A word the Third Way types have managed to make sound as sectarian as "Juche Thought".

Instead of welcome in to the party and work with Independents. Why is that? Because they're centrists and liberals. Not neocons and economic corporatists.

in the primaries.

...if not more.

It hasn't hurt the party for Bernie to have made a credible showing in this race.

*cough*RonPaulsupporters*cough*

Not anywhere. Bernie won solely on the votes of Dems and progressive independents.

And none of his victories have hurt this party.

This election would be meaningless if HRC had been nominated without challenge and was running on Bill's '96 platform again.

Why should we stick with bland centrism when it is exhausted as a political position?

Indeed, we know they love free stuff.

Otherwise it's all poor people all the time.

I'm getting a sense of Deja Moo here, I've heard this bull before.

Loves to trot out the free stuff line and fuck off elsewhere to repeat it.

Healthcare and higher education aren't special privileges. They are essential to having a decent society.

Nobody's freedom depends on their having to struggle to survive amidst plenty.

We can free up funds by finally cutting the damn war budget.

And those of us who support Bernie will be glad to pay our fair share, too.

Nobody is asking for something for nothing.

around in off shore trust. Some of that came from US Corporations and tax payers. Technically it is called capital flight. There is plenty to pay for college and single payer. The problem is do we have enough corporate capture of government to avoid that.

It shouldn't be repeated to attack Sanders or any Dem.

Why should non-party members assume they have a voice in a party's selection?

It's simple - want to support a candidate for a particular party, then join the party.

...it's not like they don't have a stake in the results.

As the old saying goes, you can't have your cake and eat it, too.

Bernie gets a lot of Democratic votes, too.

It's silly to act like his campaign is a plot against this party.

Nothing bad at all has come of Bernie running.

It's the only reason HRC isn't full-on Third Way this year.

just saying the selection of the candidate should be left to party members

The presence of the independent voters made no difference.

In Alaska Bernie got 80% of the vote in a CLOSED caucus. We made people re-register for that.

or unregistering for that matter

If they had all had to re-register they all have and Bernie would be doing just as well.

They all did have to reregister here in Alaska and we still won in a landslide. At 80% support on the day, we'd have won even people had been required to be registered Dems six months earlier.

no special rules needed - just follow the state rules to register and one can vote in the primary

I am not making a big deal out of anything - you asked a question and I expressed my opinion - sorry to disagree with you.

n/t.

I understand that

Cause if I had done it in time I could've switched in time to vote and then switch back right afterwards. What's the difference? Cause I can tell you this - now that I'm aware of the process I will be doing just that next election.

you are free to register/unregister at will

to do the selection

if you are a party member on the day of the primary (barring any exceptions by state rules), then you should have a voice in that selection

if you are not a member of the party, then you cannot help determine the PARTY'S candidate

geez louise

by party members.

Party members are determined by state.

I am not into voter suppression. But if you do not want to take 2 minutes to register (or whatever is required by your state - mine is perhaps 2 minutes), then you do not get to vote in closed primaries. No suppression.

Sorry that 2 minutes (or whatever) is such a burden - but that is my opinion.

To vote. If there's no other reason than to make it more difficult with the hopes that people won't do it then it's a means to suppress votes.

Last edited Tue Apr 12, 2016, 03:02 AM - Edit history (1)

I say all of this as an independent myself - have been since about 20 minutes after the IWR vote

I could not even vote for my candidate in our state's primary. I could work for her. Contribute to her campaign. Talk her up with my friends and acquaintances. But could not vote for her.

I still feel strongly about this. If I want to vote for a party candidate, then I should join a party. I prefer to not do so - to retain my independence. And am willing to pay the price.

And I don't play the join/unjoin game. But have no problem with those that do - if it floats their boat.

Otherwise we all lose.

You do want most of the 40+% Independants to vote for the Dem candidate, right?

If there is no candidate in either of the two big parties that fits our positions and policies, we will simply not vote (only down ticket), stay at home completely, or vote third party.

That is a reality so many of y'all just won't face.

