AND they speak Norwegian. Do you have ANY IDEA how difficult it would be to change all government documents to Norwegian? AND it’s really cold there! Why does Bernie want us to be cold all the time, huh?
Or maybe Bernie isn’t advocating for every single part of the Norwegian experience, I guess that’s a possibility too.
Besides, Norway’s more like Snoreway. 
I’m just saying, this grassroots ideal that so many here seem to have about choosing a party’s nominees, especially people from his wing, is not common around the world and does not seem to correspond with the kind of progressive outcomes he is fond of.
Holy smokes, can you at least get your own stupid conspiracy story right? They “changed the rules” on qualifying for a debate not entering the race. And the fact that the Bernie camp is outraged that a guy polling at 15% was allowed into the debates says it all. Bernie is a goddamn fraud on democratic principles. He’s still the revolutionary socialist at heart, not a democratic socialist.
As long as the moderates can unite and have more delegates then the progressives they should be able to unite and choose their candidate. If Warren + Sanders have the majority of delegates than they should be able to select the candidate. Superdelegates should vote for who they think has the best chance and I’ve got no problem if they push canidates that are behind a head of the canidates that are ahead if nothing else they will be voting with more information than the people in Iowa.
In reality Bloomberg, Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar need to unite and select a candidate for their wing so that when the superdelegates split between liberal and moderate they can edge out Steyer, Warren, and Sanders. I’d be shocked if more than 60% of the superdelegates went moderate so the moderates need to be within 5% of the liberals.
It can be useful to talk about lanes and wings of the party for positioning strategies but don’t mke the mistake that it can be applied to actual voters. If Biden drops out, his voters don’t automatically go to someone else in his “lane”. Similarly, Sanders doesn’t own Warren’s supporters if she drops out.
Are all of the other candidates who were “outraged” and attacked Bloomberg for buying his way in also revolutionary socialists?
I didn’t notice this outrage. Are you saying the other candidates didn’t want Bloomberg at the debate? News to me.
Right, Warren is my first choice, but Bernie is near the bottom of my list. If I had to fill out a ranked choice ballot it would go:
So let’s be careful about those moderate vs progressive lane analyses.
“The guy with 49.9% of the vote can’t win, that’s not democratic. Instead, we should let the party bigwigs and billionaires decide that it’s teh guy with 22% of the vote who should win. That’s the way democracy is supposed to work”
I should’ve said enter the debate rather than the race - but those are pretty close in effect, as someone who could not qualify for the debates would be crippled in running in the race overall.
Being allowed into the debates against the rules is absolutely significant and absolutely unfair. Do you know how hard some candidates like Yang worked to get the organic support needed to meet their requirements for the debate? Then Bloomberg comes in, throws around some money, and the democratic party says “yes, sir, billionaire, sir” and somehow everyone here is fine with this. I’m not sure if it’s because they love the fucking inner circle of the democratic party that much, love billionaires that much, or just hate Bernie so much that they’re willing to compromise on their principles and applaud corruption.
But, let me paraphrase your position, if I may:
If Bernie wants the fact that the most voters voted for him to mean he’s the nominee, he’s clearly standing against the principles of democracy because it’s the rules that are truly important, not the will of the people! The rules!!!
Bernie is angry that the democratic party changed the rules to accommodate a billionaire. He should know that the rules aren’t that important, that it’s the will of the people that matters! That guy is a dangerous socialist authoritarian!
You could watch the debate or read about it. People were pretty unhappy about Bloomberg buying his way in and took him to task over it.
With all of you who’ve decided that the nomination process is not about individual candidates, but instead it’s a team sport of everyone vs Bernie, so that even if Bernie wins 49.9% of the vote, and the next highest total is 10%, “team everyone else” still wins, goodbye Bernie:
Could you make a case using facts and data to show that this is the case? You assume that everyone who isn’t voting for Bernie now is a never-Bernie and he’d be their last choice, so that you could create this Bernie vs Everyone narrative. And just saying “he’s the most extreme, so any vote not for him is a complete rejection of his platform” is not good enough because the actual numbers don’t support this.
Because the data says that Bernie is a popular second choice for voters of every other candidate. Much moreso than his competition. Your narrative that it’s Bernie vs team not Bernie is completely destroyed by the actual real world data that suggests that even among people not voting for Bernie, he’s usually their second choice.
