yaaaaaaaaaay…
I’m not even American, I just figured I’d tune in and catch the results on Monday night, and now it’s turned into my whole week. Fuck.
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I changed my mind, I’m Bernie or Bust now
Edit: This was a joke, but seriously, this whole debacle makes it horrifically clear that the DNC does not care about the will of the people.
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I’m assuming you are not American so I’m going to explain in basic terms. The caucus is one option for a state to choose as part of our primary system. During the primary, all electoral parties, but most importantly, the Democrats and Republicans, choose their candidates. Each state is allotted a certain number of delegates by the national party, based on the population of the state. These delegates are then either proportionally divvied out to the candidates based on the result of either a popular vote or a caucus in each state, or given solely to the winner of that state. The delegates then report to a national convention and the candidate who receives the most delegates goes on to the general election as the democratic candidate. So no, it’s not that Iowa can only vote for Pete. It’s that, if Pete wins enough caucuses or primaries, the entire country can only vote for him as the Democratic Party candidate.
As far as why some states have caucuses and some have primaries, caucuses are an antiquated system that basically nobody seems to like anymore, but we keep using due to momentum. A caucus involves people who wish to participate going to a designated building at a designated time. There is time to make your case by discussing with the other participants, then there are rounds of voting. This is, in my opinion, the one good thing about the process. Because it allows people to stand on principal and vote for, say Andrew Yang, then transfer over to, say Bernie Sanders, during the second round. That said, there is reason to stick with your candidate, even if they are clearly not going to win the room you’re in, because your vote will still be counted on the state wide level.
Establishment people don’t like it because it favors highly energized groups, even if those groups don’t represent a majority. Marginalized groups don’t like it because it has to occur at specific places at specific times, and if you can’t arrange to be there on time and stay for the entire process, you don’t get to be included. This is probably intentional. America is a Democratic-Republic, and our founders really focused on the Republic part of that equation. North Carolina only stopped requiring land ownership as a voting requirement in 1856. We only started directly electing our Senators in 1913 (we used to elect congressmen, who would elect senators). And of course we only began to allow people of color to vote in 1870 and women in 1920, though some individual states offered these rights earlier.
I may have made some mistakes here, I’m not an expert.
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Isn’t it not necessarily a bad thing to use pre-existing systems if they aren’t going anywhere any time soon? Bernie’s whole thing is working because he’s running as a Democrat. If he weren’t we’d be hearing complaints that he’s splitting the vote. I don’t like the systems, but when most of the country thinks they are fine you’ll have a tough time getting anything done.
My problem isn’t people using the pre-existing game (edit: game systems? lmao how did I put the word game here?) systems. It’s thinking it’s the best and only way when time and time again the systems demonstrate themselves to be inefficient. I’m not telling people to not vote. I’m saying vote and also join organizations in your community to organize towards a better future.
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Ah, totally agree
D A M N
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Bernie is right, but I can’t blame Pete for saying he won. It’s like Hillary saying she won because she took the popular vote in 2016. Yes, if this was a real democracy you would have won. But Pete is getting more delegates, and ultimately that’s what decides this.
I don’t blame either for saying they “won” and defending themselves. It’s good press to win.
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Iowa doesn’t have enough delegates to really matter anyway, especially since Pete and Bernie are basically tied on delegate count. “Winning” isn’t about the delegates, it’s about who sets the narrative going into New Hampshire and Super Tuesday.
But just to soapbox a bit: if the answer to “who won the election” is ever not “the guy with the most votes”, that election is bullshit IMO.
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Thanks for the response.
I’m not American. I’m from and live in Ireland, which is also a Republic, but we have a much easier voting system here that we use for basically any candidate based vote, so anything that isn’t a Yes/No answer.
Here candidates belong to parties, or run as independents. Anyone can run so long as they meet criteria, such as applying before a deadline, paying a fee, being a law abiding citizen etc. Then when it comes time to vote, we use a transferable voting system. You number the candidates you like in order of preference, though you can stop whenever you want - you don’t need to number them all.
If your #1 candidate gets eliminated, the vote on your ballot goes to #2 and so on. Additionally if we’re voting for a number of seats and if your #1 gets enough votes to be elected, then any remaining votes above the threshold are divided out to other candidates, using some math that’s fairly basic. It ensures that every vote is allowed matter and there’s no such thing as a red state or blue state.
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Another detail about caucuses/primaries that I think is important and that also I think a lot of people might not realize is that they’re basically privately-managed by the parties themselves, and there’s nothing in any of our founding laws (i.e. the Constitution) that mandates how parties choose nominees. So the parties basically get to make their own rules, structure them however they want, transform votes into delegates by rules they make themselves, and state/local governments basically just help them organize. Republicans and Democrats actually have fairly different nominating structures; Republicans allocate delegates on a more winner-take-all basis, while Democratic primaries are typically more proportional.
Anyway, that’s all to say it’s a grand old mess, also why this particular mess that just happened in Iowa isn’t going to see any real repercussions for anyone involved, and why “winning” a caucus or even a primary isn’t as simple as winning the actual general election (which itself isn’t super simple because of the electoral college). Basically, imagine a house that people have just build extensions and renovations on for 250 years while keeping all the old construction and obsolete parts around for sentiment—that’s the American electoral system. And it’s reaching the point where it might start falling down any day now.
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I see that, as of now before a recanvas, that they’re giving Pete an extra delegate even though they are only two S.D.E.s apart and Bernie still leads the popular vote.
Coolcoolcool, not too important but not exactly democratic either. Debate tonight is gonna be fun, eh? At least Biden will be amusing.
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The best part is that basically every outlet leads with the SDEs and Pledged Delegates but forces you to dig to find the popular vote results.
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First five minutes are all about attacking socialism, so this is going well.
5:38: Not a fan of Yang, but I’m glad at least one of these people said there is more than just beating Donald Trump. There really is, he sucks but he’s just a gnarly symptom of the disease.
6:39: We’re on like the eighth debate or whatever and the moderator grilling Pete on the amount of black people arrested while he was mayor is the hardest any of the mods have gone in the past year.
Also, took an hour but I’m back on the fuck Yang train.
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And even under that small amount of pressure Pete gave maybe the worst response he could have. “I was only targeting the slaughtering gang members who just so happened to be connected to nonviolent drug users.” He really couldn’t come up with a better excuse for an increase in black arrests than pretty much saying that black people associate with murderous gangs.
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UHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
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We’re going to solve the problems with one simple tool: The Blockchain.
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