And watch GE participation plummet. Or, you and the Rs are for some surprises

A viable 3rd and 4th party would be the result.

Hey, go all the way, why not?

I think you are operating under the false premise that every Independent is a Bernie-style progressive, which is hardly the case. A very significant portion of Indeoendents would vote R if the GE were Bernie vs. Hillary vs. Trump/Cruz with the Repubs winning all the red states while picking up several blue states due to vote splitting between Bernie and Hillary. Is that what you want?

Right...you can't.

Forgive me for thinking you believe Bernie could lead a viable third party run this year. Of course, perhaps we have different criteria for viable.

in reference to the post indicating Independents should not be allowed to vote in the primary. Too late to apply to 2016.

Overall, I think it would be a good thing to have more than two viable parties. I believe the end result would be a more honest campaign from all candidates. Voters would not be forced to vote for the lesser of two evils.

Why not have four "evils" to choose from?

Seems to me, when we have a candidate losing the party vote by nearly 20%, but still winning the primary, those of us in the party are being repsented by our preferred candidate.

At that point, what's even the point of parties when non memebers can just fuck us over whenever they want? I am not at all convinced that we are not seeing some shenanaigans from right wingers looking to sow discord in our party.

But when independents are the fastest group of voters, both parties will shoot themselves in the foot. For the record, not that I mind at this point. That will only accelerate the already in progress changes in the Political system.

Look at Congress and tell me party politics no longer matters. It does matter. And the way our electoral politics are structured, we are pretty much forced into a two-party system.

Do it. Make it so that we independents can never vote in a primary. See how well that plays out in congressional elections every 2 years and general elections every 4 years.

Talk about penny smart and pound foolish.

and party members should select them imo

the reality of the number of leftist independents that the Democratic Party now needs to win any national congressional or presidential election.

Period.

...it gives the parties a real opportunity to see if their candidates are connecting with people in a wider scope.

It's not like Independents voting for your candidate turns him/her into an Independent. They are STILL the DEMOCRATIC candidate. But you can see which Democratic candidate gets the MOST support with the wider group of voters who will actually vote in the GE.

Do you want a Democrat as president or do you only want a Democrat if most Democrats like them?

That is, if you had 70% of the total American voters vote for a Democrat, but only 45% of the Democrats voted for them. . . would you scrap that person as your nominee just because of that? IT MAKES NO SENSE, if you are serious about a Democratic President?

because that was simply always the tradition IN those states. No state, to my knowledge, has switched its primary or caucus from closed to open because of pressure from independents.

Ok, more indies than not CALL themselves progressive. But it isn't always down to what people label themselves. In many, many cases, people label themselves "centrist" or "moderate" or even "conservative" because, to them, those terms are euphemisms for "sensible". When the same polls break down the actual policies or ideas those people support, a large bloc of those who label themselves "moderate" or "conservative" support a lot of things that are well to the left of center, like reproductive choice without stigma, cuts in the war budget, labor law reform and single-payer healthcare.

Those polls show that, when you ask people what proposals or ideas they support, rather than what they label themselves, people who call themselves "conservatives" or "moderates' support proposals that are clearly left of center...reductions in the war budget, single-payer healthcare, reproductive choice without stigma, and pretty much every other proposal we would call "liberal" or progressive".

It isn't the label a voter attaches to herself that matters...it's what they support.

The way to win over voters like that is NOT to make a big show of dissing liberals, progressives, leftists or the like(nobody we nominate for president is ever going to need to have a "Sistah Souljah" moment again, and Bill would have won without that) but to present a progressive agenda as leadership.

along with people in nursing homes and the elderly. http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1107&pid=96817
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1251&pid=1695648

and anyone who takes advantage of LEGAL absentee ballot provisions designed to encourage citizens to exercise their voting rights.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1251&pid=1692371

Not to mention "vagina voters," and the "stockholm syndrome" suffering demographics. In other words, the majority of American voters are the enemy.

We don't know that the votes in Wyoming were from people who were disabled or elderly. We ALL want those people to be able to vote.


