The realist's lament.

[Sloumeau]

1. Nothing helps me more to convince people of political things than knowing political history.

There are four sets of Democratic Party presidential primaries that every Democratic Moderate should be familiar with during this primary. They are as follows:

[link:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries|]

[link:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries|]

[link:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_United_States_presidential_election|]

[link:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries|]


The 2016 Primaries will help you to understand where we can expect a candidate like Bernie Sanders to be stronger and weaker, and it will help you to understand where you can expect a candidate like Joe Biden to be stronger and weaker. You would use Bernie Sanders as the model for Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton as the model for Joe Biden. Things will not be exactly the same. Bernie has a competitor for the leftmost political lane in the form of Elizabeth Warren, and Biden has a ton of competitors for the Central Moderate lane. Yet, the 2016 Democratic primaries will help you to understand how things will should go this year.

The 1992 Democratic primaries will show you that a candidate like Joe Biden does not have to win either Iowa or New Hampshire in order to win the nomination. Bill Clinton won neither Iowa or New Hampshire, but he won the nomination because he was strong in the South and strong with African Americans--Just like Joe Biden is.

The 1968 and 1972 primaries in some way mirror the 2016 and 2020 primaries. In 1968, the Democrats lost an extremely close General Election, just like in 2016. Then the Democratic Party, under the guidance of George McGovern, made changes to how the primaries worked, just as Sanders supporters pushed and got changes for the Democratic Primary system after the 2016 election. In 1972, the young more liberal Democrats voted for McGovern. The Moderates tended to vote for Humphrey. The Conservative Southern Racists voted for Wallace. McGovern only got about 25% of the vote, but he became the nominee. He was the choice of the youngest voters and the most liberal voters. In this primary, Bernie Sanders is the choice of the youngest and leftmost voters. You can look up the 1972 Presidential Election at the link below to see what happened the last time that the youngest and most liberal voters picked the nominee:

[link:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_United_States_presidential_election|]