this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2026
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As a non-American I have to admit that I don't understand how primaries work in that country. Why are the liberals who choose the candidate and not the leftists?
EDIT: Just to be clear. I know what primaries are, we have them regularly in my country. What I don't understand is how these work specifically so that the bases cannot choose freely. Or is it that the Democratic base would be happier with a candidate like Hilary? If that's the case, the complaints I frequently read here and on other sites would not be very legitimate.
Because the liberals are the entrenched power in the party and they set the primary rules in their favor. And ignore them as convenient. Even successfully argued in court that they are under no obligation to follow their own stated rules. And sometimes they don't even hold primaries.
The US doesn’t have leftists.
They're around. They just rarely receive media coverage and what little they do get is infantilization or being called a socialist 😱 or a criminal🚨.
Few get into office then it's the same story.
It's worse now under this admin.
Great, then their lack of action just makes them leftist cowards, which makes them about as useful as liberals.
You either have solidarity or you're part of the problem. It's not a lack of action. You're working from a garbage media filter.
Maybe try Coolzone Media or Unicorn Riot or It's Going Down to name a few decent ones.
I don’t see any articles about Nazis being shot in the head.
I DO see a bunch of articles about Nazis racking up a body count by shooting innocent people on US streets and murdering democratic lawmakers in their homes, though. Huh. Must be my garbage media filter.
OK then where's the article about YOU shooting a nazi in the head?
Your country is the one with the most urgent Nazi problem at the moment. I’m sure your inaction will make it our problem eventually, though, so I guess I’ll have to let you know.
I'm confident there's nazis in yours assuming you're in the west. The US might be taking off the mask but the surge to the right has been a phenomenon ubiquitous in the western world.
Yes, we have an alt-right problem thanks to you allowing a house fire to start on our street after three decades of responding like assholes when we told you not to let your kids play with matches.
“Your child’s going to start a fire and it’s going to spread.”
“Shut up, you’re America’s hat.”
And now that everything we’ve been telling you was going to happen IS HAPPENING, your response is. “LOL, it’s hittng your house next.”
People have been working and dying to fight this on the left in the US since well before either of us were born. Attempting to blame the left instead of liberals or the fascists for the actions of the liberals and the right is antagonizing at best and maliciously doing the fascist's job for them at worst.
I assume you're coming from a place of wanting a better world, but expecting people to kill outright is disregarding their position and the safety in their communities. People have lives and friends and families. When they lose what's left for them to protect then you'll probably start getting what you want.
“We’re too comfortable and u willing to risk anything for what we believe in”
Yeah. Well aware.
Exactly this.
And yet the handful that do exist never fucking stop whining when the Democrats don't pander to this non-existent bloc.
Pandering to republicans hasn't worked, but you like it because you get pandered to.
Correct.
The vast majority of people don't vote in primaries for some reason so the demographics are different from the general, but also the DNC has plenty of tricks at its disposal to get the results they want. Now part of the reason those tricks work is that American leftist politicians tend to be pussies who are unwilling to take shots at liberals, but yeah the whole process is captured by DNC liberals.
In the 80's liberals got control of our progressive party, the DNC. Back then it was possible to pull voters from the right by appealing to wealth and so Clintons won by doing it.
But every election our candidates are supposed to be elected by popular vote within each party. Recently they just kind of stopped though because it turns out that was apparently just a tradition and not like an enforceable law or anything. And the Clintons wanted to have the White House again.
We got layers of elections. The states administer them so you have a different system for each state. Primaries are different in every state, too. Then you have Federal elections that are still run by the individual states, just for federal offices, but then the President is elected through an entirely different system altogether that the states also individually have to administer.
As an American, I can assure they don't work. It's a fucking party. Guess why that wasn't a misnomer and what they mean by "Jerry Rigged" and "Glass" house.
Or did you think Propane was just a coincidence in naming?
what?
Dope
Because most people don't know the difference. it's mostly just name recognition so you have to be known and at least somewhat popular.
Primaries are generally much more extreme, because everyone voting is part of the party. So the candidates will be closely toeing the party line to pick up the passionate voters.
To be clear, the individual parties aren’t actual government-funded organizations. They’re private entities, who choose to hold primaries and then put the party’s support behind whoever wins. This is an important distinction because this means the individual primaries can be run however the party wants, even if that means not having a primary and simply running a sitting president (like what happened to Biden, then later Kamala after Biden dropped out). And registering to vote with a party is typically exclusive, meaning you can only vote in one pre-chosen primary election per cycle. Like if I were to register as a republican to vote in the republican primary, the democrat party wouldn’t allow me to cast a vote in their primary.
Then whoever wins the primaries goes on to the general election. While winning the primary is only a soft requirement for the general election, (anyone can run as an independent candidate), the US’ first-past-the-post voting system means it’s virtually impossible to win the general election without the support of one of the two big parties. And if you want to get that support, you need to win the primary. Independent candidates are generally thought of as wasted votes, meme votes, protest votes, etc…
Notably, in the general election, democrats’ campaigns tend to take a strategy of “move farther right to grab the center/center-right swing voters.” Since any registered voter can vote in the general, swing voters often determine who wins and loses the general. Which means candidates tend to disproportionately focus on appeasing those swing voters. And this tends to piss off the democrats/leftists/etc who prefer the farther left policies. Especially when those same candidates have spent the past month parroting the official democratic party platform to win the primary, then suddenly about-face and cozy up to the centrists in the general.
So even if leftists were able to get enough votes for a far-left candidate in the primaries, (they can’t, because America has no notable far-left/leftist voting blocks), that same candidate would then immediately shift to the center to grab the swing votes in the general.
Well, if you get them to even tell you what a "liberal" is, you are lucky.
Their primaries are a real election they have inside each party to pick the candidates. If you have only 2 parties, it's a hard requirement. The people enlisted to each party vote on them (it seems that if you only have 2 real parties and primaries are your real elections, lots of people enlist in a party).