When Biden beat Bernie it sucked, but the other candidates dropped out and put their weight behind Biden so it allowed him to get the most votes. That's not anti democratic, just strategy.
I'd say this go round will be much less democratic if Biden drops out, because registered Democrats more or less all voted for Biden and then all these party insider delegates will actually be the ones picking the candidate.
Don't get me wrong, I will still vote and advocate for pretty much anyone over Trump, but the Democratic party is not covering themselves in glory here.
In my ideal system we'd have ranked choice voting, so many people can run without risking being a "spoiler". If an individual doesn't have enough votes to get a majority, those votes will move on to the voter's second choice, then third choice and so on until someone has a majority of support.
Sounds like we're all jumping in to tell you about how RCV is the bare minimum improvement over FPTP. Approval Voting is arguably the best. It's so simple your ballot will always be counted, no matter how you fill in the bubbles. It's very popular in Fargo and St. Louis.
Because the people still voted brother. The people made a choice with their votes. They chose between Biden and Bernie and they chose Biden. Nobody changed their votes. You can argue that Biden wouldn't have won if the others have remained in, but it was a straight up vote.
I'm a long time Bernie supporter, and as I said I'd like to see ranked choice voting because it more accurately captures voter's preference.
That said, how was the 2020 primary not democratic? If one soccer player passes the ball to another and they score is that manipulating the system? It's playing the game by the rules. What is the alternative to people dropping out of the primary? Should they be forced to keep running even if it's clear they won't win?
You're right that some rules aren't ideal. For example, thinking of this current primary my understanding is that if a candidate drops out, their pledged delegates are free to vote for whoever. That's pretty undemocratic since now the preferences of a bunch of voters is not connected to who the candidate is.
In the case of the 2020 primary, people did get to vote for who they wanted. To me it's not a conspiracy when candidates drop out because they see there's no chance they'll win and they want someone who is sort of like minded to succeed. It sucks because in this case it was someone who I didn't prefer.
But think of the recent French election - a bunch of centrist candidates dropped out after the first run because they wanted to make sure the far right candidates didn't win. That meant more far left people won. The far right in France were complaining that this was unfair. But all it really showed is they didn't have a majority of support in those districts, and the other "team" played the game better.
Democrat here. Didn't vote in this primary as, if I recall correctly, I would have had to write in anyone other than Biden. Didn't see the point, although I would have liked someone else. The party needs to get it's head out of its ass and start doing some of the long-term planning Republicans were doing pre-trump.
This is essentially cardinal/approval voting with a runoff step. Except it's less efficient, because the nature of the systems necessitates a manual runoff step rather than leaving it as a contingency or engineering a mechanism that automatically simulates one based off of ranked choice. It also fails to accommodate the possibility of a 3-way tie.
Ironically they're making Donald Trump argument here. They're saying we should have stopped the count after just a New England's primaries. I guess New Hampshire is all we need to decide the nation's votes?
that’s not at all what is being said here. the DNC had to pull all sorts of undemocratic shenanigans to forcefully prop up biden back in 2020 and we’re still paying the price of having these uninspiring losers as our only options
Biden and Kamala were the establishment candidates no one wanted.
At least until Clyburn's endorsement of Biden. That and his warning against Sanders is what made the party consolidate behind Biden. Even Buttigeig the front running establishment centrist dropped out.
2020 was fresh covid and active Trump presidency. It was a very different vibe. But more than anything 2016 broke progressive's shot at executive power for 12 years at least.
I think it’s referring to the period when Berni was leading the Democrat primaries in 2020 and implying that Berni was unfairly treated to get Biden the nomination. And I guess maybe that potentially switching to Kamala is a continuation of the deceit.
How did they end up selecting Biden if Sanders (I assume that's who you mean) won and Biden was only fifth? Also seems like Biden wasn't all that popular if he was only fifth, which I guess was the point of the post.