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Democrats threw the election by telling their primary voters party base to go fuck themselves and instead just jammed through an unpopular candidate (even in her home state) at the 11th hour.

I really enjoy the American political dynamic where Democrats are the only ones considered to have any agency. If Democrats do it, it’s Democrats’ fault. If Republicans do it, it’s Democrats’ fault for provoking them or not doing enough to stop them. Nothing is ever the responsibility of the people who cast their votes for Trump.

The Democratic party selects the Democrat candidate in a two-party system.

It can be argued as shared fault.

By, without vote/primary, unilaterally selecting a candidate to go on the ballot an unelected bureaucracy jammed up the election. Unfortunately in USA, it doesn't work how you propose, whether you appear on ballot is only up to democratic choice if there are primaries, if not an unelected bureaucracy selects the people that actually go on the ballot and due to dynamics of our voting system virtually ensure those will be the options.

In most states you basically have Democrat, Republican, maybe Libertarian party nominated candidate on the ballot and that is it. Writing in is throwing your vote.

I would argue we probably could fix this with write-in only and some sort of ranked voting kind of system or similar, but as it stands a large part of the election process is vulnerable to anti-democratic processes and this played out in Trump's favor last election.

FWIW, as a left of democrat voter, the Dems have been a corporate captured neoliberal party for 40 years. They spent a lot of time building the infrastructure for a Trump-like. Biden and Harris were uniquely poor opponents to run.

That doesn't absolve the republicans for turning to fascism, but we shouldn't say the Dems are blameless here.

I think it's because people, somewhat rightfully, consider the descent into a fascist regime to be a force of nature—a bug in humanity v1.0 that history has proven we have basically no internal defenses for. And the last election might have been the point of no return so it's frustrating to see the party opposed to the regime own goal so hard in the one election it actually mattered.

This boils down to: Democrats didn’t provide a good enough alternative.

Which I will completely accept as true. They didn’t.

From here, there are two branching paths. Did the Democrats put up someone who was actually worse than Trump? As in, are we better off than if the November election had gone the other way? Or did the Democrats have a better candidate who just wasn’t better enough to win? (Fully understanding that this is a very subjective question.)

It’s my firm opinion that it’s the second one. Harris would have been a better President. (So would Jeb! Bush, Mitt Romney, the festering corpse of Richard Nixon, or a frog snatched out of the Tidal Basin.) In which case, giving Democrats any blame for the outcome requires the people who voted for the actual winner to have no agency. They were presented with a choice and they selected the worse one. That’s entirely on them.

How about this: Democrats share some responsibility for the climate that allowed someone like Trump to gain traction. People who ticked the “Trump” box have full responsibility for the fact that he currently occupies the office.

The American people have agency and are responsible for the candidates they elect.

But part of this process is candidates being nominated by the major parties, and the RNC put forward a candidate that people actually wanted to elect. The DNC did a worse job of this, as a seeming plurality of votes for Harris were not because they liked her, but because she was "not Trump".

Both parties have agency, but the DNC did a worse job at picking their nominee (assuming the goal was to win an election).

You're not wrong about the process. However, I'm deeply skeptical of the idea that a popular primary candidate translates to a general election win or that the continual 2nd place primary finisher somehow can't be far more viable in the general election than the primary winner.

This is a sideshow. Harris was a poor candidate, and lost a ton of votes because she refused to commit to a ceasefire in Gaza. Th larger problem is the Dems lining up behind the idea of running Biden again even though he was obviously inadequate.

Dem flaws aside, Trump isn't just 'a candidate people actually wanted to elect'. He's an authoritarian, every major prediction about how authoritarian this administration would be has turned out to be correct, he instigated efforts to overturn the result of the last election where he lost, and 25-30% of the voting population likes authoritarianism and do not give a shit about what the Constitution actually says.

That's not incompatible with what I said, and indeed is largely what I attempted to convey.

It's because everybody, republican voters included, understands that republicans are extraordinarily stupid and their policy does not work.

If you look at Trump, the only people who think he's honest are his opponents. His own supporters swear up and down he's a liar, he doesn't know what he's talking about, he won't do this or that. And this is their defensive! These are the best arguments they can articulate in his favor!

I think, the thing is, a lot of people don't want effective leaders or care. They want to win, or maybe they want to screw over some people they don't like. So go ahead and elect the idiots with bad policy, because government sucks anyway or something.

You can call it a sideshow, but it kinda seems like the DNC want the authoritarian to win as long as they keep scoring own goals.

What I mean is teh arguments over nomination process are a sideshow. I did not want Biden to run again, but the president getting waved through to run for a second term is a totally normal thing, and normalcy bias is a major Democratic flaw. I don't care so much about Harris picking up the candidacy without a primary when Biden dropped out, it wasn't ideal but a rushed primary would have been a different sort of shitshow.