exception of public education).
You have a cite for that? AFAICT, labor unions support the Democrats.
You have a very warped view of the political spectrum.
Obamacare.
Carter, Clinton, Obama, all raised top marginal tax rates.
Environmental regulations affecting industry.
CPFB
And that’s what comes to mind in the 30 seconds i thought about it.
You should stop hyperventilating, you’ll pass out.
Let’s say AOC was old enough and was running for president but at some point dropped out and endorsed Bernie. How is this different? AFAICT Pete Butigieg is an inexperienced version of Biden (actually he seems significantly to the right of him). So it seems entirely natural to me for him to endorse biden and to do it when he did.
If you want to accuse Klobuchar, Butigieg, Bloomberg, Warren and everyone else from clearing the field so that people could choose between Biden and Bernie, then fine but unless Bernie was depending on a split moderate vote getting him to the convention, I don’t see what the harm. None of these candidates are obligated to keep running to create interference to help Bernie if they actually don’t agree with him and none of them are obligated to endorse Bernie if they don’t actually agree with him.
If you are a progressive in a swing state and you are not voting because you simply cannot vote for the lesser of two evils then you are doing nothing to promote your agenda.
If you are a moderate and you feel like Trump is a better fit for you than Bernie and you vote Trump, then you are promoting your agenda even if neither of them are anywhere near where you want to be.
Just like the Democrats are not fighting the Republicans over the tea party vote, they are not fighting us for the socialist vote. We are in fact fighting the Republicans for the votes in the center. That is how democracy should work. Just because the Republicans decided that they would rather try to win elections by running away from the center doesn’t mean Democrats should do likewise. If we see a majority of swing states with large numbers of socialist voters, then things could change but right now that’s not the case.
Because they aren’t establishment Democrats. They are swing voters who probably find Biden barely acceptable and only because Trump is so fucking bad. Many of them have voted for a Republican in their lifetime. They have to decide which of two candidates are more consistent with their interests. You don’t have this problem. Biden is significantly more in line with your views than Trump, there is no real question about which candidate aligns more with your views.
If we had ranked choice voting then you could vote for bernie and still end up voting for biden but that’s not the system anywhere except Maine AFAICT. Rank choice voting sends a signal but the result would be the same.