The Stockholm Syndrome thing has been put to rest already. The guy was banned and a lot of Sanders supporters denounced what he wrote.

And nobody wants women to stop voting(Bernie beats HRC among women under 40 now).

The Sanders campaign has never been sexist or white supremacist, and if he was elected he would never neglect any of the issues you prioritize(issues Sanders supporters join you in supporting). We don't have to put "economic justice" aside to obtain "social justice", and you can't really get "social justice" if you leave "economic justice" unaddressed.

No snark, honest question. I just read the FAQ and the Surrogate Affidavit Form and nowhere does it mention anything as arbitrary as "one surrogate vote per attendee." It merely states that it must be turned in by a certain date.

General pratice for proxy voting everywhere.

You don't just let one person come in with over 600 ballots whose origins no one has any way to trace.

And you'd have to acknowledge that it's suspicious that this shipment of ballots just happen to have a lead for HRC that just happened to be just enough to overturn overwhelming Sanders lead among those who attended the caucus. The results in absentee and proxy votes sometimes vary from votes cast in a caucus or at a polling station, but it is freakishly rare that they would be the exact opposite of the in-person results.

And every single one of those forms requires contact information filled out, including a phone number. They can easily be traced to the person of origin.

I just looked at the form. Nowhere does it state anything like your claim about one person per surrogate form.

I'm no saying you're incorrect, I'm saying you've made a very definitive statement with no evidence whatsoever to support your claim.

in several places in the voter guide. It's abundantly clear that no such rule exists I regard to the Wyoming caucus.

... they just don't think that they should have a say in what is essentially party business; nominating a candidate.

to vote in them, and the results would have been the same.

Your candidate hasn't had anything stolen from her.

register as Dems in New York?

You're just going to have to accept that Bernie's campaign and support levels are, in fact just as legitimate as HRC's.

I appreciate that.

In NY they were warned if they registered as an independent they can't vote in primaries.

"open primary/caucus...it's not a REAL win".

And people are acting like somehow Bernie himself caused closed primary/caucus states to be opened. There were no more open primaries or caucuses this year than in any other primary or caucus season since the Seventies.

If your candidate had beaten another candidate in open primaries or caucuses due to the support of independent voters, you'd have all said those victories counted just as much as closed primary victories for that other candidate...even if that other candidate had been Bernie.

side only does this.

Were we supposed to say that Super Tuesday proved Bernie was unworthy as a candidate?

What your candidate really wanted was for Bernie to make the rest of the election conservative(we both know she would immediately have tacked twenty degrees further to the right if Bernie had done this) by withdrawing after Super Tuesday.

You're lucky he didn't.

If he had, Hill would have thrown gays under the bus by now just like Bill threw POC under the bus last week.

is the myth that Bernie thinks racism is a side issue. That's why there was that ugly, pointless obsession with trying to prove Bernie didn't do anything important in the freedom movement(and, even more disgustingly)the despicable claim that he lied about being in those photographs.

That was shameful. If your candidate was really that intrinsically superior, she and her surrogates never had any excuse for lowering themselves to that level. And once this is over, whoever gets nominated, HRC and her supporters will owe Bernie a public apology for smearing him on that issue.

We accept that we lost on Super Tuesday. That is all we have to say. Nothing else is necessary.

1) He wasn't known to most of them and she was...and voters in ANY demographic will always tend to prefer the known candidate to the unknown(your side always makes fun of this assertion, but there's no reason you should-it is pretty self-evident in politics that the known will do better than the unknown);

2) The belief among AA voters that HRC, for some reason, would be "more effective" at working within the system;

3) The fact that Bernie didn't have his planks on racism and criminal justice reform on the website for the first month or so;

4) The orchestrated effort on the part of HRC's campaign to paint Bernie(without any real justfication)as a person who thinks racism is a side issue(he never has believed that);

5) HRC had been working this demographic for eight years and Bernie wasn't even thinking of running for the presidency until probably 2014 so he hadn't really been working ANY demographics;

6) She made a big public show of religiousity and working the black churches. Bernie was not used to this, having fought all his previous election campaigns in a largely secular state;

7) Several leading figures in the southern AA community, for whatever reasons, made dismissive or delegitimizing comments about him in the run-up to Super Tuesday;

In my view, those were the key factors.

