• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Seems like they’d have done better with 62% of the voting public behind them.

        Trump faced an entire gaggle of conservative opponents and rarely failed to clear the 50% mark by state.

        Biden’s biggest defeat was to the 20% of voters who cast spoiled ballots in Michigan. Marianna Williamson and Dean Phillips were barely acknowledged.

        Even RFK Jr isn’t polling at better than 10%.

        Who do these people actually want for the position?

          • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            The RFK brand name carries a lot of weight among boomer voters. This looks less like coordination by either party and more like a dimwit failson cashing in on his name brand before it expires. He’s raised over $72M in his Presidential bid and has numerous friends and family on his campaign payroll.

            My man is an absolute money fountain for the consultancy class. Not as lucrative as the comically overpriced Bloomberg primary bid, but definitely worth the grift on his face.

              • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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                6 months ago

                Bloomberg was a NYC Republican who thought he could Moneyball the Democratic Primary by focusing all his efforts in a few big states. Biden wasn’t running as a moderate candidate in 2020. He was running as a conservative democrat. The moderates - Warren and Klobacher and Buttigieg and Harris - never managed to triangulate a winning position between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders.

    • ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca
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      6 months ago

      Because causing division/voter apathy when facing a threat to democracy is a terrible idea

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Democracy is perfectly fine until my candidate loses, at which point democracy is dead until late September when mid-terms start ramping up, and then suddenly democracy works again and we need to get ready to vote in 2026.

          • distractionfactory@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            Democracy is perfectly fine until the candidate that loses refuses to accept the results, tries to retain power by force, then continues to try undermine faith in democracy for 4 years and is somehow still the frontrunner for his party.

              • distractionfactory@lemmy.world
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                6 months ago

                Gore’s VP (Joe)? I don’t remember all of the details, but that was legitimately a contested election by the numbers, not by a sore loser. Won the popular by a decent margin but lost the electoral. It was by a slim enough margin to trigger a recount. As far as contested elections go I thought that could have gone a whole lot worse.

                I’m not sure I get the comparison here.

                • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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                  6 months ago

                  that was legitimately a contested election by the numbers

                  Not according to the incoming Republican administration. There are still conservatives who flog that election to prove how little Democrats care about democracy.

                  I’m not sure I get the comparison here.

                  If Gore had squeaked out a win even in the face of abundant ratfvckery in Florida and Ohio, Republicans would have insisted the election was a fraud in the same way they insisted Clinton stole the election in 1992 and Carter in 1976 and Kennedy stole it in 1960.

                  Because this is a partisan issue, there’s no real clean line between legitimate victory and election theft from the perspective of the partisans themselves. And because both sides routinely fight dirty (Nixon was as aggressive fucking democrats in southern Illinois as Kennedy was in fucking Republicans in Chicago), it is often difficult to talk about a clean race when the reality is more often that one person or the other lost in a dirty knife fight.

        • Ilikecheese@lemm.ee
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          6 months ago

          It’s not though. Even though we’d prefer a different candidate, everyone who isn’t a complete moron has at least agreed that we’re gonna stick with Biden because he’s better than the alternative and it’s not even close.

      • Daft_ish@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        All the way up till 2024 democrats were furiously protecting Biden. Shutting down any critism of him. Now it’s election time and all the discussions they refused to have for the last 3 years are at the forefront. Shame they waste their energy defending the presidential elect rather than vetting the better candidates. Like thats never blown up in their faces.

      • EatATaco@lemm.ee
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        6 months ago

        Except for the fact, of course, that the Democrat primaries have never been more democratic. But let’s not let the facts or history get in the way of the narrative!

          • EatATaco@lemm.ee
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            6 months ago

            I don’t know if I would label it “admitting,” but rather just being aware of history. Parties didn’t start having votes until around WWII, and after all of the hand wringing after the 2008 and 2016 primaries, Democrats voted overwhelmingly to dilute their power even more.

            Making 2020 the most democratic primary for Democrats ever.

      • ikidd@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Well, I mean it’s a lot of effort rigging things so they don’t look completely janky. Debbie Whatsername-Smith was done worn out at the end of 2016 making sure it was Her Turn.

    • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Because no primary challenger has ever beaten an incumbent for president. It would be a waste of time and money.

      • Daft_ish@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        62% of the voters seem to think it’s a worthwhile endeavor. You’re probably right in the sense that democrats couldnt find a progressive candidate if they came up and kicked them in the ass.

        • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          The last time the Democrats did that was Ted Kennedy challenging Carter. Even with a historically unpopular president and a well-known challenger he still lost.

          I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but our government is dysfunctional and incumbents are not successfully primaried.

            • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.world
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              6 months ago

              Lots of things. That’s what we get for having a dysfunctional government. Stop thinking it’s going to work effectively: It won’t.

              • Daft_ish@lemmy.world
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                6 months ago

                … you’re saying things won’t work effectively but then claiming to understand exactly how it works. I sense a contradiction.

                • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.world
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                  6 months ago

                  Your initial question didn’t make sense at all because the verb tenses don’t agree. I’m just doing my best to attempt to communicate with you.

                  • Daft_ish@lemmy.world
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                    6 months ago

                    This was my initial question you AI sounding mfr

                    No shit but also why the fuck didn’t we primary him?

                    What don’t you get?

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        no primary challenger has ever beaten an incumbent for president

        So, a bit of history.

        https://time.com/5682760/incumbent-presidents-primary-challenges/

        Before primary elections became the dominant way to pick a nominee, party leaders were more able to either shut down challengers or smoothly pass the nomination to someone else. Notably, four incumbents who were denied the nomination in the 19th century — John Tyler, Andrew Johnson and Chester A. Arthur — had been Vice Presidents who rose to the Presidency following the deaths of their predecessors, perhaps suggesting they’d never won their parties’ full support in the first place.

        Then

        In the 1952 Democratic Party presidential primaries, President Harry S. Truman was challenged by Senator Estes Kefauver. Truman lost the New Hampshire primary to Kefauver and dropped out of the race shortly after.

        Also

        TIME reported that McCarthy’s surprisingly strong showing in the New Hampshire primary was a statement that was “as much anti-Johnson as antiwar,” citing a NBC poll that found more than half of Democrats didn’t even know McCarthy’s position on Vietnam. Less than a week after New Hampshire, Attorney General Robert Kennedy jumped into the race. Then, on March 31, Johnson announced he wasn’t going to run for re-election.

        As TIME reported in the April 12, 1968, article on Johnson dropping out, “So low had Johnson’s popularity sunk, said one Democratic official, that last-minute surveys before the Wisconsin primary gave him a humiliating 12% of the vote there.”

        It should be noted that Ford nearly lost to Reagan in 1976

        He racked up 1,187 delegates compared to Ronald Reagan’s 1,070, which was barely more than the 1,130 he needed to secure the nomination.

        And Kennedy nearly beat Carter four years later

        Carter won 36 primaries that year, but Kennedy’s 12 victories included important ones in New York and California, and he didn’t concede until Aug. 11, 1980, at the Democratic National Convention at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

        In another historic race, William Taft was nearly edged out by Theodore Roosevelt, who went on to place second behind Woodrow Wilson in 1912. That gave Taft the dubious distinction of being the only incumbent to come in at third place in a general election.