Gretchen Whitmer responds to calls by some Democrats to vote ‘uncommitted’ in Michigan’s primary on Tuesday
Gretchen Whitmer, the Michigan governor, pushed back on calls to not vote for Joe Biden over his handling of the Israel-Gaza conflict, saying on Sunday that could help Trump get re-elected.
“It’s important not to lose sight of the fact that any vote that’s not cast for Joe Biden supports a second Trump term,” she said on Sunday during an interview on CNN’s State of the Union. “A second Trump term would be devastating. Not just on fundamental rights, not just on our democracy here at home, but also when it comes to foreign policy. This was a man who promoted a Muslim ban.”
Whitmer, who is a co-chair of Biden’s 2024 campaign, also said she wasn’t sure what to expect when it came to the protest vote.
Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat who is the only Palestinian-American serving in Congress, urged Democrats last week to vote “uncommitted” in Michigan’s 27 February primary.
Now, if the Democrats had picked someone who actually supported popular Democratic positions, there wouldn’t now be a massive chasm between him and their base on various burning issues they now have to bridge during what may, ironically, in fact be one of the more important elections of our lifetimes.
Democrats don’t pick their candidates, the wealthy donors and senior members do. Which is why we always end up with a centrist and empty promises. Money in politics is a cancer.
Those are who the Democratic Party represents. They are the party. If you want to pay membership dues and show up to local meetings, that’s fun and all, but the donors and senior members make all the important decisions above the local level, and local power brokers generally have party locals all sewn up, too.
Just ignoring that small donors exist and add up…
The DNC doesn’t like them tho. Large entities giving huge amounts of money involves, dinners, fancy fundraisers, trips, and all types of situations the money spreads around where it shouldn’t.
Small donors just want common sense politicians who are actually going to try and help Americans. Large donors want corporations to pay less taxes if were lucky. AIPAC wants billions a year and unquestioed support.
So large so ors and small donors want opposite things, and since large donors are more likely to personally enrich the people running the party, the people running the party decided that’s who they go with.
Even if it means Dems are less likely to win elections.
Right, exactly. Sure, the Dems have a bunch of formal structure, and yes, you can participate in it, and if you persuade the decision makers inside the party (who are industry tools more often than not), then yes, you can have an influence. But if you want to challenge them on something genuinely democratic, like calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, which 76% of the Democratic base is in support of, then all of a sudden the elitist liberalism comes out and we all have to get in line behind our august statespeople, who know infinitely better than us measly citizens…
It’s what Bernie has been saying for decades.
The first step is replacing neoliberals with progressives. We can’t fix anything while they’re in power, because they’re the problem
Which is why the DNC fights harder against progressives than republicans. Losing to republicans just isn’t a big deal to them, they know in 4-8 years they’ll be in power again, and they’ll be a shit ton of donations to Dems because of it.
If they lose to progressives…
That could be the end of the gravy train forever.
The more people understand that, the sooner it happens.
That’s why the neoliberals demand absolutely loyalty to Biden.
The DNC has the state infrastructure and most federal and state-level campaigns tied so deeply into their infrastructure there’s no real hope of replacing them.
Local politics are a tiny bit more open-ended, but again, the stakes are lower and local governments are explicity subordinate to states. Cities and counties can’t do much if the state doesn’t like it.
I have no idea how you fix this situation up, but as I see it, whatever the solution is has to look like making the DNC and its infrastructure obsolete. I don’t see this happening inside the Democratic Party.
…
The DNC is not the state parties…
The state parties exist independent of the DNC, but due to how funding is supposed to trickle down, the state parties do kind of have to listen to them.
And while the state parties are in charge of their primary votes, the DNC can choose to ignore them.
Which is what happened when NH Dems refused to break NH state law so that Biden wouldn’t have to lose the first primary after NH picked progressive over party favorite in 2016 and 2020.
It’s confusing, but please try to learn more about our poltical system.
I’m noticing lots of Bidens supporters are incredibly opinionated, they just don’t know what they’re talking about about. When they do, they finally start understanding how fucked up we are and that if we dont act soon it’s too late.
It’s hard enough when one party is antidemocratic, if both are…
Right, they’re formally separate, I know. The DNC intentionally uses their version of the power of the purse to control state parties. Like you said. They don’t need perfect control as long as they can starve any campaign they don’t like of funding.
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It costs more money to get ten million $1 donations than it does to get one $10,000,000 donation. You have to advertise, put up a website, collect donations, and possibly pay service fees for the charges. One giant novelty check from a billionaire means more of that money goes into their coffers.
It’s the same reason websites have advertising rather than memberships: Ad dollars are cheaper to get.
It costs more money to get the $10M donation, but it’s paid for by taxpayers rather than the candidate.
