Bullshit. I heard “Biden will alienate the progressive voters” all the damn time. Not from Biden supporters, obviously but the “Biden will keep all the enthusiastic young voters at home and lose” mantra was repeated by Sanders supporters constantly. And, of course, not one of those people ever spent a second conceding that Sanders had major issues in his own electability; it was just “Biden will lose the young voters and Sanders will get a kajillion new voters so if you vote for Biden, you’re just asking for Trump to win.”
It didn’t help, of course, that it was Sanders supporters who were constantly pitching a fit and saying “I’ll NEVER vote blue no matter who; it’s Sanders or die so either vote for Sanders or be ready to lose all our votes” so, yeah, it was Sanders people who caught most of the “Get over yourself” responses. Had other candidates’ people been saying the same stuff, they would have also heard the same response.
We all know Biden is the nominee. If you live in even a potential swing state please vote for him. But if (when) he loses please take a long hard look in the mirror rather than trying to place blame elsewhere if you supported him in the primaries. Please!
You know what is overwhelmingly popular? Getting back to something that resembles normal.
You may scream for the rooftop that this is all evidence we NEED revolution (and actually could make good points Re: Universal Healthcare which would be very advantageous during the COVID-19 crisis) but you can also scream that people need to eat their veggies but that won’t stop them from wanting comfort food.
Bernie’s policies are a gamble in the eyes of many who simply pine for the relative stability and prosperity of life under Obama. Ask the average voter if they want to trade it for a chance of something better and most are not willing to do so. Maybe they’re too scared, maybe they lack vision.
The best thing to do then is to keep steps forward towards those goals, moving the Overton Window, as opposed to letting the least progressive candidates take a hundred steps back and cripple efforts at reaching those noble goals because THEY control who gets onto the courts and THEY control who draws the voting maps and THEY count the votes.
You want to hand them the keys and you’re utterly shocked that they take off, spinning dirt in your face with their tires, and leave you there playing pocket pool on the side of the road. Shocked, you are.
So I’m supposed to fall in line by helping bestow a mandate on a corporate-backed so-called moderate who has repeatedly said he wants to “reach across the aisle” to those same Republicans? No thanks…
If Biden loses, it will not be because Bernie was the better choice but never got the nomination, anymore than any other Dem candidate in the 2020 field. The only candidate who could have won the nomination WON THE NOMINATION. Period.
If Biden loses, it will be because the country largely prefers a corrupt lying sociopath. And if that is the case, St. Bernie was NEVER going to save you from le deluge.
Biden will not move the Overton window to the left. This is a guy who saw first hand the batshit Republican obstruction of Obama and yet thinks that if he gets elected Republicans will all be reasonable people and he’s looking forward to working with them. Thinking that makes him completely unsuitable to take on the Republicans and get the country moving in the right direction - if he even wanted to.
Remember, Biden was VP because Obama thought it’d scare people left to have a conservative democrat VP. It was a necessary evil. Now we’re voting for that necessary evil, except in clear mental decline, without the good part of having Obama.
Biden won’t ruin the country as fast as Trump, but he’s going to move it in the wrong direction. He’s likely to be a complete pushover to the Republicans.
I find him convincing but he still had to do the convincing. I am not more impressed by him being the 44th President than by Trump being the 45th President.
I am more likely to help Joe because I am reminded that Joe is the spiritual successor to Obama.
The week after Super Tuesday, Biden beats Trump by more in almost every swing state than Bernie in the polls. So I am not sure what your point is.
It seems like the argument is that we could possibly win with Bernie although with a significantly slimmer margin of error than with Biden?
If bernie cannot beat biden in the primary he has no choice in the general. NONE! He will not get any swing voters or crossover voters, he is capped with the votes he got during the primary. Biden simply outlasted every other challenger except bernie and Bernie couldn’t beat Biden. I was sort of hoping for Warren but c’est la vie, she couldn’t get enough support so we are going with biden.
If bernie’s endorsement isn’t enough to convince people like you and decide not to vote, there is a good chance that people with your opinion were never going to vote anyways.
Yes we should, because we live in the real world. Sometimes in the real world you have to choose between getting the car fixed or going to the dentist. The ideal choice would be taking a vacation, but that doesn’t work, does it?
