I would counter that the primaries aren't democracy - they are party politics. We don't get to "Democracy" until the general.
Well, that I can't actually agree with. I believe the process is meant to be democratic all the way through. If you are a Democrat voter, you have a say in which Democrat represents you. You have the right to assess the candidates and decide which you think is best. Sure, if your party has a sitting president running for reelection then the assumption is, that person will be the candidate. The primary process in that case does sort of become more ceremonial, but there is still a vote. Nobody thought Obama was not going to run for a win a second term, so there was no major challenge to him.
My argument in this election is we do have a sitting president that indicated he would just be a one term president. He changed his mind, which is fair, but due to the fact that he has such low favorability numbers, the same as a guy with 91 felony charges against him and a sexual assault on his record, there should be some consideration of if they should go in a different direction.
These are the Democrat voters openly showing in polling they do not favor Biden to be their candidate in 2024. I don't think it is very democratic for the DNC to say "Suck it! We will tell you who the candidate is!" which is what they are doing. They did that with Hillary Clinton as well and it did create division within the party. We can blame none of that on Republicans.
Also, if for some reason Biden runs through the primary process but suddenly steps aside and hands Harris his delegates...that is not at all what I would consider a fair process. Harris was the favorite for the party to become their nominee when she announced in 2019. I loved her as a senator, thought she was great. Could see why they wanted her. However, her campaign was dead by December. She totally tanked. This is not based on what Republicans thought of her, this was because Democrats wanted nothing to do with her. She was awkward as a campaigner, it was a disaster. Democrats would donate to her and ran her out of the race rapidly.
The funny part of this was, the DNC did not really want Biden to be their candidate in 2020, they wanted Harris, but she garnered so little support from voters she was gone before they could do anything. They thought it would be embarrassing to have Biden run after having him step aside so Hillary could run in 2016. Problem was Bernie was still around and voters loved him. They wanted nothing to do with Sanders, so embarrassment be damned, Biden had to be their guy. These were clumsy and idiotic times for the DNC and end result was Biden wins and picks Harris as his VP. Setting themselves up with a guy who said he was going to do one term backed up with Harris who was a horror show when she ran. Not the best of plans. Primaries are where the party finds out what their voters want...not so they can tell them to suck it and vote for the candidate they chose.
You are correct that they have made the primaries about party politics and not in a good way. It has resulted in a series of candidates that poll poorly and end up in tight races with absolutely horrid Republican candidates. Not a good strategy.
Both parties are within their rights to set the rules for their primaries. Additionally, there have been debates every round for decades about the order of the primaries, and how two lily white states have an outside influence on the rest of the diverse states later in the season - the states after Super Tuesday have been complaining for years that they have no say at all. I don't see that this has anything to do with Biden losing NH & Iowa - It's more to vary the playing field.
Yes, rules. Rules that should be about running a free and fair election and hopefully determining who their voters want to vote for to present the best candidate that can win. It can't be about fixing elections so they have a hand-picked candidate based on whose turn they think it should be or because they specifically want their candidate to be a certain sex or color. If they had let Biden run for 2016 the consensus seems to be now he would have beat Trump then and we would never have faced the horror of a Trump presidency. Now some people also admit that had they been fair with Bernie and let him run he also would have defeated Trump by a wide margin. Instead the DNC forced Hillary on us and we now live with the total nightmare of a Trump presidency tearing this country apart and he has never gone away.
That tells me that their "rules" should be rules that allow voters to have their say because the voters let them know IN ADVANCE that Hillary was a crap candidate and wiped out Harris before she was out of the gate practically. Now, I have nothing against Kamala Harris, I like her, but I am aware and openminded enough to admit she is a huge risk as a candidate for president.
In times where the Republicans are fully flying a fascist flag and their leading candidate and the clown from Florida both openly promise to destroy democracy here for good...you really should not be fucking around with any candidate that comes with huge risks. You should set yourself up for success. Somehow, and this is my major issue with the DNC, they seem utterly oblivious to this.
I would give them some advice, go ahead and do that but don't expect that your own voters will not notice what you have done. This definitely is all about wanting Biden to start strong and not get embarrassed with losses in the first two primary states. It is also about them being very afraid of RFK Jr. due to what they learned from Bernie Sanders and that yes, Bobby is a legacy Democrat...or was, now for the party he is shit on a stick because that is what they have made him.
Obama won Iowa in 2008 and basically tied with Clinton in NH, so I don't care what color the voters are in those states, they voted in a fair way and there was nothing wrong with that. The DNC learned nothing from those numbers, looked kind of stupid due to the results, and so their solution to that now is to basically say "Screw Iowa and New Hampshire we won't even count their votes and we will punish them for not getting out of the way. Our voting officially starts in South Carolina."
This is for just a single reason, they picked their candidate, they know he will struggle in those two states, so to avoid that and to try to avoid any attention going to another candidate, they literally want to just run in 48 states in the primary. I would ask, isn't the president the president of all 50 states?
Yeah, the Democrats seem to want to fight for a fair general election but they prefer to fix their own primary? Seriously, WTF?
