The Democratic National Committee’s virtual roll call vote has closed, and the Democratic Party announced that Vice President Kamala Harris received the votes of 99% of the participating delegates.
In a statement late Monday, Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison and Minyon Moore, the Democratic National Convention committee chair, said that the roll call results would next be certified by the convention’s secretary, Jason Rae, formalizing Harris’ status as the Democratic nominee who will take on Republican nominee Donald Trump in November.
So twice in one year, the DNC refused to provide the US American people with any real choice on deciding who the Democrat presidential nominee will be?
How is that democracy?
Democracy happens at the general election. Primaries are held by the parties and they decide their own rules. Are you saying US was not a democracy before the 70s when delegates picked candidates without regards to the primaries?
There was a Democratic primary. Biden won this year’s primary and Kamala did not have a challenger.
Delegates are pledged during the primary, but are not voted until the convention.
Seeing as the delegates pledged for the Biden/Harris campaign, its pretty reasonable to think they were already happy with Harris as a potential president. The 99% pledge she just got from the same delegates makes it deafeningly clear that is still the case.
I mean, we literally had to riot to get competitive primaries…
We shouldn’t just give them away.
Nothing to do this year, but 2028 needs a competitive primary even if it’s Harris again
I don’t understand why this is downvoted. It is important to have meaningful primaries. The Biden dropout kerfuffle is a direct result of skipping this for incumbents. On top of that, primaries are a great way for new voices to gain some name recognition.
If you look back at who people were talking about replacing Biden with, you can see that the majority were drawn from the 2020 primary. It’s vital to keep that process moving so we don’t have years where we have to replace a candidate in a panic at the last moment, and in the event that the unforeseeable happens, it is just as vital to have runners up to replace the candidate with. Having competitive primaries every election is something we should absolutely make a priority.
It isn’t.
We don’t live in a democracy. We live in a representative democracy. You have no direct say in your national leadership, even in the general election.
I’m not defending the DNC here. I’m not a huge fan of Harris but she’s better than Biden. I think they made the right choice but they could have easily made a fucking awful one, and there would be nothing anyone could do about it.
That a private, non representative organization just gets to hand pick our candidate is weird, and you’re right to be pissed about it. The way to change that is to start an organization to petition the government to move away from primaries and caucuses and towards a better method (someone will insist it’s ranked choice but I’m not convinced that’s the best method.)
We have two parties, until that changes this is the fucked up, idiotic system we’re stuck with. We’re stuck with Harris or Trump and if you’re on the fence between those two, I might recommend voting for the one who hasn’t raped a bunch of kids on a private island, bankrupted three casinos, and tried to overthrow the fucking government. But you do you.
bankrupted three casinos, two casino holding companies, and a Manhattan Hotel [1] but he’s an excellent businessman who will run America like his business [2]
[1] https://www.thoughtco.com/donald-trump-business-bankruptcies-4152019
[2] https://www.vox.com/2017/5/18/15653808/donald-trump-james-comey-michael-flynn-business
someone will insist it’s ranked choice but I’m not convinced that’s the best method.
Why not?
It heavily favors moderates. No one, or at least very rarely will anyone get their first choice. But the least offensive candidate will be a lot of people’s second or third choice. There’s no functional reason it would lead to more than two parties, and doesn’t do anything to break up the big two we already have. You just have more candidates from each party running.
So you end up with a race towards milquetoast, be the least offensive. Be everybody’s second choice.
Meanwhile Trump literally tries to steal the election and runs again and all his lemmings continue to support him while Democrats are supposed to be concerned that Biden’s VP took over after he literally had to drop out due to the age-related issues that Trump kept bringing up.
We know who the real threat to democracy is and it ain’t Kamala.
There were two other candidates challenging Biden: Dean Phillips and Jason Palmer. Americans were given the choice to select a different candidate and chose Biden.
Bear in mind the US is a constitutional republic. It is not a majority-rules democracy. We do not vote directly for our leaders but partake in a democratic process to elect representatives. So, yeah - if you want to complain about democracy, you’ll have to take it up with the Constitution.
You are correct about all of that, but don’t get caught in a word trap. A constitutional republic is a type of democracy. It is a representative democracy, instead of a direct democracy.
No countries are direct democracies but they are still democracies. It just means “the people choose their leaders”.
Harris’ grassroots support is really massive. No other Democrat has that kind of support right now. Casting her as somebody who the elites foisted on us rings hollow.
The majority wanted Biden to drop out. Biden dropped out.
The majority supports Harris. She’s the nominee.
Where’s the anti-Harris movement within the party? It doesn’t seem to exist.
