The 2020 Presidential General Election thread

Minimizing harm is a good.
I'm saddened that you can't see that.

Diminishing returns.

It's only minimizing harm if the harm is actually reduced. If it's offloaded onto others, it's not being minimized. Hence why I said that people are afraid Trump will do to the United States what the United States has done to other countries, and so they vote for Joe Biden, who will go back to doing to other countries what Trump does to the United States, except Biden won't reduce harm, not to any appreciable degree. You're paying more with your life to have the "normalcy" Joe Biden promises, but you won't get it. You think BLM protests will stop once Biden is president? You think the police will stop killing black people for protesting? For existing? It won't stop, it will just be harder to notice. The climate will continue to become more inhospitable to human life, children will still be locked in cages, immigrants will still be deported on a large scale, corporations will still exploit the poor until they are crushed underfoot, and innocents will be bombed in the name of "peace."

Trump's actions have laid bare the very disease the U.S. has been suffering from for generations. Joe Biden will merely remove the irritating rash for most of you, but the disease won't be gone. The harm will not be minimized, merely hidden from your point of view. Meanwhile, BIPOC, the poor, members of the LGBTQIA+ community will continue to deal with the structural violence of a system that despises them while making performative overtures in their direction. You'll still die for being black, but it will be by the hand of a gay, black woman as the police chief. You'll still be homeless, but the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development will be Hispanic. It will still be oppression, but it will look so very lovely by comparison to the dumpster fire Trump has exposed for all to see.

"Harm reduction" for people who will no longer have to look at it.

No, what happened in '68 was that the teevee news (just three networks then) kept showing the protests outside the Chicago Convention Center and the Stoopids interpreted that as "damn DemocRATs," and voted for Nixon.

Mind you, many of those protestors were not old enough to vote (the age was 21, not 18) but old enough to be drafted and sent to VeeYetNam. Not something Muricans have had to deal with since.

But you, you've got a rat in your house and you want to burn the house down to kill the rat (or IYO, two equally virulent rats). Then what?

You say you're "doing a lot more than pushing a lever" this election year. If - and I'm not prying - you're helping people to register to vote, organizing carpools to take them to polling places, campaigning for alternate candidates who are neither R nor D, that's fantastic, and I commend you for it.

Just a teensy bit ironic that you'll help people participate in a process you despise.

I'm not helping people vote.
I'm working with mutual aid groups, co-ops, and other orgs that work to insulate the most vulnerable from the coming danger whether that danger has a red hat or blue tie on the face of it. Voting is a part of the process, sure, but in this day and age it's the least important part, and the least effective. It is the bare minimum of what needs to be done.

If you want to get involved with finding a cure, Represent US is one organization. There are many others.

Then you might as well say slavery didn't get us here, and Jim Crow didn't get us here because that's what the people wanted. No, that's what some people wanted, and they set about convincing everyone else why they had to choose it or else whatever bogeyman was going to come and take away their homes and murder their children. We're here because of people like Joe Biden. Donald Trump is a symptom of the disease, a manifestation of what policies created by people like Joe Biden brought us. You think Donald Trump's nationalistic chest beating and being "tough on crime" emerged from a vacuum? Of course it didn't, and you know it didn't. You cannot remove the blood from Joe Biden's hands, just as Donald Trump can't evade the truth about his contributions to millions of Americans regarding COVID-19. They are a part of that very structural violence and systemic oppression. They are avatars of it.

Edit: Not to beat a dead horse, but...

Source: https://www.salon.com/2020/02/27/su...block-sanders-at-contested-convention-report/

The DNC can do whatever it wants, but let's not pretend what it wants is the will of the people. You are told to choose, and that your choice will make the difference, but it won't make a difference because candidates who fall too far outside of what the establishment considers "safe" are rejected.

You had better choices than Joe Biden. You didn't get to make that choice, it was made for you. That is your "will of the people," and so many people just nod their heads and believe they're making a real difference.

@Amaris, you're measuring Biden by 2016 standards. The question is no longer whether the leader of the US, and hence the country itself, are casually racist, deeply corrupt, a puppet of a genocidal military-industrial complex, and offer wealth and offices as just rewards for rapists. The standard is now whether they are all of those and in addition will also kill several hundreds of thousands of Americans, conspire against the United States with is enemies, and openly embrace National Socialism and fascist home rule. And don't assume for one moment that all of the latter won't once again fall hardest on those already marginalized. They cannot afford the luxury of withholding support from the lesser evil.

