So you envision the best system being a one-time election with several dozen (at least) candidates for President, and whoever gets the most votes becomes President?
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Actually, I would partial to a worldwide constitutional monarchy elected every decade with the census. This whole thing where the governments of the world separate and fight each other for supremacy is boring, and terribly inefficient.
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Our democracy doesn’t suck because we don’t have a fucking democracy.
I grant you, the cynical farce we have in place of democracy definitely sucks.
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Rules were made to be broken. You’ve got to admit, this dream team of mine would be better than the joe biden hillary clinton inevitability… she’s been running A/B tests lately on the radio and TV incase you’ve been listening, gonna make a move soon.
That would be an interesting constitutional convention.
Right? If its every 10 years, you likely wouldn’t mind all the campaigning leading up to it since you’ll have 2.5 world cups in between every election cycle.
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Rather, the legislative branch needs to reassert its independence from the executive, and start setting policy again. It’s easy to protest, but what we need are more people like AOC who are willing to actually do the nuts and bolts work of writing laws. Democratic presidents are not kings, people like Obama and Biden take the opinions of others seriously.
Look, Sanders has already pulled Biden pretty far to the left, Biden may the best vehicle at the moment to sell it to moderate Dem voters and not spook the Wall Street locusts into attack mode until it’s too late. That’s my view as an expatriate.
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Exactly. Everyone would have their cold fusion jet-packs to ride around on to visit all the polling places, and nobody would mind.
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Well, yes.
If you sign on as a Democrat (or Republican), you’re expected to support your party’s nominee. If you want the platform that the party gives you as a national candidate, you owe the party loyalty.
Sanders and his supporters would not have gotten a tenth of the attention and following that they’ve gained over the last five years had Sanders not run for the nomination of the Democratic Party. Running as an independent or Socialist, Sanders would have gotten nowhere with a presidential campaign.
Once the nomination battle is lost, Sanders has to fall in line behind the nominee and strongly encourage his supporters to do so. If he doesn’t, the Democrats will never let him on a stage again, and I wouldn’t blame them in the least.
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To my knowledge there’s nothing stopping Sanders from doing a Joe Lieberman and running as an independent in the general election if he loses the Democratic primary. (For that matter there was never anything compelling him to run for the Democratic primary in the first place).
Given his challenges in driving high turnout for the primary I’m somewhat skeptical of his ability to be successful as an independent in the general, but he could certainly try. Of course he’d run the risk of acting as a spoiler and dividing the progressive vote, leading to a Trump re-election. So he’d need to make his own decision on whether the risk was worth it.
Now if we had a top-2 runoff election if no candidate in the general got more than 50% of the popular vote, that would be something I could definitely get behind. Unfortunately the constitution isn’t set up to allow that.
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if bloomberg had been the nominee, i would have wanted sanders to run third party. i don’t think he’d risk getting trump elected though, especially if biden gets the nomination.
he could have done so last election, and he didn’t. he endorsed clinton
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Of course there is nothing stopping Sanders from running as an independent, other than he’d in effect be saying, “Thanks, Democrats, for letting me run in all your primaries and getting the benefit of all the publicity from the debates and news coverage as a Democratic candidate. But now that I didn’t win, I’m gonna do my best to kneecap the lifelong Democrat who did win.”
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Oh I agree with you completely. I certainly wasn’t happy about what Lieberman did in hIs 2006 senate race (and I have other problems with that guy too). Just pointing out that for people like @anon18417063 that if you really really hate the concept of party primaries or don’t accept the results of them as being legitimate there are other options.
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This and one more thing … It’s helpful to remember that there are local and state elections in 2020 as well. If we don’t want another Merrick Garland, we need to remember that there are three branches of government (cue the "There are n lights meme).
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Moreover, the bogeymen DNC leadership is actively trying hard to get states to do this:
Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez is calling for states to allow residents to vote by mail in the remaining primaries to contain the spread of coronavirus.
Asked Monday on MSNBC’s “All In” if he was calling for “universal vote-by-mail adoption in the remaining primary states,” Perez said that he supported the idea.
“Wherever practicable, and I think you can make this happen,” the DNC chair said.
I’m just not sure if we’re supposed to be frightened and incensed because the DNC is manipulating the election by not delaying primaries. Or because Trump is manipulating the election by delaying primaries.
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Plato’s Philosopher king would be an ideal form of government. But I’m not sure how to make that happen consistently.
This is false.
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Ranked choice would make that plan pretty reasonable.
Furthermore, it’s obviously false. I don’t understand why people keep repeating stuff like this.
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