Rich Conway
Footballguy
This is intended to be a hypothetical post as an interesting thought exercise. To be clear, I don't expect any of this to happen. I do want to set a few ground rules for the hypothetical discussion...
* For sake of hypothetical argument, let's assume Joe Biden steps down in the near future (i.e. well before the convention). Let's not argue "that will never happen!" or "he shouldn't step down!" or "but Trump!"
* Let's assume it's way too late (and dangerous due to COVID-19) to hold primary elections again in all the states that already did, even assuming it were legal to do so
* For sake of argument, I'd like to approach this from the point of view of a Democrat that views the overarching goal as "ensure that the D nominee wins the general election". That is, arguments like "Bernie's approach is socialism" aren't really relevant. Arguments like "Democrats suck, Trump is much better" aren't relevant, since they aren't from the D point of view. Arguments like "Bernie can't win the general election because he's too far to the left" would be valid, although it would be nice to see some links or facts to back up something like that.
* Let's approach it from the angle of "using the above assumptions, what can/should the DNC do", both legally and strategically?
I suspect the approach would not be to simply award the nomination to Sanders because he has the second-most delegates to date.
I also suspect that awarding the nomination to anyone other than Sanders would cause many of his supporters to have a conniption due to perceived (and possibly very real) DNC bias against Sanders. Would that cause many of those supporters who might have reluctantly showed up and voted Biden to instead stay home? Would awarding the nomination to Warren (as opposed to, say, Klobuchar or Buttigieg) mitigate that possibility?
So, if you had final say, and the sole goal is "winning the Nov general", who would you nominate? Sanders? Warren? Klobuchar? Buttigieg? Other?
* For sake of hypothetical argument, let's assume Joe Biden steps down in the near future (i.e. well before the convention). Let's not argue "that will never happen!" or "he shouldn't step down!" or "but Trump!"
* Let's assume it's way too late (and dangerous due to COVID-19) to hold primary elections again in all the states that already did, even assuming it were legal to do so
* For sake of argument, I'd like to approach this from the point of view of a Democrat that views the overarching goal as "ensure that the D nominee wins the general election". That is, arguments like "Bernie's approach is socialism" aren't really relevant. Arguments like "Democrats suck, Trump is much better" aren't relevant, since they aren't from the D point of view. Arguments like "Bernie can't win the general election because he's too far to the left" would be valid, although it would be nice to see some links or facts to back up something like that.
* Let's approach it from the angle of "using the above assumptions, what can/should the DNC do", both legally and strategically?
I suspect the approach would not be to simply award the nomination to Sanders because he has the second-most delegates to date.
I also suspect that awarding the nomination to anyone other than Sanders would cause many of his supporters to have a conniption due to perceived (and possibly very real) DNC bias against Sanders. Would that cause many of those supporters who might have reluctantly showed up and voted Biden to instead stay home? Would awarding the nomination to Warren (as opposed to, say, Klobuchar or Buttigieg) mitigate that possibility?
So, if you had final say, and the sole goal is "winning the Nov general", who would you nominate? Sanders? Warren? Klobuchar? Buttigieg? Other?