More than four months after Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin announced that he was breaking his promise to release its autopsy report on the 2024 election, the decision remains highly controversial. Arguments swirl around whether it’s wise to proceed without public scrutiny of what went wrong during the last presidential campaign. But scant attention has focused on how hiding the autopsy provides an assist to Kamala Harris, who currently leads in polling of Democrats for the party’s 2028 nomination.
As Harris eyes another run, she has a major stake in the DNC continuing to keep the autopsy under wraps – and has a lot to lose if it reaches the light of day. She must feel gratified when Martin defends keeping the autopsy secret, saying that the party should not “relitigate” the 2024 election and claiming that release of the 200-page document would result in “navel-gazing.”
Release of the entire autopsy would likely be a blow to Harris’s chances of becoming president in January 2029. Partly based on interviews with more than 300 prominent Democrats and others in all 50 states, it reportedly concludes that Harris’s unwavering support for U.S. weapons shipments to Israel was a significant factor in her loss to Donald Trump.
While she pursued an unsuccessful strategy of wooing scarce “moderate” Republican voters, many in the Democratic base were repelled by the full backing that Harris gave to President Biden’s massive arming of Israel as civilian deaths mounted in Gaza. She adhered to Biden’s admonition that there be “no daylight” between the two of them as she campaigned for president after he withdrew from the race.
At the time, polls showed that Harris was harming her election prospects by refusing to distance herself from Biden’s policy toward Israel. She evades that reality in her post-election book 107 Days, which dismisses antiwar protesters at her rallies as mere “hecklers.”
Harris’s protracted book tour has been beset by disruptions as well as her inability to provide cogent responses.
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The US has extremely high turnout for primary elections (and a low turnout for general elections) compared to democracies, the vast majority of which don’t even have open primary elections.
The problem is the two-party system.
The us primary system is used to gaslight the public into the candidates the oligarchy wants. Which is why the dates are staggered with weaker insignificant states first before super Tuesday
I don’t care about the turnout relative to other countries. That doesn’t improve the results for me here. I care about the turnout relative to the amount of people eligible to have voted. And 0-49% is just awful.
We won’t get rid of the two-party system by voting for losing 3rd party candidates. At present there are a grand total of 3 (out of 535) federal legislators who are not either Democratic or Republican. Bernie Sanders ran in the Democratic primary for Senate in 2008, winning the nomination but then declining it to run as an Independent. Kevin Kiley was first elected as a Republican and then declared as Independent after several years in office. In all state legislatures combined, there are a total of 6 state senators and 22 state representatives out of 7,578 total state legislative seats. There hasn’t been a single electoral college vote for a presidential 3rd party candidate sine 1968, and Perot won 19% of the national popular vote in 1992! Unless you already live in a district with ranked choice voting or with an independent elected official, the odds of displacing either of the major parties is effectively zero. So your best opportunity for reform is still to vote for such candidates at the state level in the major party primary.
No, but it could help you put into perspective what the problem is - clearly not primary turnout.
Yes, that is true. The best bet is to try and get a suitable candidate through a Democratic primary, though even then it’s an extremely long shot at best. Unfortunately, most Americans, even “liberals” and “progressives,” are raised on a diet of jingoist and ultranationalist propaganda, and things probably need to get worse before people start realizing Murica really isn’t number one in any sense that matters for people’s daily lives.
You haven’t really made a cogent argument about this. There exists more than one problem to solve.
The problem I’m addressing is that “I won’t vote until the party gives me a better nominee to vote for” is completely backwards, because we the voters are empowered to select the nominee from the primary candidates, without caring who the party heads wanted us to vote for.
The lack of third party representation is a separate problem. The two party “system” really isn’t so much an entrenched “system” as much as it is a mathematical byproduct of first-past-the-post winner-take-all elections. So we need election reform. So we need to candidates who will fight for that to win. They won’t win as a 3rd party in the vast majority of districts above a county/local level. So they have to run in the major party primary. Which brings us back to turnout in the primaries to put better nominees on the ballot in the general.
Yes, but if other countries manage to have decently functioning democracies without high primary turnout or even open primary elections at all, then it is not obvious that “low” primary turnout is a problem that requires a solution.
Would you care to make an actual suggestion as to how to address it, then?
Just copy-paste a working system and think about how to improve things from there.
How to convince your fellow citizens to pursue this? Realistically, you probably can’t. You need a paradigm shift in society to address the problem I mentioned. It’s a pervasive one; for example here on Lemmy one may commonly encounter calls to implement ranked-choice voting, whereas even the most rudimentary glance at what we already know about what works and what doesn’t would be sufficient to conclude this isn’t the way to go. If even well-meaning and partially educated people cannot manage to unchain themselves from the propaganda drilled into them, there is a long journey of deprogramming ahead.
Ok, so no real suggestions, then.
Very real, just not explicit. If I have to explain what characterizes top democracies, you underscore my point.
The most important aspect, of course, is having a multi-party system.