Sat down at the computer 20 minutes or so ago all like OKAY WORDZ TIEM MOTHERFUCKERS and … yeah, apparently that’s at least slightly easier said than done? I dunno, maybe the seventeen hundred words I gave y’all on Nioh 2 yesterday was all I have in me at the moment.
So, politics, I guess.
I am having an interesting reaction to the news about the primary ending. I was not actually expecting rage to be among the emotions I felt once that happened, but as it turns out that one’s kind of leading the pack; it pisses me the hell off that we are two months away from anyone in Indiana getting to cast a ballot in a primary that started off with half a dozen candidates I’d have been perfectly happy to vote for and two I’d have been deliriously happy to get, and we’ve somehow ended with an eight thousand year old white man who I used to refer to as “the Senator from MBNA” winning the nomination before Indiana even got to vote. And I’m not happy about it. This motherfucker has been close to the bottom of my choices for the entire Goddamned primary, and while the math has been clear for quite a damn while that my choices are not everyone else’s choices– none of my candidates managed to get anywhere with black voters, which is critical to winning the Democratic nomination– the fact that I literally didn’t get to cast a ballot before the choice was made pisses me off anyway. I’d have been fine with voting for someone who lost. I’ve done that a whole bunch of times. I’m not fine with this.
The Democratic party’s primary structure is fucked, the way we choose presidential candidates is fucked, and I want this shit fixed. Now, God damn it.
(There is– and I will make this point more than once more before November– absolutely nothing short of the election being cancelled or my own death that will prevent me from voting for Biden this fall. Nothing.(*) But that doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it, and right now I choose not to be. A good VP choice would go a long ways toward restoring some enthusiasm, but I don’t need to be enthusiastic to vote. I’m grown. I’m gonna fucking vote like it’s my job, because it is.)
(*) Well, okay, Biden’s death would probably also cause me to not vote for him, but this election’s already going to be fucked up enough and I don’t want to even think about what the shit would occur if that happened.
(**) Since I actually know, image credit: @adequateashell
8:03 PM, Wednesday April 8th: 429,052 confirmed cases and 14,695 Americans dead.
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Everything about politics in this country is designed like a sports playoff. Rather than an actual choice among a field of candidates, we’re essentially left with two or at best three “real” options, while any other candidates are left to squabble over the scraps of the delegate count to boost their future political ambitions.
The way to fix it is to have a nationwide primary with run-offs. If 12 candidates are all polling at… whatever, 3%… on National Primary Day, then they all make the ballot in every state. If we end up with a plurality of candidates receiving delegates above a pre-defined threshold (say, 10%), then we schedule a run-off election with those candidates.
Rinse and repeat until a single candidate wins a majority of the vote, nationally. This structure invites true competition, even from smaller-name candidates, giving the likes of Amy Klobuchar to advance to a run-off against Sanders, Biden, Warren, Buttigieg, for instance.
I have no idea why the DNC would not want this model, except that both political parties and major media outlets benefit (financially) from protracted “races” between big-name candidates. It’s survivor, except, you know, with the fate of our country on the line.
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