• dhork@lemmy.world
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    8 hours ago

    Nice try, but the popular vote doesn’t mean anything in primaries, because the elections are held over a period of time and many candidates drop out mid-way through, so we will never know how many Joe Biden or John Edwards voters would have voted for Obama over Clinton. Clinton did not win a majority of votes, after all.

    Obama won a majority of pledged delegates, even before taking the undemocratic Super Delegates into account, and it’s delegates that count.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries

    Democrats don’t need to mess with the counting of votes to “fix” primaries. They do it the old fashioned way, by manipulating the primary calendar to make certain candidates inevitable.

    • EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com
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      2 hours ago

      Primaries need to be on one fucking day across the nation.

      Make it ranked choice or some other system that works properly with more than 2 candidates while we’re at it.

    • Nalivai@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      Popular vote reflects how people who actually vote think. Candidates aren’t appearing out of thin air, they’re nominated as the result of political campaigns.
      You can’t shift the blame for candidates to ambiguous “them” if you didn’t get your ass to try to affect it in any way. The delegates represent pretty nicely the opinion of people who actually vote in Primaries, with almost perfect track record. They don’t represent your opinion because you don’t vote therefore don’t have an opinion. So you don’t get to complain about what party that you’re not in is doing. Want it to change? Use the ways to change it. Those ways aren’t hidden from you, aren’t secret, aren’t gatekeeped by a shadow cabal, you just need to do politics about it. People who get their candidates elected do that.