January: Biden
February: Biden
March: Biden
April: Biden
June: Biden
July: Biden
August: Biden
September: Biden
October: Biden
November: Biden
December: Biden
January: Lead starts to disintegrate.
February: Bernie gains momentum/becomes frontrunner.
March: Biden miraculously skyrockets back to the top after winning 1 conservative state. All rivals drop out.
dun worry, we’ll succeed with AOC 2024! and if they screw us again, there will be Omar’s daughter in 2032! Something about Lucy and football…
If you think kneecapping outside candidates is inevitable, keep in mind that the far more competent, far more disciplined Republican party couldn’t do it against Trump in 2016. Democrats were able to pull it off in 2020 because:
- They had a candidate who was a popular, high-ranking official from a popular Democratic presidential administration.
- That same candidate had enough of a real base of support to win a primary state despite looking dead in the water.
- That same candidate was able to get not just the endorsement of a popular former president, but was able to get that former president to convince his more successful competitors to drop out (something that has never happened before).
- They lucked out on the timing of the Tara Reade story (and/or were able to delay it long enough).
- They lucked out on the timing of the pandemic.
- The centrist competition was willing to drop out because (a) none of them were having any sustained success and (b) they likely view Trump as soft competition (i.e., you’re not going to drop out in exchange for a Biden administration job if you don’t think there will be a Biden administration).
- Bernie was popular, but not so popular that he could power through this type of ratfucking.
- Bernie was a good candidate, but he had a number of obvious weaknesses (he’s an old white guy who had a recent health scare, he’s from a tiny state, he’s not the most eloquent or charismatic candidate, he had to break the ice on a century of anti-communist propaganda, he arguably was too nice, etc.).
It’s also likely that Obama/Biden promised the VP spot to multiple candidates. Yang said as much about himself, and if Obama/Biden told that to a candidate as fringe as Yang, they probably dangled that in front of at least one other semi-popular candidate as well. That will be an open secret among the lanyard class who works on all of these campaigns, and future candidates are going to be more wary (because Biden pulled the rug out from under all of them by picking Kamala Harris). That goes double if Biden loses and those candidates dropped out and didn’t even get a cabinet spot in return.
If any of the above plays out differently in the future (and you can substitute some other scandal for Tara Reade and some other disaster for the pandemic) we might not see the same result. They can’t just flip a switch and shut out the left; they have to try, it’s getting harder, and they won’t always win.
It’ll be harder for a leftist candidate to succeed in the Democratic Party than for a proto-fascist to succeed in the Republican Party, yes. But that just speaks to the strength of the party’s resistance; I’m pointing out factors that define the party’s ability to resist. Even if everyone really wants to keep an outsider out, they still need some way of coordinating opposition, of getting opponents on board with something as drastic as dropping out, they need to be facing an outsider who isn’t strong enough to bulldoze their way through that opposition, and they need to get a bit lucky. They won’t always be able to do all of that, even if they’re strongly opposed to the outsider.
Biggest difference really is that the Republican party is smarter and understands power. They threw everything and the kitchen sink at Trump but eventually realized that he was their best shot and the voters loved him for saying the quiet parts out loud.
The GOP accepted the radical Tea Party back in 2010 when they realized that those bat shit crazy fundamentalists were good enough to swing state elections for them and could bring them back into power. Look at the Dem response to Occupy Wall Street. Look at how they treated Black Lives Matter back in 2014-2015. Dems refuse to change the course of their party. They rather uphold the status quo instead. Historically, that party has had to be dragged, kicking and screaming the entire time when it comes to anything left based.
There’s a huge age gap among Democratic voters, and the party itself is ruled by fossils and deadeyes careerists like Mayor Pete who just parrot what the fossils say/do. The Dems just take younger voters for granted and tell them to sit down and shut up because it works, just like an abused kid being told by the parents “it could be so much worse!”
71% of democrats trust the media
Blatant manufactured consent
forreal, this didn’t end in 2016: https://theintercept.com/2016/10/09/exclusive-new-email-leak-reveals-clinton-campaigns-cozy-press-relationship/
I don’t know, Cowboyitis69, this doesn’t seem very normal at all.
If you or a loved one suffers from cowboyitis, you may be entitled to financial compensation.
