this post was submitted on 11 May 2025
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If it looks like that's going to happen, they just won't bother with primaries.
Again.
I am so fucking sick of doomerism.
Neither party has ever had a real primary for an incumbent president. Neither party has ever not had a primary without an incumbent president, since we started having primaries. I'm not defending it, because it's an affront to democracy, but if your looking at the past to predict the future, then you should do it right.
This wasn't the time to did it as it's always been done when everyone and their mother knew Trump was a dangerous fascist President and could see the warning signs of Biden's age.
I hope everyone here is finding and boosting viable third party candidates. We've got several long rows to hoe, but we can make the garden grow.
A candidate being third party precludes them from being 'viable' in our system, at least in the federal elections. It's more advantageous for an independent or progressive democrat to take the primary, but they'll always be at a disadvantage under the DNC. Maintaining a high populist energy through the midterms and into 2027 will force them to recon with it. Hopefully Bernie and AOC can keep up the oligarchy tour and keep it in the headlines, and maybe if they do more democrats will join the cause.
Its been so long since we've had a candidate who embraced a people first platform instead of triangulating and offering the barest minimum of information of what they strongly support. Just that would be an overwhelmingly welcome change. The whole election process has become enshitified.
There is no such thing.
If we want to win a Democratic primary then we will have to overcome the Democratic establishment. If we want to skip the primary and win the general, then we will have to overcome both parties. It's much easier to completely shut out third party candidates in the general than to freeze a popular candidate out of a primary.
The biggest barrier any progressive candidate has to overcome is that there is a massive core of disengaged Democratic voters who just want to beat the Republican, and they have totally swallowed the myth of centrists doing better because they appeal to the right.
Having to overcome that at the same time we have to overcome the very real narrative that a third party candidate will just split the Democratic vote is absolutely impossible.
The only two things that might save Republicans in 2028 are Democrats winning big in 2026 and doing nothing, and the bulk of the progressive movement backing a third party.
I don't think it is easier. The DNC controls the processes and all the systems within their own party plus the media biases, while a third party who makes it to the general only has to contend with the normal difficulties of the media. They've done different kinds of maneuvering each of the last 3 primaries to prove this, not to mention other things like tipping the scales in local primaries or choosing that old guy over AOC for that committee seat they were fighting for.
A lot of anti-establishment voters went from Bernie to Trump, so I think the right candidate can maneuver this middle path, not by being a centrist but by appealing to people who hate the establishment in this country but want someone other than Trump after he no doubt fucks up again.
When you look at how Democrats control primaries, it's almost entirely through their cozy relationship with the media. It was more direct in 2016, but in 2020 it was a consistent message from the media that Bernie was less electable and Trump had to be defeated.
If you were familiar with running as a third party in even local elections, you would know that just getting on the ballot as a third party is a massive effort. Also, the controls that Democrats have over the primary process, Democrats and Republicans together have over the general election process.
That has nothing to do with popular elections, but it does bring up a good point. Do you think AOC would have been more likely to get that seat if she were in a third party? Once you start getting people into office, you will still be dependent on coalitions with Democrats to get anything done.
Here is the thing that drives me nuts. You are not proposing anything that hasn't been tried over and over again. Third party advocates point to the limited gains of progressives within the Democratic party, and ignore their own elong history of total failure. What you "think" defies pretty obvious reality.