• tal@lemmy.today
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    9 months ago

    I still feel like we haven’t had really strong candidates for some elections now.

    2016:

    https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-distaste-for-both-trump-and-clinton-is-record-breaking/

    Americans’ Distaste For Both Trump And Clinton Is Record-Breaking

    The Democratic primary will technically march on, but Hillary Clinton is almost certainly going to be her party’s nominee. Same with Donald Trump. And voters don’t appear thrilled at the prospect: Clinton and Trump are both more strongly disliked than any nominee at this point in the past 10 presidential cycles.

    2020:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/us/politics/polls-trump-biden.html

    Both Candidates Are Widely Disliked (Again). This Time, Biden Could Benefit.

    This could be the second straight presidential contest in which both candidates are viewed negatively by a majority of voters.

    2024:

    https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/25/politics/biden-trump-unpopular-president-election-2024/index.html

    Biden vs. Trump: The 2024 race a historic number of Americans don’t want

    • Rookwood@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      We had a strong candidate in 2016 and the DNC literally committed fraud to deny him a nomination.

      • Orbituary@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Yep. Thanks for mentioning it. Wasserman Schultz and her cronies gave old Sanders the shaft after HRC paid off the DNC debt.

        “Democracy.”

        • norbert@kbin.social
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          9 months ago

          Imagine if Bernie had broken with the party. There’s a good chance he could’ve attracted a lot of otherwise disillusioned people and formed a real, viable third party candidate.

          • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            Yeah but then enlightened centrists would have blamed him for Clinton’s loss, and used it to push the party further right.

            Oh wait, they did that anyway.

          • forrgott@lemm.ee
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            9 months ago

            Regretfully, our system is designed against us, and has been further corrupted over the years. So, no, there wouldn’t have been any positive outcome from that type of action.

            • SatansMaggotyCumFart@lemmy.world
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              9 months ago

              They accuse middle-right Biden of being a socialist constantly, for a huge part of America it’s the worst slur you can be called.

                  • Tinidril@midwest.social
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                    9 months ago

                    I think maybe you might be the one who gets it in the morning. You’ve internalized the framing sold to you by establishment media and can’t seem to see past it. You have no understanding of how a socialist can do better than a centrist in red states, so you reject what polling tells us is true.

                    Most of the ire directed at “socialists” comes from the association of Socialists and Democrats with elitism. Actual Socialists are not elitist and can speak to the actual needs of voters in a way that centrists do not.

      • LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net
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        9 months ago

        The strength of Bernie in the general election remains an unproven hypothesis. But I agree that the DNC behaved inappropriately. The nature of primaries as “private” elections controlled by the party makes this type of behavior fairly inevitable.

        Though the RNC also tried to stop Trump, they just failed at it, so parties don’t necessarily have complete control over the outcome.

        • winterayars@sh.itjust.works
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          9 months ago

          He was polling ahead of Trump, Clinton was polling behind. We don’t know if that would’ve continued to the actual election but we do know that Clinton lost.

          • LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net
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            9 months ago

            I largely agree with this. I think there are good reasons to think the race would tighten—Bernie was never subjected to republican attack ads, and I think he also benefited from Clinton’s unpopularity, an effect that might fade once she was out of the race. But you’re right that we’ll never know for sure what would have happened.

            • Ulvain@sh.itjust.works
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              9 months ago

              Idk, I feel like Republican attack ads on Bernie would have done what Democratic attack ads on Trump did: electrify his base. “HE WANTS EVERYONE TO HAVE EDUCATION FOR FREE!!!” damn, well, sign me up!

              I know there would have been calls of “communist” ad nauseam, but idk that it has the horrible effect it once had - if anything it might have energized youth vote…

              Idk

      • EatATaco@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        We had a strong candidate in 2016 and the DNC literally committed fraud to deny him a nomination.

        No they didn’t. You can complain about how they ran it, or that they showed a preference for Clinton, but she absolutely destroyed him and this “they committed fraud against him!” is equally as empty as the Trump supporters who claim the same. And, FTR, I voted for sanders in 2016.

    • Thrashy@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      There was a reasonably strong slate in 2020, and Dem primary voters passed them over for the old white guy as a hedge against the voting preferences of casually-racist and sexist boomer voters in the general electorate. The shit of it is that their reasoning wasn’t without merit either. But that’s left us where we are now, with a milquetoast octogenarian as the last bulwark against putting the fascist septuagenarian dementia patient back in charge, and nobody likes those options even if one is obviously less bad than the other.

      • spider@lemmy.nz
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        9 months ago

        There was a reasonably strong slate in 2020

        Tulsi Gabbard looked promising at the time; too bad she went off the rails.

        • Tinidril@midwest.social
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          9 months ago

          She went off the rails long before that, but it took some time for her fan base to catch up with reality.