I think voters are always just going to lump the candidate fromtge administration with the current president. Trying to break with Biden wouldn’t have worked. I think this would have been the case with a lot of possible candidates, it would take an obvious outsider to pull it off.
You just did literally the exact thing I’m complaining about. If you take an individual person and their grocery bill, there’s a good chance we’ll find out that their pay has gone up witih prices. If we are not talking about named individuals, then aggregate statistics are the only way to get at that truth.
Instead we’re all taking it as established fact that there are a bunch of people out there who saw 400% increase in food prices and a 0% increase in wages. I’m sure that’s happened to a minority of people, but the numbers say it’s not happening to most people.
And we’re being very emphatic to insist that there is no possible way to find out if this abstract persona actually reflects most people’s experience. This makes it unkillable as a propaganda piece. It feels very true, and it can’t possibly be analyzed, so it runs wild across everyone’s phones.
We’re talking about the voting attitudes and habits of young people among others. It won’t kill you to learn an extremely common and relevant bit of slang.
“Based” = authentic, courageous, no bullshit, true to principle, not trying to be a people-pleaser or punch-puller, unlike typical politicians. In the 2016 era, online conservatives used this as a synonym for “not politically correct”, now it’s spread to broader usage.
Funny thing, but at the moment Bernie got fewer votes in Vermont than Kamala did. So maybe he can shut his damn mouth.
Cringe.
Interesting, I didn’t know about that origin - I’ve only seen left leaning people (some very left) use it - but, I guess I wasn’t watching online conservatives in 2016, so that tracks!
Clearly, we need to tack even further left than Bernie. /S
Nobody who was hand-picked by DNC leadership.
The whole point of an open fair primary system is to see which particular issues/candidates match the (initially unknown) mood of the current electorate. Without that any leadership pick is somewhere between “you’re trying to win the last election not this one” and “'your pick is living in a total bubble”.
You know who could have won?
Joe Biden.
He is the only one ever to have beaten Trump. Trump ran against women twice and beat them both. And he is a white man, a comfortable grandfather type.
All he had to do was stay awake during that one debate…
I suspect this is the most correct answer. Have a completely open primary and see who really connects with the voters. Will the DNC accept that smoke filled back rooms are so last century? Probably not, but you can always hope.
For those suggesting Biden would have won, the poll numbers don’t support that. While polls have taken a great hit to credibility lately, I think the Biden/Trump ones are pretty on point. Simply because they’ve overblown democrat popularity and Biden has been hammered. So if the polls have been generous to liberals, Joe would have fared far worse than the polls suggested.
When was the last time truly open primaries were held despite incumbent president wanting to run for re-election?
No argument, but how else is leadership going to find out the true vox populi? As mentioned above, polls are of completely questionable reliability. Whether they’re asking the wrong people or if people are giving answers they think they want to hear is a topic for another thread.
Ted Kennedy running against Carter in 1980
So it’s rarely done. And once Biden dropped out after the first debate, there really wasn’t time for a full slate of primaries, or really any. So practically speaking, who else could have been chosen and how?
Oh yeah. The roots are deeper than that, originally in Black vernacular it meant the way that a crack “freebase” addict will behave in a way that’s oblivious to everything except getting more crack. Then rapper Lil B kind of remade it into “being yourself, don’t give a damn”. Then around 2016 the groypers took it over, and now everybody’s using it.
Right!
And – open primary or no – Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer, who were among the only other potential contenders with a national profile, both said they would not run against Harris.
Initially, I was cool on Kamala Harris (partly for stories about how she worked with her staff as vice-president) but once she was running, she was really good, especially with how she countered Trump.
In defense of smoke-filled rooms, the old-school political machines wouldn’t have run a candidate that was very possibly too old to serve out two terms back in 2020, and would have avoided the race to the left that left Harris in political no man’s land and tarred her with Biden’s promise to pick a woman for vp. Not to mention they’d probably do a better job laying the groundwork for thr next generation instead of leaving us with old people from the Obama administration.
I think open primaries are great for finding people like Obama that are great politicians who buck the conventional wisdom of their day, but sometimes they miss fairly obvious things that lead to where 2024 ended up.
It didn’t help that the rest of the 2020 primary field sucked - the path now should probably be purple or red state governors.
Either I’m misunderstanding you or you misunderstood me. Wasn’t it the old-school political machine that put Biden on the ballet in 2020? Or was there an open primary I missed?
2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries on Wikipedia. “A total of 29 major candidates declared their candidacies for the primaries.”