More than four months after Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin announced that he was breaking his promise to release its autopsy report on the 2024 election, the decision remains highly controversial. Arguments swirl around whether it’s wise to proceed without public scrutiny of what went wrong during the last presidential campaign. But scant attention has focused on how hiding the autopsy provides an assist to Kamala Harris, who currently leads in polling of Democrats for the party’s 2028 nomination.
As Harris eyes another run, she has a major stake in the DNC continuing to keep the autopsy under wraps – and has a lot to lose if it reaches the light of day. She must feel gratified when Martin defends keeping the autopsy secret, saying that the party should not “relitigate” the 2024 election and claiming that release of the 200-page document would result in “navel-gazing.”
Release of the entire autopsy would likely be a blow to Harris’s chances of becoming president in January 2029. Partly based on interviews with more than 300 prominent Democrats and others in all 50 states, it reportedly concludes that Harris’s unwavering support for U.S. weapons shipments to Israel was a significant factor in her loss to Donald Trump.
While she pursued an unsuccessful strategy of wooing scarce “moderate” Republican voters, many in the Democratic base were repelled by the full backing that Harris gave to President Biden’s massive arming of Israel as civilian deaths mounted in Gaza. She adhered to Biden’s admonition that there be “no daylight” between the two of them as she campaigned for president after he withdrew from the race.
At the time, polls showed that Harris was harming her election prospects by refusing to distance herself from Biden’s policy toward Israel. She evades that reality in her post-election book 107 Days, which dismisses antiwar protesters at her rallies as mere “hecklers.”
Harris’s protracted book tour has been beset by disruptions as well as her inability to provide cogent responses.
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You haven't really made a cogent argument about this. There exists more than one problem to solve.
The problem I'm addressing is that "I won't vote until the party gives me a better nominee to vote for" is completely backwards, because we the voters are empowered to select the nominee from the primary candidates, without caring who the party heads wanted us to vote for.
The lack of third party representation is a separate problem. The two party "system" really isn't so much an entrenched "system" as much as it is a mathematical byproduct of first-past-the-post winner-take-all elections. So we need election reform. So we need to candidates who will fight for that to win. They won't win as a 3rd party in the vast majority of districts above a county/local level. So they have to run in the major party primary. Which brings us back to turnout in the primaries to put better nominees on the ballot in the general.
Yes, but if other countries manage to have decently functioning democracies without high primary turnout or even open primary elections at all, then it is not obvious that "low" primary turnout is a problem that requires a solution.
Would you care to make an actual suggestion as to how to address it, then?
Just copy-paste a working system and think about how to improve things from there.
How to convince your fellow citizens to pursue this? Realistically, you probably can't. You need a paradigm shift in society to address the problem I mentioned. It's a pervasive one; for example here on Lemmy one may commonly encounter calls to implement ranked-choice voting, whereas even the most rudimentary glance at what we already know about what works and what doesn't would be sufficient to conclude this isn't the way to go. If even well-meaning and partially educated people cannot manage to unchain themselves from the propaganda drilled into them, there is a long journey of deprogramming ahead.
Ok, so no real suggestions, then.
Very real, just not explicit. If I have to explain what characterizes top democracies, you underscore my point.
The most important aspect, of course, is having a multi-party system.
Your "real" suggestion for how to achieve this is literally that we should copy and paste from another country. That's not a serious suggestion. Be explicit with a real, specific thing that you think we can do instead of trying to tear down the people who have.
If the question is: what should be done to improve the system, then incorporating known improvements is the obvious and "serious" suggestion.
If the question is: what might realistically be done under current circumstances (a completely different question), then I have already answered it - try and get some marginally less inept people through Democratic primaries. However, given the reasons I already outlined and the ongoing and escalating constitutional crisis, the prospects over the short and medium term are bleak to say the least.
So you're suggesting we improve by improving, and put more vote-worthy candidates on the general election ballot by getting better people nominated in the primaries, but also that people who clearly care about the quality of nominee choosing to sit out the nominee selection process isn't a problem but instead the problem with bad Democratic nominees is that we don't have more successful third parties and the solution to that is to copy other countries' systems. Brilliant insights. Thanks for your contribution.
No, I'm not suggesting that at all.
The way to get "successful third parties" is not to found them or vote for them. What you need is electoral reforms to make your system more similar to democratic ones, and then you can vote for them. The way to do this, if not through revolution, is by getting pro-election reform candidates elected. That's tricky, because in essence they would be voting away their power. And, as I mentioned, the share of Americans even aware that there are massively overwhelmingly superior electoral systems they could simply copy is minuscule, making this not much of an issue to campaign on.