Balloon Juice – Elections These Days are Weird – Proxy Fights or Actually About the Candidates?

Seems like tonight’s primaries are a big Joe Biden deal.

We’re used to thinking of primaries at 2-dimensional – a race between candidates to see who gets the nomination.

Not this year!

Proxy fights or about the candidates themselves?

Multi-dimensional duking it out on display tonight

In one corner of the ring we have individual andidates competing against one another.   Normal year.

In another corner, we have moderates vs. progressives.  Or call it the establishment vs. the ones who want to turn over the table.  Progressive seems to have lost its meaning now that it has been coopted by a specific subgroup that is trying to take that word for themselves.  To call it DSA is not entirely correct, either.  But you guys know who I mean, so let’s not get caught up on what the label should be.  We can always have that fight another day!  🙂

In yet another corner, we have gerrymandering.  Will gerrymandering win tonight?  Personally, I have no idea, but my hope is that gerrymandering gets a great big kick in the nuts.

And in the final corner, we have outside spending – big money from billionaires and groups like AIPAC.

Nope, that’s not the final corner,   I think the final corner is that we don’t even know what the voters are prioritizing with their choices, so how do we interpret the results?

Voting Strategies – Interpreting Democratic Primary results tonight

Thinking strictly in terms of which candidates win, I’m not sure how we can draw any clear conclusions about the results tonight.

 Let’s say I am voting for the Senate Candidates in Michigan.

• Do I actually like her / him as a candidate?
• Do I think she / he would make a good senator?
• Am I voting for the candidate i WANT, or the candidate that I think can win in November?
• Am I voting reflexively because I hate AIPAC?
• Am I voting reflexively because I hate Schumer?
• Am I voting for the future of the Democratic Party – establishment vs people who want big changes?
• Is it backlash because of Maine?
• Or is my vote part of the proxy war for something else?

I don’t see what conclusions we can draw about the candidates or their campaigns when there are so many dimensions to all of this.

But we will know who wins the nominations and who will represent Dems in November.

No matter how it comes out in the 5 Democratic primaries tonight, we have one job.

Our job is to do everything we can so the Democratic candidates win in November.  That’s what I believe, anyway.  We are all grown-ups and most of us have probably had to work on a stupid project at work at some point or another, or watched the results of bad decisions playing out at home or at work, or watch a bad or inexperienced boss make a bad decision – when if they had only just fucking asked you for input, they would have made a better choice!

In real life we suck it up, we do what we have to do, and move on emotionally, right?  (Though perhaps only after some serious venting!)

I’ll close with a question.  How come most of us are able to do that for most things, but some of that subset just can’t bring themselves to do that when it comes to politics?  Is it because there’s so much more at stake?  Or less?