I've never said Bernie was infallible. But he has corrected all of his mistakes in terms of addressing AA issues, so I'm not sure why he is still being relentlessly attacked on this. Compared to Bill making a show of flying back to Arkansas to WATCH a black guy get killed, nothing Bernie ever did was all that bad of a screw-up on AA issues.

his numbers he is done.

There is a lot of enthusiasm for Bernie in ALL the communities of New York.

People there know there IS no conflict between the economic justice and social justice movements-those movements are distinct, but they intersect. And they are never in conflict with each other in terms of objectives.

Bernie's crowds are just as diverse as HRC's now.

It just comes down to getting all of the communities that back Bernie out to the polls.

But thd election is in a week, so we shall see.

I agree that Bernie is behind, but it looks like the trendline is going his way.

Bernie has always insisted that racism is a massive issue...it's just that he doesn't see it as the ONLY issue.

Does it somehow threaten the anti-racist cause to admit that greed matters too?

That exploitation matters too?

That corporate power is a manifestation of racism just as much as police brutality?

All Bernie is saying is that you have to deal with both types of injustice to defeat either.

What is so terrible about saying THAT?

The economic justice and social justice struggles don't conflict, and the activists of one cause are pretty much always going to be supporters and activists in the other.

There is no such thing as a economic justice activist who doesn't care with equal passion about racism. And there are few, if any anti-racist activists who think economic issues don't affect the victims of racism OR that there are no issues on which POC and working-class whites can ever find common ground.

So no, you have never had any reason to think Bernie, as president, wouldn't put just as much energy into combatting institutional racism as he will in standing up to corporate power. All your sanctimony and distrust on this has been totally unwarranted.

The sad thing is, you know perfectly well HRC is not going to reward you or your community for your personal relentlessness on this.

He has never dismissed it.

He has never minimized it.

He has been arrested for standing up to it.

He has never proposed colorblind solutions.

If you don't support the guy, fine, but it's silly for you to still be acting like he can't be trusted.

There is no way a Sanders Administration would do anything less on racism than HRC or O'Malley.

Bernie is the only thing keeping me from registering as an independent.

When he is no longer in this campaign I will go. I've been registered Dem since '87 - I voted first in '88. That will change in Nov, if Kissinger is running. I will vote against killing more kids which Kissingers Iran war entails.

I had a reply that someone likes Dem policies but not the spam, however parties are private organizations that can determine what the rules are and every state has decided that FOR their states. And, btw, you can always block the spam if you wanted to, so frankly, I think that was just a dumb reach for an excuse.

The furthering of the claim that the entire primary system is rigged is unbelievable when factor in the OBVIOUS - If it was rigged in advance to benefit only Clinton according to so many threads here, every state would be a closed primary - there would be no caucuses, either - and it would have been done at the state conventions over the last 3 years.

And I take no pleasure being the one who has to keep my feet on the ground while replying to my fellow Sanders voters. In fact, it's a bore that is unfortunately, necessary still at this point.

It is completely strange that Bernie Sanders won Wisconsin convincingly but a anti -gay conservative judge was also elected. This tells me that some voting for Bernie were GOP types out to screw up Democratic elecitions. This is why many states and individuals oppose open primaries. Remember, Limbaugh and operation chaos?

because there is no controlling the certain confusion that will be present.

Heh.

You seem to be one of the few, at least speaking out, that get this.

I voted for Jesse Jackson in the 1988 primary. I considered joining the Democratic Party thereafter, but I did not. Why?

Bill Clinton. I lived in Arkansas during the Clinton years there. I was not impressed. I saw them for who they were and what they were even then. When I saw him win and the Democratic Party embraced or was taken over (I suppose it depends upon your perspective), I knew the Democratic Party was not for me. They were no longer traditional FDR/JFK/LBJ progressives. They had become the corporate funded New Dems.

