Bottom line problem: No black or brown person will be on any primary ballot

[Midnightwalk]

99. Excellent post

Especially liked this

But the systems, often unintentionally, perpetuate exclusion while on the surface appearing to be innocuous.

Insights into boring innocuous systems is a beautiful thing even when the insight is about an ugly problem.

I don’t like the year long run up to primary elections. It’s tempting to think that the time is needed to raise cash for the general election but has anyone built up a war chest?

One alternative is to have 20 candidates still in the race for the first primaries. That would definitely broaden the field, keep more excitement, and also alleviate some of the negative stuff flying back and forth as the front runners scramble for the nomination.

But would 20 candidates on the ballot be better than a coin toss?

It’s not just that no one has voted. Google says that 6, 9, and 14 million people watched the debates. Double those numbers to cover people who preferred to read and it’s still a fraction of voters.

Numbers like 6 million viewers make me think it is the political junkies who are paying attention. They’ll stay interested no matter the format.

My most important quality in a candidate was being a great speaker and sales person. Policy differences don’t matter if we don’t win the presidency and the senate and even then we only get what can pass congress.

I’d rather see smaller groups of candidates discussing Democratic policy broadly with semi hostile groups of swing state voters. Harder to get a national audience but the 6 million viewers would likely watch youtube. We might also get more sound bites on the news. I don’t care who wins in a democratic venue. I want to know who wins more broadly.

Do we really still need primary elections ? Couldn’t the DNC set up secure voting for registered Democrats and couldn’t we have ranked voting multiple times throughout? At least use that for the culling rather than polling. We could still do the old style primary votes after.

Sorry for rambling and much of it wasn’t on your point, but those are some of the edges I see in the system.