It was true in 2016, too. It was true in 1916 when Woodrow Wilson, a dedicated racist, was in the office. It was true in 1980 when Ronald Reagan let millions of gay men die from AIDS. It was true in 2012 when Barack Obama oversaw the caging of children, and the murder of a U.S. citizen without trial. All Donald Trump has done is expose everyone to it now, not just the poor and vulnerable. The middle class white moderate is feeling the pinch, and that's why people are fucking terrified. That's why the news is blasting his despicable nature at the top of their lungs, even as they now minimize the transgressions of Joe Biden. That's because Biden will step in and put that blanket of blessed ignorance around the moderate white folks again, so they don't have to see how the rest of the country, and the rest of the world, lives under the presence of the United States government.

Pffle. You Germans act like you invented National Socialism or something. WTF were you guys doing when the National Socialists were running around Europe in the 40s? You certainly weren’t out there fighting against them, like ‘Murcia was! You and your Swiss chalets and years long vacations of the country.

Stop it! Someone might take you seriously.

The superdelegates' opinions would be absolutely irrelevant if Bernie could have convinced a majority of Democratic voters that he should be the nominee.

Bernie had arguably a better message and policies, more money, better name recognition, more drive, more sincerity and on and on and on. Yet he couldn't close the deal. Didn't come close.

That's not on the DNC. That's at least in part on Bernie.

Also, what are the chances that Bernie got elected and won that the problems of systemic racism would be somehow solved or een meaningfully diminished?

Even spoting him credit for caring about racism and ignoring his lack of accomplishments as a senator in uprooting these problems, he would still face a hostile Senate that would block mot initiatives he might try. And many of these problems, such as policing, the federal government has limited control over anyway.

I completely and adamantly disagree. Bernie did as he was supposed to - he engaged the people. The party, including superdelegates, are supposed to support the people and who the people want. It was never Bernie's responsibility to woo superdelegates. That right there is exactly what is wrong with the system.

This. It creates a privileged class between the voters and their representatives. Suddenly you're not just picking your guy, your guy has to convince party elites to choose him as well. It's wholly undemocratic.

This is the hardest hitting anti-Trump ad I’ve seen.

No, it was Bernie's role to win delegates by getting enough people to vote for him. If he got enough people to vote for him, he would have had the requisite number of delegates to win on the first ballot and the superdelegates couldn't have blocked him. Bernie pushed for and got a change that prevented superdelegates from doing anything if a candidate got (I think) 1,991 delegates.

Had he done that, the superdelegates would have been irrelevant. Instead, he got something on the order of half the number he needed to win outright.

While I agree that it's Bernie's job to woo delegates, the Super delegate system is complete bullshit. It allows a block of voters to completely undermine the will of the people. It also undermines the left's argument when they bitch about the electoral college. If a party REALLY cared about "one person one vote", it wouldn't allow that type of system in their nomination process to begin with.

In fact, if the parties really cared about a non-corrupt system, they would both do away with the delegates entirely and just determine the nominee by popular vote.

This is what I and @Amaris are saying is wrong with the system. This is how trump got elected - by catering to the delegates, not the people.

And what I'm saying is that as bad as the superdelegate system is, it was definitely irrelevant to Bernie's chances in 2020, and mostly irrelevant in 2016. One can make the argument that enough people knew in 2016 that the superdelegates could vote on the first ballot and had Clinton's back that it distorted how voters casts their ballots.

But in 2020, Bernie had a chance to win outright on the first ballot and he didn't come close. He can't really blame the DNC or superdelegates for that.

The big differrence is that as citizens we have a right to have our individual votes count and count equally. There is no corresponding right to have a choice in who a party selects.

If a party wants to have delegates, superdelegates, direct popular selection of candidates or a big-ass dartboard with candidate's pictures on it in a smoke-filled room, that's up to it.

Ok. I see what you're saying. This is the way it is. Fine. Then that's the way it is.

