I think a lot about how the inevitability of former vice presidents winning presidential primaries, combined with the incompetence with which both pre-VP Biden and Harris ran in primaries before being selected, effectively indicates presidential primaries are non-democratic
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Replying to @Nymphomachy
It's funny, when USA first started the VP was whoever got the second-most votes for President, meaning they were an opponent from a different party. Back then, the Secretary of State was considered the heir to the president's policies and the next candidate.
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Replying to @StorySlug @Nymphomachy
Honestly the implication in this thread that the "fair" way to select a running mate would be to automatically make it whoever got 2nd place in the primary is probably just as bad an idea as making the VP the runner up of the general election
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Replying to @arthur_affect @StorySlug
That's not what I'm saying I'm saying the primary doesn't matter because DOING WELL in it doesn't matter And it obviously doesn't, Joe Biden was historically one of the worst primary campaigners of the party; Kamala's campaign this year was shit internally and externally
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Yeah - I mean, that's something; the Biden Campaign was clearly not doing anything unique or new or even just...good. When retail campaigning counted, he got smoked, IA and NH. Then it just turned out not to matter.
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But like to the extent this high school factional hatred stuff was real and mattered this was a huge part of it Biden was the candidate for D stalwarts who never liked being told they didn't matter because their votes were on lock and swing voters mattered more
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Yeah - and the other big part of it is that most primary voters were pretty high on all the candidates. People didn't hate Biden, he came in too strong to lose unless he was *rejected*
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Yeah, that's what I mean by this factional stuff possibly not being real Extremely Online people think of Bernie vs Biden as this primal opposition, in real life most Bernie voters had Biden as their second choice and vice versa
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I'm not even talking about factional stuff! I'm talking about how Biden's worth as a presidential candidate was demonstrably nonexistent until Obama uplifted him If he hadn't chosen him as his feckless symbol of non-aggression this election would look different
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Replying to @Nymphomachy @arthur_affect and
Right. And, if Obama had gotten up in December of last year and said, “X should be the nominee,” then X probably would have won for basically anyone other than, like, gabbard. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ most people don’t want to go deep learning about candidates and just listen to elite signals
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The irony is that the reason Obama did not do this seems to be he really didn't favor Biden as the best possible candidate (he didn't want him to run in the first place) but didn't like anyone else either
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Replying to @arthur_affect @lawnerdbarak and
There's an idealistic and a cynical read you can have of Obama's motivation here - was he really committed to letting the people decide or did he just not want to be dragged back into the game - but it amounts to the same thing, he waited as long as he could before speaking up
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
I don’t think it’s that he didn’t LIKE any of them so much as he didn’t ha e strong preferences between several of the big names, and so decided to adopt above it all neutrality.
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