DNC Announces Plans to Learn Nothing from This
The leaders of the Democratic National Committee announced they plan to learn absolutely nothing from their embarrassing loss to President-elect Donald Trump.
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They still address Republicans as their friends and collages. Once that work shift is over, they don't care. They will run someone like Pete and have the same issues next election.
They will run whoever wins in the primaries, which means that voting in the primaries is where you have much more power. Start early on supporting candidates who you think can win and help them win the primaries.
This works much better in down-ballot races than at the POTUS-level, but even there if you get a big enough movement going it can work. That's how Trump got the R nomination in 2016 after all--the R establishment hated him and didn't want him to win but he got the votes.
On the DNC side, after outcry about what happened with Bernie in 2016, they changed the rules to limit the power of the superdelegates to rig things like they did it 2016, by preventing them from voting on the first ballot and other rules on what they can do. Whether those reforms are enough has not yet been tested.
One reason it hasn't been tested is that we didn't hold primaries this year.
Sure, it's not (very) illegal to offer the rest of the candidates cabinet positions to drop out, so that you can 1v1 the progressive and prevent the him from winning the way Trump did. But "we're a private entity and can pick the nominee however we want" will not exactly endear you to your base, or give them very much respect for the primary process.
I assume you mean you have more power if you live in Iowa, New Hampshire or South Carolina. If your state votes after "super Tuesday" things will be pretty decided before you have a chance to weigh in.
As a leftist, I feel pretty unrepresented by the Democrats. "Vote in the primaries then support whoever is the nominee" would feel a lot more palatable if I wasn't so sure the DNC will do everything they can to prevent a progressive from getting nominated.
The Democratic primaries were held as always. Biden won, as the sitting president (almost?) always does because there are no serious challengers. Maybe there should have been a stronger effort to challenge him but it would have probably accomplished nothing but disruption. After he dropped out there wasn't time to hold new primaries.
But yeah, that's why I said people have a lot more power further down the ballot, the more local the closer it is to the people and the more democratic. On a national level your voice is one among millions and as you say, the earlier primary states have the most power. and unfortunately yes, that voting strategy usually takes many election cycles of concerted effort by a movement to start working. On the R side, you could say it started back in the 80's with the "moral majority" movement. One thing they did that was really effective was focusing their efforts on the State level and getting control of state legislatures.
A couple of things that make this harder for D's is that it is a big tent party with diverse positions that can make it like herding cats, whereas with R's their positions have been much more consistent (until the first trump candidacy and presidency, and now they're consistent again, all having fallen into line under him). The other thing is that R's and conservatives are spread out everywhere in the rural areas, while D's and liberals are concentrated in the cities as a minority of the population in the many red states and an oversized majority in the few blue states. That also works to the R's advantage in controlling more state legislatures. It's a tough situation.
Then they can call us homophobic when people don't vote for him