He’s is advocating for whatever will probably get him the nomination.
I picked #2 in the survey knowing that if one candidate is far ahead of all others coming into the convention, he or she can’t be denied.
As for more borderline situations, there are a lot of factors. If Bernie is hospitalized* in May, and does poorly in the final primaries, and Democrats who voted for him seem to have buyers remorse, that should be considered. But if he ends the primary season strongly, and then is in the hospital during the convention, it might be churlish to deny him the nomination.
As for democracy, it depends how you define it. I believe in rotation in office, limited government, and respect for minority rights. Following the will of pluralities, or even bare majorities – not so much.
I read somewhere that he has maybe a 1/3 chance of being hospitalized before November 3, given his age and heart attack timing. This is a legitimate electability issue. If elected, his health won’t worry me – government of laws and not men and all that.
Your actual position was even more absurd than that.
Okay, so now we get to start adding two people together and combine their vote count as if they weren’t candidate? Well, of course Bernie doesn’t get the same privilege, only people running against Bernie get that exercise in their favor.
A) That’s obviously not how it fucking works and it never has, it has nothing to do with the nomination process
B) That would mean that someone can only choose their VP from among the other candidates, otherwise they wouldn’t be taking strategic advantage of this combined votes mechanic that you just invented out of thin air
C) Neither Biden nor Bloomberg seem like they’d be interested in being each other’s VP
D) Even if they were, what a fucking shitty ticket that would be. You try to pick your VP based on shoring up your strengths. You’d actually be doubling down on old white men who are viewed as corrupt, out of touch, and generally hated by anyone under the age of 40. Fucking Biden-Bloomberg is your ticket to get out the vote? Holy shit, that’s clueless
E) You assume that Biden-Bloomberg would cleanly pick up all those votes, but what about people who like one without the other? You cannot assume that people who liked Biden would be happy with a Bloomberg as president ticket just because Biden is on it, and vice versa.
F) You’ve given one racial group primacy to decide the election as if they were all that matters. Why even let other people vote? Let’s see who black people vote for and nominate them, because they apparently are the only ones who matter if you want the democratic nomination
G) Which is not even a valid strategic consideration, because black people are among the most reliable democratic constituencies, which means, strategically, if they’ll vote for whoever has a D next to their name, you should nominate someone to appeal to voters other than them. It’s not like they’re going to defect to Republicans, but even if your concern is that they will stay home and not be enthusiastic about the candidate, you think fucking Biden-Bloomberg is what’s going to get them to the polls?
You propose an idea that would a strategic blunder, nonsensical, bad for democracy, and baseless in terms of being an actual viable plan in your desperate attempt to concoct any possible scenario to undemocratically deny Bernie the nomination.
Don’t worry, the DNC is on your side. They’re going to do something as monumentally stupid as you suggest, screw Bernie out, disenfranchise millions of young and formerly apathetic voters to make sure that none of them want anything to do with the democratic party again. They’ll stay home in 2020 and never become part of the democratic party because of the way you want to spit on them and screw over the only candidate they’ve ever felt passionate about. Forget losing 2016, you’re losing a whole fucking generation.
But hey, the payoff is worth it. We might get fucking Biden-Bloomberg. Holy shit.
Actually if there is no majority it definitely is one of the ways the nomination COULD fucking work, if the delegates voting conclude that such is what those who voted for them would want them to do, or otherwise in good conscious decide that such is the right decision to make.
A specific odd hypothetical has been presented in which one candidate does not have a majority, is pretty much rejected by Black voters and in which the candidates selling a less revolutionary approach together have more delegates. Delegates would, ideally, listen to the arguments in such a case, including possibly the tempo of the race, the performance in specific states, contemporaneous polling and match-ups, and decide then how to vote in good conscience in a second and possibly further rounds.
Facts on the ground at the time would inform, but if a coalition of Biden and Bloomberg delegates stayed with their candidates when released and gave a pledged delegate majority, and the supers then jumped on board to make it conclusive, Sanders one hopes would accept he lost and immediately and strongly commit to the unity ticket.
I agree with you that who stays home determines elections. But I disagree about who is the most likely to be deciding whether or not to stay home. It is the soft Trump supporters who would stay home when the alternative to Trump is non-threatening Biden, while they would stand in long polling-place lines to stop a socialist. This is consistent with political science findings about why moderates tend to win – the other sides voters stay home.
I agree that would be a weak ticket, but there is low risk of that. If the nominee is elderly, they will be sure to have a much younger veep partner. And knowing how much African-American turnout declined from 2012 to 2016, they are highly likely to ask a black man or woman to join them.
My priorities are then quite different from yours. I think that Trump has genuinely authoritarian inclinations, and that his second term would be uniquely bad for civil liberties. I’m not sure he will voluntarily leave the White House if defeated this year, and think it perhaps less likely that he would voluntarily turn it over to a Democrat in 2024. So I think getting Trump out of there is much more important than speculative Democratic weakness ten or twenty years from how.
Then, I was a Republican until early 2016 who left my party because even it’s moderates had become tea party types. So getting to some situation where the Democratic Party, after losing this November, is dominated by leftists who win every time doesn’t excite me. It could even, if the Trump wing is clearly beaten, send me back to my old political home.
It’s clear that the several decades since the last contested convention has erased cultural memory of how these things work. Anyone can do this kind of coalition building. Bernie could go and get Bloomberg to marshal his delegates to have the two of them run together instead. I just think Bernie would have more trouble finding takers.
The other thing I think you are missing due to this gap in cultural memory is that the usual process of picking a vice president goes out the window at a contested convention. Normally what you are used to seeing is someone going to a convention with the majority of delegates and then choosing the running mate they think is strategically best to join them.
But when no one has a majority, that goes out the window and you have to horse trade and combine the personal ambitions of multiple candidates who together can get to a majority. In this case that will mean, most likely, two elderly white guys. Unfortunate but it is what it is. Our best chance to avoid that, actually, would be for Bloomberg in this scenario to tell Joe he will ask his delegates to support a ticket of Biden and some other running mate who would balance the ticket better. But I wouldn’t hold my breath for that.
Don’t worry (that’s real), the DNC and our corporate media are well on their way to concocting the sort of outcome you want. Just do us a favor and stop claiming to be an advocate for democracy when you work with them to eliminate something outside the acceptable bounds of our managed democracy.
Do tell, how is it contrary to democracy to urge democratically elected leaders like Obama to publicly endorse a candidate? This is precisely what AOC did! Is it only democratic if they endorse Bernie?
Your comprehension problem is not my problem. You are the one not explaining how there is anything undemocratic about politicians endorsing other politicians, something Bernie is happy for others to do if it benefits him. :dubious:
