If it’s this easy to win them back and the Democrats couldn’t even bother, who’s the real idiot?
Abdul and the other progressive candidates winning the nominations this year are not because “the Democrats” are trying when they weren’t before, it’s because the electorate came out to vote in the primaries when they did not before. The nominees are selected by the voters who come out during the primaries. So when the electorate isn’t showing up to pick the nominee, then they shouldn’t complain about the party “running” bad nominees.
the old guards do not want more AOCs or even bernees in congress. they only allow 1 of each in the houses because they give them something to hide behind as a pretend to be on the “left”.
that is just not true. i don’t know why you would even suggest that. if what you consider the new guard is currently attacking Zohran even after he won, then the distinction is meaningless
LOL, they are still allowed to speak. That’s all they can do.
They absolutely do not control the DNC any longer. Martin distributed the entire Victory fund the “old guard” used to control the members. The fact that you are conflating the two shows that you’re either very uninformed or just trying to divide the party.
you do realize the old guard is anyone that isnt AOC/BERNIE. majority of them are aipac recipients, if they dint have contorl they wouldnt have the funding backing them or the pacs, or aipac or billionaires. hakeem and schumer still controls the funding for htier congressmembers. and most of them are in safe seats.
but are you suggesting the DNC would support progressive candidates if more voters showed up to vote in the primary?
No. I’m saying stop talking about what the DNC or Democrats want, because it doesn’t matter when the voters show and tell them what we want. Too many people say they’ll vote when the party gives them someone to vote for. That’s backwards and exactly what the establishment wants.
In case you didn’t notice it during the Hilary Clinton vs Bernie Sanders primaries, the DNC has mechanisms like super-voters that allow them to override the will of voters.
If I remember it correctly they even went to Court to make the case (which they won) that the Democratic Party doesn’t need to actually be Democratic in their candidate selection process.
in case you didn’t notice, Hillary won the nomination thru pledged delegates alone, she didn’t need a single superdelegate vote. Because she won the popular vote in the majority of primaries. Also, then DNC changed the rules for 2018 so that superdelegates.dont even get to vote at the convention unless the pledged delegates can’t elect a nominee in the first round.
I’m not saying the DNC did/does no wrong then or now (media collision and superdelegates stumping for Hillary during the campaign both come to mind). But it is not the case that superdelegate swooped in at the convention and stole the nomination from Bernie. Ken Martin is against all the favoritism and machinations showed in favor of Hillary and Biden.
And yes, as private organizations no party is required to have a democratic public vote to select their nominees. But our elections are stacked in favor of the D/R duopoly so our best option is to show up in the primaries to dictate the direction we want, as we have seen happening this year.
The Establishment Democrats have a lot of power. Haley Steven’s only lost the Michigan primary by 1% after outspending Abdul El-Sayed over 10x. That means roughly, Haley Steven’s spent over $10 for every vote compared to Abdul El-Sayed $1 per vote. She absolutely was being propped up by both the Israel lobby as well as Establishment Dems and that money went to waste. That money could have been way more useful in the general, but the DNC has been burning all their cash on fighting progressives instead. It’s gotten to the point where the DNC is millions of dollars in debt and had to put up their physical building as collateral while the RNC has over $100 million in their warchest leading up to the midterms.
It is very important to talk about the Establishment Democrats because they are doing their best to lose all political power by dunking on their left flank instead of combating the Republicans. They would truly rather rule in hell than serve in heaven and they’re gonna drag us all down to party with Lindsey Graham. As much as it sucks, the DNC still has a lot of power they are exerting that needs to be addressed before they cause the situation to become unsalvageable.
Are you saying the DNC was directly spending money on Haley Steven’s campaign? It was understanding the DNC chair Ken Martin is vocally against the DNC supporting any one primary candidate over another. That was even one of the points of friction between Ken Martin and David Hogg.
I didn’t stop at saying “don’t talk about what they want,” I said show up to dictate to them what we want instead of just sitting around talking about what they want.
The fact is, Abdul wom because he received more votes. Not because of spending it establishment support, but because the people just voted for him. Don’t wait for the party to flip and bless a progressive, just go vote the progressives onto the ballot, and the establishment neoliberals will continue to see themselves replaced.
We all know the DNC works to suppress candidates they don’t like. Most famously, the DNC worked directly with the Hillary Clinton campaign to crush the Bernie Sanders campaign. So when Ken Martin claims “We are investing in a year-round distributed organizing operation capable of supporting races at every level of the ballot.”, I feel it’s pretty obvious what he means. The Establishment Democrats have historically been very weak opposing the Republicans while fighting tooth and nail against their own progressive wing. They are not spending money raising up candidates like Abdul El-Sayed or Francesca Hong, but neither are they simply waiting for the candidate that wins the primary. The DNC has a type and they are spending money to get that type of candidate through primaries into the general.
Abdul almost lost the primary despite very obviously being the best candidate for Michigan. This is because his opponent had an absurd amount of money. Money does influence elections and the DNC is beholden to their donors. The common voter can very clearly see these relationships and it depresses voter turnout whenever money wins. I agree with you that it is important to vote for progressives that are on the ballot, but you are framing these races as if the common voter has the same amount of influence as the establishment neoliberal. The DNC is the referee and it is blatantly bought and paid for.
“Just go vote” is not good advice because the opposition is spending absurd amounts of money to place obstacles in front of the populace. People like you and me who spend time talking about politics on lemmy are more politically active than the common voter. We need to help remove those obstacles so that everyone can vote for who they’d like instead of trip over manufactured concerns like electability.
Am on mobile, and at work so this won’t be very well formatted and I don’t have time to read your whole link.
I’m aware of what the DNC has historically done, particularly with Hillary and Biden, I even just stated as such in another comment.artin is talking about having nominees in races all up and down the ballot in the general election.
The investments we are making are designed to do both: win big this November and build a stronger party for the elections that follow.
Remember Howard Dean’s 50 State Strategy? To have a nominee on every ballot, challenging the Republicans for every seat instead of giving up on some.
Your previous comment says DNC is spending all their cash and are bankrupt but your link says they’ve had they’re best fund raising year, without holding the Whitehouse, in party history. Also with small donor contributions up 77% (compared to large donor contributions only being up 30%). So at least from what I have gotten through, I don’t see how your link justifies your position (acknowledging that I haven’t read the whole thing yet).
I don’t care that Abdul almost lost the primary, because he didn’t lose it. That means the voters are now overcoming the big-money campaigns backed by groups like AIPAC to get better nominees on the ballot.
I didn’t say just go vote. I said talking without voting is a losing strategy. We can talk IRL with people all we want, but if we don’t back it up with votes then the establishment learns to pay lip service without action. We have to fire the status quo by voting them out. And yes, we have to talk amongst ourselves and our peers to get each other to vote.
I think it is important that Abdul almost lost because of stories like Francesca Hong who almost won. Money plays an outsized role in these elections and the money the DNC is spending is most definitely being focused on raising Establishment Democrat candidates. Sure they are raising money and contributions are up, but they are spending money faster than they are raising it to the point where they are in debt.
Spending money is important to increase influence. I think it’s a good thing to spend money to try and unseat Republicans. But when we hear stories of Establishment Dems getting endorsed by other Establishment Dems, like Gov Tony Evers endorsing David Crowley in Wisconsin or Gov Gretchen Whitmer endorsing Haley Stevens in Michigan, this comes with fundraising and financial contributions from the establishment. This comes with buying ads for the establishment pick. It is a signal from the DNC to the voter base to unify behind a preferred “electible” candidate.
Abdul’s victory is a good thing because it means that people can beat out money. It is also a cautionary tale of how far the Establishment Democrats will go to fight their progressive wing. They already know what the people want which is why Ken Martin released that anemic 2024 autopsy report that was clearly edited to omit key progressive issues.
I am disputing your original claim that it doesn’t matter what the DNC wants. It absolutely matters what they want when they are the ones running the races and influencing elections to get their preferred candidates theough the primaries. They are actively trying to direct the voters instead of listening to the what the voters want. The DNC is absolutely the biggest problem that leads to depressing voter turnout. My problem with your original claim is the idea that we can tell people to vote for who they like without talking about what the DNC is doing. The reason people don’t vote Democrat is directly a result of the DNC spending all their time and energy putting up terrible candidates.
To put it more simply, the Establishment Dems are attacking us. We ought to be defending ourselves.
Michigan has open primaries and there was one uncontested Republican running this year, look at the total votes in 2024 vs 2026 and not just the blue numbers.
Yeah comparing to 2022 would be better. I can’t seem to find that on the NPR site, though it doesn’t appear to list the actual turnout percentage, just the number of votes. I have this site but it doesn’t break it down by party and doesn’t have 2026 data yet. It shows 27% primary turnout for Michigan in 2022 and 24% in 2024.
With turnout that low in the primaries, it really shouldn’t take a big surge for progressive voters to tip the scales away from neoliberal incumbent/establishment candidates.
Abdul and the other progressive candidates winning the nominations this year are not because “the Democrats” are trying when they weren’t before, it’s because the electorate came out to vote in the primaries when they did not before. The nominees are selected by the voters who come out during the primaries. So when the electorate isn’t showing up to pick the nominee, then they shouldn’t complain about the party “running” bad nominees.
Im kind of with you, but are you suggesting the DNC would support progressive candidates if more voters showed up to vote in the primary?
the old guards do not want more AOCs or even bernees in congress. they only allow 1 of each in the houses because they give them something to hide behind as a pretend to be on the “left”.
The “old guard” lost control of the DNC in 2024.
that is just not true. i don’t know why you would even suggest that. if what you consider the new guard is currently attacking Zohran even after he won, then the distinction is meaningless
LOL, they are still allowed to speak. That’s all they can do.
They absolutely do not control the DNC any longer. Martin distributed the entire Victory fund the “old guard” used to control the members. The fact that you are conflating the two shows that you’re either very uninformed or just trying to divide the party.
you do realize the old guard is anyone that isnt AOC/BERNIE. majority of them are aipac recipients, if they dint have contorl they wouldnt have the funding backing them or the pacs, or aipac or billionaires. hakeem and schumer still controls the funding for htier congressmembers. and most of them are in safe seats.
Meanwhile, back in reality, Ken Martin is in control of the DNC and he is not any of those things you are railing against.
No. I’m saying stop talking about what the DNC or Democrats want, because it doesn’t matter when the voters show and tell them what we want. Too many people say they’ll vote when the party gives them someone to vote for. That’s backwards and exactly what the establishment wants.
In case you didn’t notice it during the Hilary Clinton vs Bernie Sanders primaries, the DNC has mechanisms like super-voters that allow them to override the will of voters.
If I remember it correctly they even went to Court to make the case (which they won) that the Democratic Party doesn’t need to actually be Democratic in their candidate selection process.
in case you didn’t notice, Hillary won the nomination thru pledged delegates alone, she didn’t need a single superdelegate vote. Because she won the popular vote in the majority of primaries. Also, then DNC changed the rules for 2018 so that superdelegates.dont even get to vote at the convention unless the pledged delegates can’t elect a nominee in the first round.
I’m not saying the DNC did/does no wrong then or now (media collision and superdelegates stumping for Hillary during the campaign both come to mind). But it is not the case that superdelegate swooped in at the convention and stole the nomination from Bernie. Ken Martin is against all the favoritism and machinations showed in favor of Hillary and Biden.
And yes, as private organizations no party is required to have a democratic public vote to select their nominees. But our elections are stacked in favor of the D/R duopoly so our best option is to show up in the primaries to dictate the direction we want, as we have seen happening this year.
The Establishment Democrats have a lot of power. Haley Steven’s only lost the Michigan primary by 1% after outspending Abdul El-Sayed over 10x. That means roughly, Haley Steven’s spent over $10 for every vote compared to Abdul El-Sayed $1 per vote. She absolutely was being propped up by both the Israel lobby as well as Establishment Dems and that money went to waste. That money could have been way more useful in the general, but the DNC has been burning all their cash on fighting progressives instead. It’s gotten to the point where the DNC is millions of dollars in debt and had to put up their physical building as collateral while the RNC has over $100 million in their warchest leading up to the midterms.
It is very important to talk about the Establishment Democrats because they are doing their best to lose all political power by dunking on their left flank instead of combating the Republicans. They would truly rather rule in hell than serve in heaven and they’re gonna drag us all down to party with Lindsey Graham. As much as it sucks, the DNC still has a lot of power they are exerting that needs to be addressed before they cause the situation to become unsalvageable.
Are you saying the DNC was directly spending money on Haley Steven’s campaign? It was understanding the DNC chair Ken Martin is vocally against the DNC supporting any one primary candidate over another. That was even one of the points of friction between Ken Martin and David Hogg.
I didn’t stop at saying “don’t talk about what they want,” I said show up to dictate to them what we want instead of just sitting around talking about what they want.
The fact is, Abdul wom because he received more votes. Not because of spending it establishment support, but because the people just voted for him. Don’t wait for the party to flip and bless a progressive, just go vote the progressives onto the ballot, and the establishment neoliberals will continue to see themselves replaced.
We all know the DNC works to suppress candidates they don’t like. Most famously, the DNC worked directly with the Hillary Clinton campaign to crush the Bernie Sanders campaign. So when Ken Martin claims “We are investing in a year-round distributed organizing operation capable of supporting races at every level of the ballot.”, I feel it’s pretty obvious what he means. The Establishment Democrats have historically been very weak opposing the Republicans while fighting tooth and nail against their own progressive wing. They are not spending money raising up candidates like Abdul El-Sayed or Francesca Hong, but neither are they simply waiting for the candidate that wins the primary. The DNC has a type and they are spending money to get that type of candidate through primaries into the general.
