Statement made on 23rd July 2024 (~20 days ago)
A third option: I think it’s still important to be cognizant of their very correct call-out of the lack of democratic choice in this process. As you said, it’s too late to change that now, and certainly Beehaw is essentially all aboard the Harris/Walz train, but we did bypass an important phase of our democratic system to get here.
As it says in the article:
So we will do the hard thing: we will celebrate, and honor the joy many in our community are feeling about Kamala’s historic candidacy and path to the nomination—while calling out the undemocratic process and engaging in a vigorous discussion on the issues our community cares about.
They’re the nominees. They’re going to be on the ballots. But while I personally don’t think there was a better pair of candidates readily available at this point, I can still acknowledge that it was sad that it played out this way. Biden should have withdrew from the race back at the start, and we could have had a true primary (apart from the usual DNC shenanigans that they always pull), but Biden robbed that from us in his arrogance.
3 weeks ago, I barely had heard the name Walz, and now from what I’ve seen I love the guy. How many better candidates could we have had if we weren’t 100 days out from the election and being rushed to find good ones?
I get the potential gripe, but realistically it’s hard to call it undemocratic even as it stands. People voted for an incumbent (essentially unopposed) ticket of Biden/Harris. Had Biden simply dropped dead this would have been the very same result. We just skipped the whole death part and moved on to the natural line of succession. Besides, how many times have we had a VP become pres or at least the candidate in the past few decades? Better than half since the 70s if I count correctly.
I’m not particularly disappointed with the outcome, but it was undemocratic. Just because there is a precedent of the party bullying other candidates out of running against an incumbent doesn’t make it democratic. The party bullying it’s way to its preferred candidate is what lost us 2016.
Anything specific to say they forced others not to run? The whole bit of others dropping out and endorsing happens regularly. Happened on the R side too. Bernie didn’t get nominated because not enough people showed up to vote at the end of the day. Having dedicated fans and lots of youth energy means nothing unless the vote count says what you want when it’s over.
