i swear half the young people i meet tell me they campaigned for bernie. their souls got sucked out a little when realizing their own party was fighting him all along. like step aside for hillary then see her fail to trump. that hurt. anyway i miss the enthusiasm for politics they brought. bernie is only alone within his own party...
The problem you have is the 18-29 set show up to vote in in ridiculously low numbers compared to every other age demographic and it's been that way for at least 50 years. So it's a little much to blame the party for Bernie not advancing when really at least half that problem is people failing to show up to vote. Look at reddit. The reddit youth demographic kept going on about how they were going to 'flood the polls' and 'make sure this never happens again'.. Well that didn't happen.
Progressives are doing better now 10 years later. Probably because those 18-29 that supported Bernie but didn’t show up to vote are now 28-39 and realized you have to actually show up and vote for things to happen. Sadly it seems like it always takes so long to learn and the new batch of 18-29 will have low turnout again
Honestly if there were a viable 3rd party contender that wasn't composed of extremists and corporate shills I suspect it would be extremely popular. Everyone is sick of corporate Dems promising change and never delivering because their corporate masters keep them on a leash
It would more popular than like other third parties in the US but definitely not popular enough to threaten the ruling two party establishment of the US.
The median voter doesn't particularly care. All they care about is whether it affects them personally. Which is why the economy is always such a major issue in the US.
Even if the third party seemed to be popular and gaining it, it would lead to the Republicans and Democrats coming together in some weird unholy alliance to crush anti corporate resistance.
Oh I'm well aware of how difficult it would be to actually establish a viable competitor party. I'm just saying that I believe a lot of folks in my generation and the younger generations would support it since the dems can't seem to get much done and the republicans want to drag us back to the stone age
I've never been a member of a party (40 years now) but I also don't vote Republican. I despise political parties and have since I was 16. Geo Washington and the founders of the Constitution knew what they were talking about when they called them a dangerous influence primarily because of what they observed/experienced in England.
Defeatist bs. This is a 2 party system. You pick the party that's going to get you closest to where you want to be, and try to get them to improve. Anything else is just aiding the opposition.
I like this analogy: politics is like a bus, you pick the one that's going to get you closest to where you want to be. Your problem in the US is you only have two buses, and one of them wants to drive straight off a cliff. If you don't want to take the drive off the cliff bus, your only choice is to punch your ticket for the other bus. Not punching that ticket is sending the message that you're actually alright with driving off the cliff.
If you want to send a message to the Democratic Party, you have to actually get involved. Not voting just makes driving off the proverbial cliff more likely. Case in point, the last two years.
If Democrats started winning every election, you'd quickly see a split within the Democrat party further to the left. You'd see the Republican party go up in flames.
He identifies as a Democratic socialist and votes along those lines. There are more actual Democratic congresspeople adopting that stance all the time. You're not going to see change if you don't get on board with making change. Stop making up reasons to be regressive.
It's the system we've got. Fantasizing about a third party only weakens Democratic voting power. The GOP is fully entrenched and taking all their orders from the top, so a third party only serves to divide the left. Save your idealism and take a serious look at what you can do to make change.
Not if people refuse to vote, like some of these idiots. And the fact is that we don't have ranked voting, so you have to work within the system you have until you have the power to make that change. It's super discouraging to see all these commentators just whining over things not being perfect and giving up. You'll never get what you want that way.
If you’re stupid enough to keep voting when it’s been proven time after time that people’s votes don’t mean shit and that votes can be manipulated. And dumb enough to choose sides when both side sides are evil and have evil in them is crazy. I’ll stay independent thank you.
You watched what happen? Bernie twice failing to persuade more than 30% of the leftmost voters in America to vote for him? Anybody talking like this ("I am no longer a Democrat because of what they did to Berniiiiieee") in the year of our lord 2026 is almost certainly a foreign op.
You'll call it a foreign op then cry online next month when Dems underperform cause you convinced actual leftists to stay home with your degrading bullshit 😂
I was keeping up with news on the 2020 primary. I watch in real time every day his name wouldn’t even be mentioned ever in print. He could be polling 3rd they would talk about 1st, 2nd, 5th, 8th. Even when he was polling second his name would never be mentioned.
We need to do everything we can to vote get out there and wrestle control away from republicans and then wrestle control away from business interests. Sadly it’s going to be a long fight just to achieve the first part,
When my foreign friends ask I explain "the Democrats are incompetent, the Republicans are legit evil. I guess I prefer to vote for incompetence over actual cartoon villains"
I was a Republican. I vote Democrat now (have since Obama) to stop Republicans, while promoting every candidate Left of the Democrats that actually run for office.