BUT, that is not how it should be. And, Bernie's entire platform, his campaign, the reason the people like him, is because he doesn't do things the way they are done. He's not going to allow they current corrupt system to corrupt him. He should not have to bow to the delegates. He ran his campaign the way it was supposed to be run.

He lost. So, is it really Bernie's fault? or the fault of a corrupt system? My stance is the latter.

Of course they can do that, but that doesn't mean I as a citizen don't have a right to call bullshit whenever one of them tries to claim that they care about voting rights. Because if you are fine with a delegate system the way the democratic party has you're full of shit when you claim to care about voters being disenfranchised.

So who were all those primary voters that overwhelmingly voted for Biden? Are they not "the people?"

https://www.usatoday.com/elections/results/primaries/democratic/

State after state after state, ordinary primary voters picked Biden over Sanders. You may not agree with them, but claiming that their choice somehow isn't "the will of the people" is just plain wrong.

I think it takes a lot of faith to believe that this primary was anything approaching ordinary or correctly executed. From the very start there were problems, but then the pandemic made things worse on a level not seen in many years. I do not have the faith in the DNC you seem to have.

That's some vague innuendo you've got there. Care to make some specific accusations of fraud or Bernie-specific voter suppression?

The pandemic certainly effected the primaries because Bernie lost his momentum right around the time that it hit. With everyone being forced to stay inside for so long, there was no way he could do rallies or any of the other normal social interactions that candidates do. Many primary and caucus goers are influenced more by personal contact than they are from campaign ads. Take away a politicians ability to shake hands and hold town halls and you basically are leaving his fate to television, radio and mailers.

Incoming post about irregularities that even if corrected (and were true) would not have changed the outcome.
Biden was nominated by the will of the people. At least the plurality of them.

Whilst I hope that my political posts here are viewed with more rationality than those of Amaris by most people, I will agree with Amaris on this point. As someone who is very active in the local Democratic Party, I can tell you that there were a number of things done to tilt the field away from Sanders. Not necessarily towards Biden, but definitely away from Sanders, and as well as Warren. When I discovered these things, I did DM some posters here (and if any of them want to discuss the content of those DMs, they've got my permission) with my concerns. I also contacted people from various media outlets to inform them of the matter. I got one response from a reporter with The Intercept who said, "Yup. That matches what we've been hearing from people in other states." The response from other reporters, even those who publicly raised issuues about certain candidates running for the Democratic nomination was either silence, or to block me on social media.

I have been told, and I believe that I've mentioned this here in the past, that as far back as a year ago, people I know who were serving on the state executive committee for the DNC told me that the party leadership wanted Biden. Now, just like the crazy shit that happened in Florida enabled W to become President in 2000, I don't think that it's correct to say that the people who did those things knew that it would lead to W beating Gore, but it would be wrong to say that they didn't affect the outcome. Had Gore won his home state of TN, it wouldn't have mattered how fucked up the Florida election was, he'd have been President. But because the party wrote off TN, and ignored it, Florida became key to the election, and the actions of those involved with the ballots resulted in W winning.

So, yeah, you can blame Gore's loss on his failure to address issues that related to people in his home state, but that doesn't change the fact that Florida was a clusterfuck, and had a few things gone differently there, he might have won the election and been President. Would the country be better off as a result? I have no idea.

This election is not about getting a good outcome. It’s about keeping good outcomes possible. There may well be no good outcomes possible if Trump wins. Trump may have been a result of the afflictions of the body politic, but he’s not the same kind. Those are a mixture of congenital defects and a number of psychological problems. Trump is a malignant brain tumor about 4 months from inoperability, and with a large chance of being terminal in 4 months to 4 years. Joe Biden is chemotherapy. He might not heal the rest of the body’s ailments, but he’ll give us many more chances to do so than the tumor will, and that might just help a couple of the neuropsych problems along the way.

Meanwhile, let’s say you convinced 10 people on the board to vote for Hawkins or write in Bernie Sanders. And we each convince 1000 people to vote the same. And those 1000 convince another 1000 each. What happens? Donald Trump wins. Brain cancer wins. And the body politic stands a good chance of dying, replaced by a single smiling Donald Trump. There’s no coming back from that. You don't end the world just because you don't like how the alternative was chosen. You keep the world going, and then you fix the problems.