So not only is your narrative of turning a 6 way race into a 1 vs 5 race an illogical, unfair one, it’s one that also goes against the truth and data.
So you are taking a stand that a guy polling at 15%+ should have not been allowed in the debate. That would have been better for democracy. Yes or no, please.
That’s the stand Sanders, Warren, Yang, Booker and I don’t know who else took. Klob and Pete were fine with it, but as far as I know they’re the only ones who said so.
Nobody cares what Booker or Yang thought. Do you have a cite for Warren’s outrage over Bloomberg’s inclusion? She sure seemed damn happy he was there at the time.
I was actually taking a stand that saying the Bernie hates democracy and puppies because he thinks the person with the most votes should win, because the rules are sacred, but then turning around and saying Bernie hates democracy and puppies because he wants the rules to apply to Bloomberg too is not an argument in good faith and does not make any sense. People are just looking to smear Bernie.
And even that is not actually what Bernie said - he didn’t ask for a change in the rules, just that the superdelegates should respect the will of the people and cast their votes for the person who won the most votes in the primary.
As to your specific question, yes. I don’t think Bloomberg should be allowed in the debates. A lot of candidates had to work hard to qualify, Bloomberg just bought his way in. That very thing - that the rich work by a different set of rules and buy whatever political power they want - is exactly the problem most harming our democracy right now. So yes, Bloomberg being able to buy his way into the debates hurts democracy. Bloomberg being able to throw around enough money to get enough people to vote for him to bring about a contested convention, so that he can then throw around enough money to be a kingmaker to pick who actually becomes the candidate, who he can then order around as he pleases since that person owes them the nomination, is exactly the sort of thing that is antithetical to real democracy. What Bloomberg and the DNC are doing right now is exactly the sort of shit that disenfranchises people into being apathetic about politics, because they correctly sense that they’re in a managed democracy, not a real one.
I’m sympathetic to the argument that they shouldn’t have changed the rules midway through the process. But the rule was stupid to begin with. Steyer gamed the system by spending more on small-dollar fundraising than the donations actually brought in. Bloomberg could have done the same, but that’s kind of a farce, isn’t it? And it would have detracted from the pitch he is trying to make, that he’s unbought and unbuyable, because he doesn’t need or accept anyone else’s money. (Trump leveraged this notion himself in 2015 and early 2016, but in his case it turned out to be another of his thousands of lies.)
But that’s only because voters are dumb. On Pod Save America, they cited polling that a majority of Americans, and even 40 percent of Democrats, still don’t know Bernie is a socialist–which helps explain how socialism can poll so poorly but Bernie can poll well. I wouldn’t count on that ignorance holding up through November, but it looks like it will hold up long enough so it’s too late to nominate someone else. :smack:
No, because this is a strawman. There’s no chance that this could ever possibly happen. What could happen is that Bernie gets 35%, but the candidate who gets 31% wins the nomination because s/he is able to get to over 50% by attracting enough support from other candidates’ delegates on the second ballot, just as the rules call for. And that’s perfectly legitimate. You realize this is similar to how Bernie has won a higher percentage of delegates so far than he has gotten in votes?
Mike Pesca laid out some very interesting numbers on Slate’s The Gist podcast. Bernie (who represents only 10,000 African American constituents in Vermont) has only received about 3,000 black votes thus far. A very plausible scenario is the following:
Bernie gets to Milwaukee with about 40% of pledged delegates, after having won only 15% of the black vote in the primaries. Biden has 35% of the delegates, but 55% of the black vote. Bloomberg has 20% of the delegates, and 25% of the black vote.
If under these circumstances Biden and Bloomberg unite to form a ticket, they will represent 55% of the delegates overall, and fully 80% of African American primary voters. Under those circumstances, it could be a really bad look for Bernie to throw a fit and insist that he is the rightful nominee. This might be the key to defusing an otherwise potentially explosive scenario (at least, as much as it can be defused).
We definitely need Bloomberg to save black people from Bernie. The nonsense of that completely cracks me up.
Good thing that’s not remotely what I said. :dubious:
In the scenario I described, the nominated ticket would be one representing the vast majority of black voters. *They *would be saving *us *from Bernie, not the other way 'round. 