LogFAQs > #978949678

SecretBase posted...

They tried against Obama and it failed because he rallied enough independents and disaffected leftists (youths) who didn't care about the typical partisan smears. Whereas the propaganda was effective against Hillary since she was campaigning mainly for more traditional voters.

Granted these judgments are mostly made with hindsight, it's hard to know how specific candidates would do.

It didn't work so well against Obama because he pretty much straight up denied and tried to distance himself from any association with socialism. However, groundless accusations of socialism against Obama (thanks, Joe the Plumber!) were actually pretty successful in 2008, just 8 years before Bernie ran as a candidate using that word as part of his platform (and calling it Democratic Socialism didn't really mitigate much any of that).

Checking it 25 contests were closed, which is almost half. 14 others were semi-closed; rules for these can vary, some simply allow independents to vote freely, but others require the independent to temporarily register with their major party of choice for the day.

That's not to say that every primary being fully open would've changed the result, though. Just that little things contribute.

There are other reasons for keeping primaries closed, like not wanting Republican plants getting in. Still, I won't act like there wasn't any fuckery in the 2016 elections, and I'm frankly surprised you didn't come back with the superdelegate argument which is a bit tougher to get around. That wasn't the case in 2020 though, as the DNC was much more on guard about alienating progressives through a "rigged" primary system, and moderates still carried the vote. It wasn't because their positions were preferred, because Democrats as a whole would actually like to move further left if possible, but it was because people though Biden would be able to keep moderate voters from going for Trump (which as I like to point out, is twice as bad as losing the vote of a progressive).

Well it's not like the problems people originally bitched about vanished, and there's also a new one (the Palestine issue).

The problems people bitched about with regard to Hillary are now irrelevant because hopefully Biden's campaign team will learn from hers' mistakes. The other problems, like the one you're pointing out, will only get worse if we allow Republicans to win this election, and inspiring voter apathy is a great way to make sure they have the presidency, senate, house, and the Supreme Court like they already have thanks to our failure to elect a Democratic president in 2016. If they have enough of the House and Senate to bypass filibuster, they can basically "lawfully" (you know, Constitution aside) do whatever the fuck they want.