Abdul almost lost the primary despite very obviously being the best candidate for Michigan. This is because his opponent had an absurd amount of money. Money does influence elections and the DNC is beholden to their donors. The common voter can very clearly see these relationships and it depresses voter turnout whenever money wins. I agree with you that it is important to vote for progressives that are on the ballot, but you are framing these races as if the common voter has the same amount of influence as the establishment neoliberal. The DNC is the referee and it is blatantly bought and paid for.
“Just go vote” is not good advice because the opposition is spending absurd amounts of money to place obstacles in front of the populace. People like you and me who spend time talking about politics on lemmy are more politically active than the common voter. We need to help remove those obstacles so that everyone can vote for who they’d like instead of trip over manufactured concerns like electability.
Am on mobile, and at work so this won’t be very well formatted and I don’t have time to read your whole link.
I’m aware of what the DNC has historically done, particularly with Hillary and Biden, I even just stated as such in another comment.artin is talking about having nominees in races all up and down the ballot in the general election.
Remember Howard Dean’s 50 State Strategy? To have a nominee on every ballot, challenging the Republicans for every seat instead of giving up on some.
Your previous comment says DNC is spending all their cash and are bankrupt but your link says they’ve had they’re best fund raising year, without holding the Whitehouse, in party history. Also with small donor contributions up 77% (compared to large donor contributions only being up 30%). So at least from what I have gotten through, I don’t see how your link justifies your position (acknowledging that I haven’t read the whole thing yet).
I don’t care that Abdul almost lost the primary, because he didn’t lose it. That means the voters are now overcoming the big-money campaigns backed by groups like AIPAC to get better nominees on the ballot.
I didn’t say just go vote. I said talking without voting is a losing strategy. We can talk IRL with people all we want, but if we don’t back it up with votes then the establishment learns to pay lip service without action. We have to fire the status quo by voting them out. And yes, we have to talk amongst ourselves and our peers to get each other to vote.
I think it is important that Abdul almost lost because of stories like Francesca Hong who almost won. Money plays an outsized role in these elections and the money the DNC is spending is most definitely being focused on raising Establishment Democrat candidates. Sure they are raising money and contributions are up, but they are spending money faster than they are raising it to the point where they are in debt.
Spending money is important to increase influence. I think it’s a good thing to spend money to try and unseat Republicans. But when we hear stories of Establishment Dems getting endorsed by other Establishment Dems, like Gov Tony Evers endorsing David Crowley in Wisconsin or Gov Gretchen Whitmer endorsing Haley Stevens in Michigan, this comes with fundraising and financial contributions from the establishment. This comes with buying ads for the establishment pick. It is a signal from the DNC to the voter base to unify behind a preferred “electible” candidate.
Abdul’s victory is a good thing because it means that people can beat out money. It is also a cautionary tale of how far the Establishment Democrats will go to fight their progressive wing. They already know what the people want which is why Ken Martin released that anemic 2024 autopsy report that was clearly edited to omit key progressive issues.
I am disputing your original claim that it doesn’t matter what the DNC wants. It absolutely matters what they want when they are the ones running the races and influencing elections to get their preferred candidates theough the primaries. They are actively trying to direct the voters instead of listening to the what the voters want. The DNC is absolutely the biggest problem that leads to depressing voter turnout. My problem with your original claim is the idea that we can tell people to vote for who they like without talking about what the DNC is doing. The reason people don’t vote Democrat is directly a result of the DNC spending all their time and energy putting up terrible candidates.
To put it more simply, the Establishment Dems are attacking us. We ought to be defending ourselves.
How is firing them in the primaries by electing a different nominee not defending ourselves? What other actions are you suggesting?
Looks like slightly less people showed up, actually (typical for a non presidential primary):
https://apps.npr.org/primary-election-results-2024/states/MI.html
https://apps.npr.org/primary-election-results-2026/states/MI.html
Michigan has open primaries and there was one uncontested Republican running this year, look at the total votes in 2024 vs 2026 and not just the blue numbers.
Yeah comparing to 2022 would be better. I can’t seem to find that on the NPR site, though it doesn’t appear to list the actual turnout percentage, just the number of votes. I have this site but it doesn’t break it down by party and doesn’t have 2026 data yet. It shows 27% primary turnout for Michigan in 2022 and 24% in 2024.
https://statesunited.org/resources/voter-turnout-since-2000/
With turnout that low in the primaries, it really shouldn’t take a big surge for progressive voters to tip the scales away from neoliberal incumbent/establishment candidates.