Lol
You think thos 20k a plate fundraisers cost zero?
The difference is the in person schmoozing with all those donors. The people running the party want to be paid to attend shit like that and having wealthy people suck up to them
I think getting $19,000 out of $20,000 is better than getting $0.90 out of a $1 donation, yes. It’s called cost-of-revenue.
But you’re right about the schmoozing. The donors love that shit. But there’s also massive armies of political operatives whose livelihood depends on getting paid a ton of money to repeat facts back at the candidates.
Advertisers, analysts, pundits, news orgs, and a ton of other people rely on elections being both as expensive and as frustrating as possible. That way they get a ton of money, and sell a ton of eyeballs.
Sure, if you’re making up random numbers anything can be justified…
But talking to someone who does that isnt something a lot of people are going to want to do bud.
Talking to someone who can’t understand a common business concept isn’t much fun either
No, we always end up with a centrist because a vast majority of voters are nowhere near as left-wing as the people who flock to Reddit and Lemmy. The American public is electing who they support and believe in, and it sounds to Lemmy leftists like the rest of America is robbing something from them because they never meaningfully interact with people on other parts of the ideological spectrum. Whether you realize it or not, a sizeable majority of American voters do not think or vote like you do.
Which is why I’ve given up on actually being happy with my government: I’m a weirdo and most Americans actually like this shit.
A majority of Americans have been unhappy with their government almost every single year since Nixon was President. So no, most Americans don’t actually like this shit. It’s just that given the problems we’re currently facing and the fact that most Americans don’t like this shit, a huge majority of them either blithely disagree with people who think like you, or actively and violently oppose people who think like you. A majority of America simply has different priorities, even if they ostensibly like progressive ideas, and that’s the reality we’re stuck with until public opinion shifts in a different direction or on-the-ground conditions change.
And I’m not gonna live long enough to see that.
A lot of black people died before the Civil Rights Movement. A lot of LGBTQ+ people died before gay marriage was legalized. A lot of women died before their full integration into the workforce. A lot of political outsiders died before the first nationally-binding primary system was implemented in 1972. All of those people died either hopeful that change would come or resigned to the fact that it never would, yet here we are.
Public opinion can and does change. It takes time, and progress is intermixed with periods of backsliding, but change is certainly possible. I think the American experiment will eventually collapse by popular vote, but I hope I can see a few cultural, economic, environmental, and philosophical victories notched between now and then, just as I’ve witnessed a few big ones since I was born.
Cool take, see you after the flopped election when you’re back here screaming that leftists single handedly tanked the election for Biden. 🤷
People really will argue there are no left leaning voters and also leftists are why Democrats can’t win elections because the non existent voters don’t vote.
Shocking that aiming at the apathetic middle fence sitters doesn’t seem to work when clearly that the argument is that it does. In which case it doesn’t matter that Biden isn’t liked by leftists cause he will win in a landslide for getting all those centrists and centrist conservatives right?
I’m with you dude. I don’t get how there can be this argument that Democrats don’t need leftists and shouldn’t try to even bother getting their votes but also are being ruined by greedy lefties not voting. It’s a fucking paradox which means they need to actually give a shit and aim for the left.
I will eat this thread printed out on a sheet of paper after elections in November if Biden loses
Not my take, I brought sources. Feel free to read them if you want to get outside of your bubble for a bit.
And their democracy is at stake. Just shut up and vote D like a good peon and leave them to make their billions.
Support for Palestinians is not even close to being a majority opinion among Demcratic voters. Most Dems that are gen X and boomers tend to (broadly) support Israel, while support for Palestinians is strongest amongst zoomers and younger millennials.
No position has a majority because many voters don’t care, but more Democrats and Independent disapprove of Israel’s handling of the war than approve.
When a poll forces them to choose, most Democrats disapprove of Biden’s handling of the war.
Do you understand that, in regards to a general election, this is a problem?
There’s not any position that he could take that doesn’t have huge potential drawbacks for his core voters, while Trump’s supporters overwhelmingly support Israel’s war against Palestinians.
He could simply not unilaterally and proactively send them more weapons. He could not veto UN resolutions. While I think we should be taking a moral stance on genocide, I’ll take simply not being actively complicit.
…Which costs him independents and Republican-leaning voters, and hence the election.
Whether I like the system we have right now or not, politics is strategic. Right now, it’s not good strategy. If he was just starting his 2nd term, then he could–and should–absolutely to just that. But right now he doesn’t have sufficient political capital to cut off funding to Israel and win an election.
Independents also oppose Israel’s actions. You didn’t even need to open the links, I highlighted that for you. Holy fuck skittish liberals, stop fucking abandoning everything for imagined Republican crossovers.