[kelipso]

They could have had a mini primary leading to the Democrat convention in August and let the voters in the convention (electors?) decide from multiple candidates while taking polls into account, for example. Having a memory, I do remember people discussing the option of mini primaries. Harris wasn’t pre-ordained, she was just a bad decision that Democrat insiders made without input from the outside.

[shadowgovt]

What is a "mini-primary?"

[kelipso]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2024/07/21/heres-how-d...

Basically speeches/debates/mini campaign before the convention, and the delegates vote at the convention without regard for the original primary.

[ElevenLathe]

This would just be show anyway. Even with a "real" primary, the DNC's "superdelegate" structure means that party insiders essentially get to choose the candidate, just like in the 19th century (the mythical "smoke filled room").

The primary process itself is just for show, but a competent party would understand that it needs to have at least the appearance of legitimacy.

The last Democratic presidential primary that seemed legitimate to voters who were paying attention was 2008: 2012 was 2nd term Obama, in 2016 insiders ratfucked Sanders to pick Clinton, 2020 they did something similar to pick Biden, and then of course the disaster of 2024.

It's been nearly 20 years since we've had a "real" Democratic primary that at least advertised itself as a democratic process. Seems logical that Democratic voters would be skeptical about the so-called leadership of the party.

[shadowgovt]

It's not precisely "just for show;" there are enough non-super DNC delegates that they can, in fact, outweigh the superdelegates if they have something approximating consensus. When it's a close race, the superdelegates can dominate the outcome.

But there's no reason to assume that anyone would have shown up to challenge Harris. The incumbent effect is very strong in both parties, and it's extremely rare to refrain from nominating the sitting first-term President, so there's no reason to believe the result of all of that wouldn't have been the successor the President recommended. Note that the initial Primary went landslide to Biden. American voters tend to go with recognizable names and tend to hew to tradition.

You're quite correct that relative to the GOP, the Democrats have a more elitist structure that consolidates leadership to party operatives. When you don't have that... Well, nobody in the GOP party machinery really wanted President Trump, but the GOP doesn't have superdelegates.

> 2016 insiders ratfucked Sanders to pick Clinton

This is a common hypothesis but Sanders never had the votes. He was about 3 million short of Clinton. While there's no doubt that the party preferred Clinton, the voters didn't show enough of a preference for Sanders to overcome that inertia. Again, American voters tend to go with recognizable names, and they already saw Clinton close to the White House (even if, as First Lady, she wasn't actually elected).

Were the Democratic voters even wrong? Clinton ultimately went on to win the popular vote. There's no particular reason to believe Sanders would have done so; we'll never know what that alternate reality would have looked like, but his opponents would have drilled in on his Jewish heritage and it would have gotten quite ugly (as Trump revealed, there's a lot of straight-up bigots who became politically motivated in 2016).

[zzrrt]

If this had happened, wouldn’t people say the result was not legitimate because they didn’t win real primaries, the donors easily gamed the mini-primary, etc? Maybe they were screwed as soon as anything unusual happened, and/or some people will find any reason to say Dem insiders play favorites, any reason for Trump to keep “Sleepy Joe” as his opponent.

[kelipso]

The proportions matter and I think much fewer people would be saying the result was not legitimate if it was through some sort of campaign and primary process than an insider decision made through whatever backroom deals they did.