I’ve said this elsewhere, but it seems like democrats have a problem with democracy, at least within their party. In 2016 shenanigans were pulled to bypass Bernie and the DNC won a lawsuit on the claim that they have no obligation to nominate the candidate selected by the people.[0] The 2020 primaries played out in a similar fashion with Biden having a difficult time and every other candidate stepping aside to allow him to have the nomination. Now I’m 2024 an entire nation has been disenfranchised of their primary selection and the foremost candidate being proposed never received any votes by anyone for a nomination to the highest office (she ended her candidacy before any primary in 2020).
Biden keeps saying democracy is at stake but the DNC seems to keep avoid any democratic process to find their candidate.
This is undoubtedly one of the few times the Democrats collectively did the right thing and defended against an outsider from taking over their Party the way Trump took over and undermined the Republican Party.
People like to imagine that the Parties are these kind of quasi-public entities that exist to serve the American people. They’re not. They’re private entities that are vehicles for the acquisition of power across local, State and Federal offices that are in a perpetual term-based competition with each other. We tolerate their campaigns because their battlefield is the ballot box instead of actual fields, but nominee selection still happens at conventions run by the parties themselves.
The Primary system you are familiar with is one that the Republicans and Democrats chose for themselves to inform their overall decisions on who to put forward as the candidate flying under their banner and has only been around since 1972.
If the DNC no longer has use for a public nomination process, they should get rid of it. It wastes a significant amount of taxpayer resources with estimates in the hundreds of millions of public dollars required to run a primary. It looks like the party has regressed to 1968.
I don’t disagree, although I’ll go a little further and say 1) parties should run their own damn primaries if they run them at all and 2) do so without spending a single cent of public money to do so.
Biden keeps saying democracy is at stake but the DNC seems to keep avoid any democratic process to find their candidate.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilding_v._DNC_Services_Corp.