Joe Biden announces presidential bid

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This implies 2 important things
1: It implies that the people who refuse to vote for these candidates are unable to accept anything but a candidate that agrees with them on all issues.
and 2: That, if they vote for $bad_candidate (Hillary, Biden, Kerry, etc,) they’re going to get what they want.

People have a range they’re comfortable with. Do I agree with Bernie or Liz or whoever else I’d consider voting for on everything? Hell no. None of them advocate for stuff that’s even close to my positions. Similarly, I don’t suspect that you’d vote for the shambling corpse of Andrew Jackson if the DNC brought him back for a new term (let’s say the supreme court ruled that he was allowed a 3rd term because he died before that constitutional amendment.)

Do I think that Biden particularly agrees with me on any issues I care about? Nah, probably not. He’s already got a race problem. I don’t expect him to push for trans&queer rights to any extent beyond “the entire party will disown him if he doesn’t go with this.” He’s on the record as a fan of billionaires. He’s notably not for single payer healthcare. I’m not seeing any progress on ending the war on drugs beyond reinstating the Obama era “Let’s issue an executive order to not prosecute people for drug offenses in states that they’re legal in.” And that’s just the list of positions everyone’s talking about, much less more obscure topics I’m interested in like killing software patents and a serious look at the copyright system.

Cheeses Priced the dude can’t even get OBAMA to endorse him, and not only was he VP under the man, but Obama also expanded surveillance and drone murder to previously-unprecedented levels. I can hear the campaign slogan now: “he’s not as racist, not as rich, and has groped fewer people than the other guy! Vote now to turn the political clock back to 2010!”

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So you think it would be better to have another four years of Trump vs. Biden?

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I dunno, and I also don’t know who Kirsten Sinema is. I was addressing the admonition I’ve been hearing here to get out and vote, no matter who the Dem nominee is. What I’m saying is that the problem is putting up a plate of the same old poison, and then blaming everyone who isn’t willing to eat it yet again.

And by poison, I mean neoliberal Republican Lites like Obama and the Clintons, politicians who mostly perpetuated and even advanced the problems that got us stuck with Trump. I don’t blame people for refusing even more of that, if and when that choice comes around again.

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The republicans can run Ted Cruz and we wouldn’t have another 4 years of Trump. Any party running literally anyone but Trump gets to check the “not Trump” checkbox.

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I think it would be better to not have to make that kind of a choice in the first place by driving Biden out of the primary before he gets any kind of momentum behind him to steamroll the candidates who might actually have a chance to be energizing.

Sure, “vote blue no matter who”.

But that attitude kind of presupposes that the candidate is going to be a pile of shit whose only real redeeming feature for people not paying the closest attention is that he’s not going to burn it all down like a Republican president would. Wouldn’t it be better to pick someone that people didn’t have to be coerced into caring about only because the alternative sucks even more?

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That’s going to be a significant percentage of Democratic voters’ attitude to anyone who isn’t their candidate from the start. It’s human nature. Many people here don’t like Biden. Others don’t like Sanders, or Warren, or Harris, etc. etc.

For the entirety of my life conservative activists have been shrieking and whining about this “RINO” and that, but they always come out and voted. And the answer was that the path to their dream candidates lead through multiple terms of candidates who infuriated them, but who were just that little bit closer to what they wanted.

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One could say that they both look after some of the American people:

https://psmag.com/ideas/the-dirty-truth-about-white-liberal-racism

I am not saying that both sides are equally bad. But one being an open sewer does not make the other a shining beacon of hope and light.

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Meanwhile there has never been any kind of assurance like that for the left, as elected Democrats increasingly find themselves stepping into the shoes that the Republican party abandoned after Nixon resigned and kicked off the next 40 years of ongoing scandal-plagued right-wing politics and extremism, all the while telling the left flank of their party that this is just what you have to do to win elections (and repeatedly failing to win them with said strategy), so just Deal With It.

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There was never any assurances on the right, either. They kept being sold Bush scions and compassionate conservatives. They made their assurances by making themselves indispensable.