Then I hold my nose and vote for the lesser of two evils because it is LESS EVIL. By the way, this is my 13th election, so I’ve held my nose a number of times. My first vote was 1972. The country is better now than it was in 1972.
All this crap about the people who run the parties having absolute power might have made some sense in 1960, when LBJ thought he could engineer a back door coup and wrestle the Democratic nomination from JFK (BTW, he couldn’t) but this is 2020. Sanders had a level playing field, and plenty of campaign donations to take his message directly to voters. How’d that work out for him?
Here are his wins
26.5% in Iowa
25.6% in New Hampshire
40.5% in Nevada
35.5% in California*
36.8% in Colorado*
35.3% in Utah*
And then his no asterik wins in North Dakota, Vermont, with Democrats Abroad, and the Northern Marianas.
Taking a look at the math, it seems that Sanders received fewer votes in California in 2020 than in 2016. Colorado went from a closed caucus to an open primary, which complicates a comparison. Only in Utah did he actually increase his voter base. In total, Biden has gotten 10.7 million votes in 2020, while Sanders has 8 million.
So you’re saying that black people in south carolina saw bernie taking iowa and new hampshire (two of the whitest fucking states in the union) and saw biden taking 4th in iowa and 5th in new hampshire, black people thought that biden was the choice of wypipo so they just went along with it?
You live in a reality of your own making. You think Obama picked Biden to scare people left? That doesn’t even make any sense. But say for a minute it does make sense in your world. Once Obama was done scaring people left after his first term, why did he need to continue to have Biden around?
My top choices were Warren, Bennett, Harris, Klobucher, Booker, and Castro. All of them dropped out before I even had a chance to vote in the primaries (which aren’t for months now thanks to the pandemic and are now largely pointless for that race).
If Bernie had won the nomination, I’d be voting for Bernie in November. He didn’t, so I’m voting for Biden. Would I rather be voting for one of my other choices? You damn betcha, but I’ll take what I can get to get Trump the fuck OUT and hopefully move the country at least a bit back to the left.
Those of you still bitching about Bernie not being the choice of the party leadership for candidate are kindly invited to go fuck yourselves. He caucuses with the Democrats, but he is not and never has been a Democrat so expecting the party leaders to be happy about him crashing the primaries and supportive of his candidacy is idiocy.
For those who plan a protest vote, I’d like you to think very hard about the fact that several states in the last election were considered safe for Democrats and went for Trump because too many people “couldn’t vote for Trump but wouldn’t vote for Hillary”. Do you really want to risk his re-election because you’re butt-hurt that your preference didn’t make it through the candidate selection process? Even after the last 3 months? Are you fucking insane?
As for the rest, if you’re not happy with the result of the candidate selection process, then get off your asses, join the Democratic party, and start working to change the process. Bitching about how it isn’t fair to poor put-upon Bernie is like the useless whinging of a four-year-old, and y’all are making me tired.
Let’s say, not at all hypothetically, that we have a system where candidates with different political ideas present their ideas to the public and then let the people decide which ideas and candidate they prefer.
Okay, we get it; you don’t think Joe Biden is the best candidate. But a lot of other people don’t agree with you. More than the people who thought Bernie Sanders was the best candidate.
So what exactly do you want? Do you want a system where we ignore what the votes say and just go ahead and nominate the candidate who’s “best”? And who exactly makes that decision?
Edit: Sorry, I completely misstated what I meant earlier and I don’t even know what word I brain farted and meant to substute. Please ignore the whole “scare people left” thing.
I think Obama picked a conservative white generic democrat to reassure conservative democrats who were a little nervous about this uppity black man in the white house. But Biden was meant to be the opposite of Obama - conservative, safe, white, generic - to offset the change Obama seemed to represent.
Now we’re getting the guy Obama picked to be his opposite - the drag on him to appease conservative voters - without the benefit of getting Obama.
Of course he is. New poster makes his first posts in the pit and drops right into the flow with no learning curve on the board’s cukture? Yeah, he’s a sock.
I think the percentage of people in this country that “bend the knee” to money is pretty much everyone with a job. Very few people who go to work would continue to do so if they were not getting paid.
We should ignore the radical left if they get too demanding. They clearly have no loyalty and can only be counted on if we “bend the knee” to them.
Who is biden scaring off? All those young folks who didn’t show up to vote for bernie? People that refused to vote for hillary the last time around? Who? And why should we bother chasing their vote?