I’ll catch downvotes for this, but every incumbent president has a primary that is abbreviated and dominated by the incumbent. Biden is no different than Obama, Bush, etc. That said, you can and should still be critical of the DNC not hosting a full primary when Harris was tapped out.
That’s not an accident though, the party is choosing to shut out new candidates. I think it’s always wrong to do, because it puts even more power over our elections into the hands of billionaires.
Yes. The party chooses to “shut out new candidates” in the sense that the vast majority of potential candidates choose not to run. In large part because the incumbency is either a massive strength or an albatross hanging around everyone’s neck.
And considering primaries tend to come down more to attacking the candidate themselves (since the viable candidates tend to have platforms not too dissimilar from one another with the expectation that the final platform is an amalgam of the front runners anyway), it mostly just serves to provide weaknesses for the other party to exploit.
A biden who had chosen to stand down would have been a very different story. There were definitely arguments for it at the time much as there were arguments against it (the biden years were really good for the country and most of the horrors of it would have been there under any other president). But people are stupid and decided that the local kroger jacking up the prices meant the world was ending and so forth.
I’ll catch downvotes for this, but every incumbent president has a primary that is abbreviated and dominated by the incumbent. Biden is no different than Obama, Bush, etc. That said, you can and should still be critical of the DNC not hosting a full primary when Harris was tapped out.
That’s not an accident though, the party is choosing to shut out new candidates. I think it’s always wrong to do, because it puts even more power over our elections into the hands of billionaires.
Yes. The party chooses to “shut out new candidates” in the sense that the vast majority of potential candidates choose not to run. In large part because the incumbency is either a massive strength or an albatross hanging around everyone’s neck.
And considering primaries tend to come down more to attacking the candidate themselves (since the viable candidates tend to have platforms not too dissimilar from one another with the expectation that the final platform is an amalgam of the front runners anyway), it mostly just serves to provide weaknesses for the other party to exploit.
A biden who had chosen to stand down would have been a very different story. There were definitely arguments for it at the time much as there were arguments against it (the biden years were really good for the country and most of the horrors of it would have been there under any other president). But people are stupid and decided that the local kroger jacking up the prices meant the world was ending and so forth.