it’s gross no matter how you spin it.

That's because you're doing it wrong. No spinning please.

It's also the best opportunity candidates get to frame issues and demonstrate vision. Conventional wisdom is that a contested primary is bad for the general, but that hasn't been true for decades. Election after election, a contested primary wins the general.

The way we run our primaries is an absolute joke. The presidential race is over months before half the country has even had a chance to vote. That gives the establishment every opportunity to manipulate media coverage to boost their preferred candidate.

The way every single establishment candidate dropped out and endorsed Biden (who was near last place) on the same day was ridiculously transparent. I'll also go to my grave with absolute certainty that Warren stayed in because the establishment got to her. I don't know if it was a carrot, a stick, or both, but they kept her in the race as a spoiler. Warren completely dropped her campaign but refused to drop out for almost another month.

We should be up in arms about the Democratic primary process, not calling them "clean and fair". Everyone should vote on the same day, we should have ranked choice style voting, and debates shouldn't all be run by corporate media. That's the minimum we should accept.

As for the superdelegates, they are the perfect demonstration of how our of touch and clueless the party establishment is. It doesn't even occur to them that if they ever were to override the will of their voters that it would sink the party for a generation or more. There is no world in which they could do that then win the general.

America does not even remotely understand this, so they will not vote as such.

Yeah, I'm not sure you need to be talking about what voters do or don't understand. Quit repeating establishment bullshit.

Because she's a black woman.

I seriously doubt this was the factor so many people think it is. Republicans have the racist/sexist vote locked up no matter who is running.

Where this can come into play is that women and minorities (especially blacks) have to avoid a lot of behaviors that would never hurt a white male candidate. They can't show a hint of outrage,weakness, or indecision, or they just become a stereotype. For all the mistakes Harris made, I don't think I ever saw her fall into that trap.

Unless you have some evidence, please don't go blaming it on leftists. That's just establishment bullshit. Leftists have been Democrats narrated to be the most consistently reliable voters in the country with more engagement than even Bible thumping nationalists. Engagement (including voting) is lowest at the middle of the political spectrum, which is exactly where anyone who thought about it for two seconds would expect it to be.

The establishment always bitched about leftists going third party (Although the Libertarians hurt Republicans far more than the Greens hurt Democrats) but that was clearly not a real factor this time, so now they insist that leftists went to Trump. No matter what, it always must be the fault of the left, not the precious "centrists" they love so much.

Step one in fixing this broken down wreck of a party is to stop buying their bullshit excuses. They lost because they didn't do enough for the American people, and because they weren't loud enough about what they did do. If they bragged about helping unions then they might piss off their corporate sponsors and they won't get to go on tour after leaving office and get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for 45 minute speeches.

My intention is not that we segregate, but that we not coddle bigotry and reactionary politics in our associations. Politics and interpersonal human connections are not two separate realms. Your politics and morality feed off each-other. Blurring differences beneath a veneer of politeness is just social isolation in geometric proximity. This has been the dominant social mode for decades, and it didn't stop society from getting where it is now.

It's really easy to blame the internet, but I'm old enough to remember the before times, and the differences are mostly cosmetic. (Although I agree with your comment on social media algorithms.) Rush Limbaugh dominated talk radio a decade before most people even heard of the Internet. Even back then we all had all the same toxic people who's company was tolerated, not appreciated. The civil war obviously predated even radio, and the build up was not all that dissimilar to what we have today.

Conservatives need us more than we need them. When it comes right down to it, rich culture is a feature of liberal or leftist thinking. There is a reason why Republicans keep using music at their rallies that gets them sued. We have the best artists, the best scientists, the best comedians, the best lovers, and the most generous people. We have creative business leaders and they have scam artists. We build technology and they abuse it. We stand up for women, and they are incels or human traffickers.

Was Israel really attacked In October 2023? This is the first I heard of it. So weird for something like that to just happen out of the clear blue sky to such wonderful people who definitely didn't provoke it or anything.

It's actually a lot less common for regular citizens to open carry in the US than some might think from US News. It's unusual in a protest, and almost always a far right thing. It has been used effectively by the left, but not at scale in the last 50 years.

The most effective protest movements usually have two approaches going on at the same time, one that threatens violence, and one that is strictly non violent. Non violent movements tend to be ignored until negotiations with them are seen as more favorable than dealing with an armed movement.

Yes actually. It's not immunity from cops, but it protects from general harassment. If the cops want you bad enough then they will get you regardless.

Most of what Trump says is complete bullshit though. In the 2016 campaign he supported universal healthcare.

I don't think anyone has any idea what specific horrors Trump will unleash in this time, but it should be obvious to anyone that it will be horrors.

It's one thing for them to be afraid you might be armed, and quite another to know you are armed and surrounded by allies who are also armed.

I've always thought this was one of the most dangerous ideas ever to gain widespread acceptance, and we are currently seeing exactly why. If somebody's politics are so terrible that civil discussion is impossible, why on earth would you want to associate with them? This is how we coddle terrible ideas and let them quietly fester with a vanier veneer of false civility. The seeds of MAGA should never have been allowed to take root.

Unfortunately, America's economy will likely take the rest of the world's economies with it.

The kind of cop you are talking about is a coward. They are far less likely to harass protesters when they are open carrying.

It's pretty sad that you can assume someone is a leftist just because their against corrupt politicians. It doesn't say much for non-leftists.

There is certainly something seriously wrong with a country that can generate that many Trump voters.

There is no "the problem". Societies and elections are too complicated for that kind of reductionist reasoning.

Take value judgements out of it, and the fundamental truth is that the Trump campaign attracted and energized more voters than the Harris campaign. What knobs and switches could we have played with to get a different outcome? That is all I care about, and I don't know how we are supposed to get better voters in less than four years with Republicans in power.

That is literally the basis of democracy.

Which is why democracy and capitalism are fundamentally incompatible, but that's a much deeper conversation.

What does being leftist have to do with it? Our government is an amalgam of corruption and grift, and people across the political spectrum are fed up with it. The Republican party is worse than the Democratic party, and Trump is an extra special helping of sewage, but the whole system is one big grift. One way or another, the criminals running both parties are long overdue for the gallows, or at least a tiny prison cell.

It's totally irrelevant whether or not these voters understand the underlying economics. What they know is that they can't afford to make a car payment and buy groceries anymore, and they know that the Democratic messaging is totally inadequate and out of touch. If your political strategy requires voters to understand the underlying economics realities, then you damn well better be telling them what they should know.

But I do get that. However, I'm not sure what you think we can do about it. We do have people in society that have the job of influencing voters to vote differently. We call them politicians, and they influence votes through something called an effective campaign. I know that's a weird concept for a lot of Democrats to grasp, but you should look into it.

I'm totally on board in saying that the voting public fucked up. However, I'm looking for solutions, not just someone to blame. I do not and will not believe that the American public was just unreachable - especially when the Harris campaign had so many gaping flaws. Some of us were watching in horror as Harris sunk her campaign and trying desperately to wake someone up. It's nice to think that voters will bypass a shitty campaign to find the relevant information themselves, but it's hardly realistic.