Your idea of how the DNC works (or worked) is historically uninformed, at least prior to the DLC takeover. It certainly is completely wrong w/r to the 1972 campaign. (Monied interests were always there, sure, but as a former card-carrying member of the AFL-CIO I don’t consider union money as tainted as some do.) The Clinton wing of the party has been in place for several decades, so it is a little hard to remember what things were like before that.
My friends and I desperately wanted McGovern to win in 1972, for selfish reasons; we didn’t want to go to Vietnam. However, those of us who were active in party politics at the time didn’t kid ourselves that McGovern had a chance, or really any coherent vision for the office. Even with the full backing of the party structure, which he certainly had, his election was always a longshot.
The reference to them preferring right wing capitalists was an explanation of why they supported Nixon over McGovern. Yes, the statement has broader application, but the direct referent was Nixon. Meany wasn’t mentioned until several posts later.
No, they were being REPORTED as early as February. Counting them requires the national convention.
This is just a list of active high-level Democrats who endorsed a candidate, not a counting of the votes. If you don’t know that, then you should do some reading. If you do know it, you’re being dishonest.
That doesn’t have any bearing on my point that Sanders and his followers – including kpkpkp – want to open up the Democratic primary to non-Democrats. If, as kpkpkp’s use of the chart as evidence of a flaw in the system indicates, he believes voters are idiots then why INCREASE the number of idiots in the process?
No it doesn’t, and I actually very much agree with you that “opening a Democratic primary to non-Democrats” and “adding more idiots to [any arbitrary decision-making process” are at minimum non-obvious strategies, and I’m not arguing for them.
I’m saying that “ability to consistently and quickly see through misleading statistics” is a vastly higher bar than “exclude idiots,” that even the latter has little to do with “exclude non-Democrats,” and that charts like the one above will cause problems and distortions no matter who is allowed to vote in a primary. Almost all the deciding power in our political system resides in those who exclude the other ~300 million people who never show up in polls and charts, rather than in the voters in primaries or general elections; press and parties hold much of that power; and misleading statistics and strong framing effects can influence all of us.
What really surprised me about the Democratic primary (and I’m saying this as an Otherplacian, for whom the US politics are primarily a spectator sport) was how many of the most ardent and passionate people didn’t understand squat about the primary process, or the role of the delegates, or the electoral college, or the US voting system and why it makes third parties in the presidential election into spoilers, and so on and on.
What the US really, really needs is a comprehensive reform to how people are taught civics.
I understand the process, as do you, however, the vast majority of busy people out there do not and are working on the smallest amounts of political information (as opposed to political messaging, in which we are drowning).
To conflate the count of constituent selected (past tense) delegateson THE. SAME. FUCKING. CHART. as pledged-but-yet-to-be-cast-may-change-in-the-future (future infinitive) superdelegates is to confuse. It gives the impression a vote for Sanders would be a vote launched into the wind. It’s a subtle form of voter suppression. That’s the issue I’ve had all along (since this sort of combined “count” chart started appearing in Q1 2016).
I’ve said no such thing, but thanks for the projection