I saw it yet again with Gore, another New Dem. And then again with Obama, yet another New Dem neoliberal. After more than 30 years I became inspired by Sanders in the same way I was by Jackson all those decades ago. Here was someone whom I could actually respect and feel in sync enough with that I would not only be willing to register as a Democrat to vote for him in my semi-closed state but even stay in the Party.

But the Clinton wing has been abhorrent. There attacks on Sanders and all leftists has me realizing yet again that the Democratic Party is not for me. It is not MY fault. It is the Party's fault. The shenanigans, the DWS debate debacles, the rat-fuckery from Brock, and the list goes on is what has me and so many others bailing yet again on the party of the left.

Y'all do need us. And yes, if this was the kind of party that Sanders and his faction presents were the lead voices, I would join and stay in a heartbeat.

But sadly, I doubt this cycle that this message will get through. Perhaps when Clinton loses yet again they maybe, just maybe, a revolution will occur.

n/t.

do the independents get to participate in the selection of the republican and Democratic candidates. Or do republicans and Democrats choose their parties' candidates with an eye to winning independent voters (or whatever other criteria they want to use)?

Remaining an independent in a closed primary state may be a highly principled stance but highly principled stances often have a downside to them as well.

The Clinton camp wants to shun the working-class and weird ones and also the potential Trump voters. They prefer their independents to be solvent, conventional in opinion (even if diverse), upper-middle class and up, etc. etc. - in short, the same people who otherwise kept the old Republican establishment afloat. Which is what the CC has turned into.

There are those who have been to the left of the Democrats. Since I am to the left of most Democrats, I feel for them and I personally welcome them. I'm guessing most of Bernie's independent supporters are from this group.

But there are some conservative, libertarian, and/or racist independents. I don't like the idea of our party embracing them.

n/t.

I do think most of the independents in question are of the first category.

As much as anything else, my response to your post was in reaction to the absurd claim that Bernie has somehow been winning primaries and caucuses because of mass infiltration by Rand Paul supporters...even thought the GOP primaries showed that Rand Paul has no mass to infiltrate WITH.

about what kind of people they are.

That means same day registration.

Anything else is limiting the vote.

Which is by definition voter disenfranchisement.

n/t.

When we Indys got threads full of "They shouldn't be allowed to vote in OUR PARTY'S business" and "We don't need your votes, get out!"

I almost have to feel for them though- the party they still think is theirs is almost gone. I predicted that if they kept this up, there would only be 10% of the party left if it was just New Dems. They're working diligently to get that done.

I know some "independents" who think the GOP is filled with "liberal pussies."


But even the ones who are not my enemies are also not my in my party. I invite them to join if they want a say in our nominee. We have a pretty big tent and can accommodate a lot of different views.

to see why they don't join. You have to be living in some kind of fantasy world to think that the message is been sent is anything but repulsive.

.... if are are not members of our party, why do you think they deserve a voice in its nominee?

I donate to the party. Do they?

I volunteer to expand the party. Do they?

I knock on doors for down-ballot candidates. Do they?

Excuse me if I'm not thrilled about people who do not, in the end, give a shit about the party, coming in and telling me not only who our nominee ought to be, but that my preferred candidate is a little more conservative than General Franco.

I invite them to join and participate. I have no problem with discussing actual ideas. But it seems what I get from them is self-righteousness and platitudes.

And I think that may be the reason they may not choose to be members of the Democratic party.
YOU have a conflict. You don't like them but you sure NEED THEIR VOTES. But the whole attitude you stated above is so off-putting, no wonder so many say they will not vote for your candidate.
So, excuse them if they are not thrilled by your "not giving a shit" about them.
I wonder if that's why they don't seem to give a shit about your candidate. Not hard to understand.

Bernie won 72% of them in the last election.

All you "do the math" Hillary supporters . . . do the math. . . the IMPORTANT election is the GE and the independents can vote in that one. You really want to win the GE or do you interested in Hillary winning the Primary?

independents are the enemy as are liberal Democrats and anyone else who didn't demand an unopposed march to the convention with a throne, scepter and crown waiting at the end.