No, the Democratic Party isnt divided or in disarray

[Jim Lane]

45. Sorry, but if you keep using the passive voice I won't fully understand you

You now write "maybe something should be CHANGED" without specifying the agent who would do it.

Let's start with the DNC. My point is that the DNC can't make rules about ballot access. Its only option would be the one I called "dictatorial" in #34: a refusal to seat duly elected delegates whose opinions displeased the party oligarchs. I'm confident that the DNC is too smart to shoot itself in the foot by incurring the enormous ill will that such a decree would generate.

A change in the rules about ballot access would have to be made by 50 separate state legislatures plus the governing bodies of a handful of other jurisdictions (District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, etc.) that choose convention delegates. (Maybe it would be fewer than 50 if, in some states, there is no primary, and the caucus is completely under party control. It would still be a lot.) Furthermore, given that several states (including Vermont) don't even have partisan registration, any such change to confine ballot access to Democrats would have to define the term in a way that didn't assume partisan registration.

If that's the program that you think should perhaps be implemented, well, it obviously won't happen.

That's a good thing, IMO, because the Democratic nominee in 2020 would be hurt by such a change. In 2016, more than 13 million people voted for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries and caucuses. Most of them then voted for the Democratic nominee in the general election. If you tell them that they can't vote for whom they want to in the primary, that would obviously cause some of them to be alienated enough to vote third party or stay home in November.