General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: JPR Nutjobs interpret CA moving up their primary as an attack on Sanders chances in 2020 [View all]Jim Lane
(11,175 posts)First, it would mean that the Democratic Party could never nominate anyone from Vermont (paging Dr. Dean!) or from any of the other states that don't have partisan voter registration.
Second, it would mean excluding some of the very people we want to win over. An obvious example is Lincoln Chafee. He's an exemplar of the "Rockefeller Republican" type that used to be prominent, especially in the Northeast. He and his father before him both served in the Senate as Republicans. The younger Chafee, without changing his political views much (as a Republican, he voted against the Iraq War Resolution), found that the rightward lurch of the Republican Party had left him far removed from its mainstream. He became an independent and then a Democrat.
That's what we want. Along with registering new voters and fighting voter suppression and all the other things we should do, one fruitful avenue is to win over the longtime Republicans who are no longer welcome in today's GOP. But Chafee didn't register as a Democrat until May 30, 2013 (see https://web.archive.org/web/20130609054220/http://wpri.com/dpp/news/local_news/mcgowan/warwick-ri-gov-lincoln-chafee-officially-becomes-democrat). By your proposed rule, the party would have told him, "We're glad to have your support but you're a second-class member who can't run for President this year." That's counterproductive.
Third, in the current political situation, the adoption of such a rule would obviously be (and, what really counts, would be widely perceived to be) an anti-Sanders maneuver. Is this your recipe for success in 2020 -- that the party do everything it can to piss off the 13 million people who voted for Bernie in the Democratic primaries? Most of us, following Bernie's lead, went on to vote for Hillary Clinton in the general election. I don't know whether Bernie will run in 2020, but if he does, and if the DNC were to adopt your idea, then he'd have no alternative but to run as an independent or third-party candidate. That's precisely what we don't want. It would virtually guarantee a Republican victory. Even if Bernie decided not to run, millions of his supporters would take note that the party machinery was pushing them away. That's not a great recruitment strategy.
Finally, your proposal is profoundly undemocratic. The voters are perfectly capable of noting a candidate's political history and deciding how much weight to give it. (In the first debate, IIRC, the moderator asked Chafee about this very point.) You personally believe that no one should be nominated who doesn't meet a particular set of criteria? Fine, vote that way, advocate that way, engage with the people who disagree with you, and let the voters decide. Don't try to force your views on the electorate by resorting to the DNC, whose members are not popularly elected but are chosen by people who are chosen by people who are chosen in obscure party contests that garner very little participation.
As an aside, I'm against the "natural born citizen" requirement in the Constitution. Jennifer Granholm ought to be eligible to run. If someone thinks she shouldn't be President because she was born in Canada and didn't live in the U.S. until she was two years old, that's another example of an argument that can be made to the voters. Of course, there's no immediate prospect of amending the Constitution in that regard, but the DNC shouldn't emulate the mistake of imposing its own views.