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I guess the less charitable interpretation, then, would be that the right generally doesn’t catch on when they’re being sold a bill of goods.

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It’s an idiom which reflects how important it is to vote (even strategically)—. Because if you don’t show up and vote every single time, you don’t get to have seats on the Supreme Court, AOC, or a Green New Deal.

AOC is a great example of what happens when folk show up and do their duty.

I was also frustrated, since it sounds like folk are advocating for soft voter suppression whenever someone says “it doesn’t matter.”

Who does that help?

And yet, nobody yet asks me why I felt the need to express it that way.

And it’s not like I was addressing actual Democrats, apparently, or was even going to do so. I’ll agree that not-primarying-out-less-ideal-candidates-and-then-refusing-to-vote-for-the-candidates-who-did-become-candidates isn’t working.

But that doesn’t seem to be what you’re saying.

The point was in voting strategically. Staying at home isn’t voting, and it isn’t a strategy. If Biden gets the nom, you vote for him anyway. It’s the only way I’ll vote for him, since I’m pretty settled on Warren). Also, rabid weasels make knowing about who the running mate is really critical.

You’re right when you say that it is less than ideal. That’s part of the strategy, though: to get something instead of nothing.

We already know it’s less than ideal. You then vote anyway, because if you’re a progressive, you know the value of getting something over nothing (allegedly). That math isn’t hard.

Yep, I was partly frustrated. Well, am, because it doesn’t help or change my point. Every day, we can see what the future that folk who failed to do their duty by voting has secured for us if they take the advice “it doesn’t matter” to heart.

How can anyone even say that, when we can all see exactly what that’s gotten us?

Yeah. I’ll have to vote for Biden if he’s not primaried out. That doesn’t mean he’s a good choice, but a better one than Trump.

The stakes are bigger than not being happy your preferred candidate didn’t get picked—they nearly always are.

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That really should be Uncle Joe’s campaign tag line.

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You mean it’s not?

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If being sold a bill of goods means eventually being in charge of the majority of state and federal government positions for the whole of my entire life, then I want to buy.

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You keep ignoring what I’ve been saying, so I’ll just start ignoring you too.

Buh bye.

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The “mainstream” “centrist” Republicans all moved to wilder positions because they were losing primaries to Tea Party candidates, or were in danger of losing their primaries.

The less wild Republicans also tried to tamp down their over-zealous wings through party-rules chicanery, and not-sporting behavior. They couldn’t over-rule the mass that swung their primaries.

They didn’t tend to do it because they were losing the main election.

Can a lot of politicians be painted as calculating and cowardly status quo-ers? Sure. But they move their positions to match what they think will get them votes to stay in power, and that will always be hard-wired into the system. It’s not a bug. It’s what that part of the system was designed to produce, a leadership of a few influence-able humans, that bends to the perceived whims of voters, in a way that makes any individual politician look changeable and weak.

The only way “centrist” Democrats move left or get replaced, is if they see that wind in the primaries.

The Tea Party candidates were actively fought by a lot of forgotten Republicans, who “devolved” their platforms or were replaced. But it wasn’t based on who had the better philosophy, it was based on who could clinch the primary, even when things were heavily stacked against them from the party machine.

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Or as people have been trying to tell you, AOC is a great lesson in what happens when you give people something to vote for, versus “lie back and think of America.”

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Not really: she holds a Democratic safe seat: when she won the primary she was basically in, whether she inspired people or not. After all, the incumbent she unseated didn’t inspire anyone, and he consistently won.

However, I certainly believe that progressives can perform more strongly in competitive races than centrists and the media would like to believe. I also think that even when they don’t the help re-enforce brand image, and so can be good for the party as a whole. I’ve never voted in a primary for “electability” over positions. There are so many unknown unknowns on that count that I think it’s a waste of time trying to assess it.

I’m not sure if there are any examples from the last election of a progressive unseating a centrist candidate in the primary of a competitive race and then going on to outperform expectations or win. That would be a good thing to see.

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But how did she win the primary?

Maybe by giving people something to vote for?

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Voters under 50 haven’t known any other life. Voters over 50 are watching Fox News and being told “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.”

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