Sometimes you have to vote out of spite and then bully the establishment until they relent.
I love Bernie and wish there were a lot more of him in the House and Senate.
But he lost the nomination in 2016 because he didn't get enough of the actual votes in the primary. It's a good thing too because there is no way a Democratic Socialist can win in the general election now in the majority of states. There are a handful he could easily take but there are far too many that see "socialist" and read "communist".
The Red Scare fucked virtually all the Boomer's and most of Gen X.
It's obvious by how the DSA is treated even today by a lot of tried and true Democrats.
Bernie did a great job moving the needle to the left... There's just no way he would have won even the popular vote let alone the Electoral College.
He is, but he largely votes with the Democrats because his other option is to join the fascists (Republicans). He's been very staunchly outspoken against Democrats in the past as well. However, Republicans have moved so far right that it's forced Bernie to kind of fully ally with Democrats to fight against them.
Yep and that’s why even is democrats suck. You are never going to go from full Republican control to what Bernie is advocating for. It’s going to take a lot of work making people realize we need more reasonable policies so first we have to get everyone away from the insanity of the Republican Party. Then we need to start moving towards people that are not bought by corporations.
He's alway caucuses with the dems and he was running for their nomination. They let him run because they never expected him to actually be a contender for the nomination.
he wasnt ever a contender for the nomination. he was never close to winning in either election,. because he doesn't understand how to build a coalition that exceeds about 30% of the primary electorate.
This is revisionism. Bernie was literally the front runner for the first part of the 2020 primary. Indisputably (meaning you're just not worth responding to if you ignore this fact) Clyburn saved Biden's campaign. Bernie was actually winning younger black voters prior to Clyburn's endorsement. This is the reason Clyburn jumped in. Bernie was on track to either win SC or get close enough that it would kill enthusiasm in Biden entirely. After Clyburns endorsement, black voters in SC strengthened behind Biden again, leading to virtually every other person in the race to drop out and back Biden when the entire party was explicitly freaking out about Bernie winning.
It is not revisionism. You're just trying to claim that it was a Clyburn-led conspiracy that got other candidates' voters to *not* vote for Bernie, rather than Bernie just not being as popular as you think. He was indeed the front runner in a 9-12 person field, which was impressive since it already included Biden. But Bernie did not ever come close to commanding a majority of support from primary voters. This is because he does not really attempt to persuade and is bad at talking to people who do not agree with him. So his support in 2020, even with name recognition and a massive cash advantage, was capped in the low 30s. among democrats. When the rest of the field bowed out, those voters didn't go to Bernie. Not even Warren's. Jim Clyburn didn't do that and its insane to suggest that he has that level of power over millions of people. Voters actively chose not to follow Bernie. They could have and they didn't. It's incredibly weak to blame anybody but Bernie for that. As the choices narrowed, Bernie's support should have surged - instead it stayed the same. His supporters harassed and antagonized people online to the extent that when Warren dropped out, he didn't get her support. They went to BIDEN, who they ideologically aligned with LESS. Because Bernie and his vibe were just so toxic. Biden did not parachute into the election at the last minute to steal it from Bernie. That would have fit your narrative of conspiracy - if the Dems fielded a surprise high-profile candidate at the last minute to keep Bernie from running away with it. But that's not what happened. Biden was there the whole time. Bernie failed to persuade voters to come to him as their first choices dropped out, and that is why he lost.
Because states like South Carolina that were never going to vote democrat anyway got to be the deciding voice and by the time I got the opportunity to vote in a primary in a state nearly 2:1 democrats the primary had already been long decided.
It's the people he consistently works with on everything. Even if someone isn't a member of the family if they are always at the BBQ it's kinda weird to be stabbing them in the back all the time.
Caucusing with the party means he joins the party’s private meetings, receives committee assignments from the party and helps establish the party’s legislative agenda.
yeah this is about the time I lost all faith in the democrats as an institution. I still vote blue but I sure with they were all more like Bernie and AOC and not like Hillary =/
My hopes for America died in 2016 for that exact reason. No one I knew wanted Hilary and they picked her anyway. The democrats running things have their own agenda and it’s clear that it still aligns with the people who have all the power/wealth
This is literally the reason trump is in office. I’m so tired of democrats telling me to vote for their incompetence. You are the reason we are here in the first place.
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u/WilliamJamesMyers 15h ago
i swear half the young people i meet tell me they campaigned for bernie. their souls got sucked out a little when realizing their own party was fighting him all along. like step aside for hillary then see her fail to trump. that hurt. anyway i miss the enthusiasm for politics they brought. bernie is only alone within his own party...