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Comment by wunderland | Hacker News Reader

The Sanders campaign hedged against such an error occurring and had their own internal app to track caucus numbers: https://theintercept.com/2020/02/04/sanders-campaign-release...

No surprise, it shows Bernie Sanders winning solidly. This whole situation reeks of the DNC trying to stunt his momentum.

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One would think the person with the most votes is their best hope. But apparently the leadership thinks they know better than data.

The DNC leadership is controlled by large donors who have billions of reasons to oppose a candidate like Sanders.

Having the most votes in the party caucuses is definitely not equivalent to having the best chance to win the election, where you have to appeal to a different set of voters.

The major deficiency of the two-party system is that the parties have to resort to this kind of second-guessing the "average voter" instead of just presenting all the options and letting the voters choose for themselves.

In most democracies that don’t suffer from the two-party system, there is as far as I’m aware nothing like the American primary/caucus system. The parties just decide who their candidates are with no input from anyone but dues-paying party members.

The last UK leadership election for the Labour Party [0] had a turnout of 500k+, or roughly 1% of the population. I won't bore you with the details of whether it's correct to think of all 500k as "dues-paying members".

That's a lot less than the 30 million or 10% of population [1] who voted in the last Democratic primaries in 2016, but not "nothing like" it. And we could pick other years the turnout was much lower, e.g. 7 million [2] in 2012 where Obama did not have meaningful opposition).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Labour_Party_leadership_e...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_Party_presiden...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Democratic_Party_presiden...

UK is not a good counterexample here. It also uses the first-past the post voting system, which trends towards two parties since any third party becomes a spoiler.

With a different voting system there would be a wider range of smaller parties, so you don't need to wrest control of a major party to be represented.

It seems there are people in the Democratic establishment that would rather have 4 more years of Trump than elect a non-establishment Democrat they can't control. At least with Trump they can spend 4 years pointing to him and saying what a disaster he is to better position themselves for next election.

Here's an Op-Ed piece that makes that argument: https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/01/15/it-clear-estab...

And I would even argue that it's not always best to go with the person who gets the most votes amongst the Democrats. Most Democrats and Republicans will vote for their party in the election, no matter who the nominee is.

So I would think the best person to win the election would be a candidate that is able to get the most support from across the aisle, from Independents and Republicans.

This election, it seems like the top candidates for that are Yang, Biden, or Tulsi, based on what few articles I can find on the matter.

https://www.businessinsider.com/right-leaning-voters-support...

https://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/476265-poll-gop-voters-dra...

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/11/tulsi-gabbards-suppo...

But it doesn't seem like the DNC cares about that as much as long as one of the establishment candidates wins the nomination (Biden, Buttigieg, Warren, Kloubuchar).

Washington's warning rings true in this case. The really odd side-effect, though maybe not unpredictable, is the amount of people who voice approach along the lines of 'burn it all down, start from scratch'. Sentiment like that must be scary to the existing powers. That said, I have no idea how common that is.

The weirdest thing about it is that Trump seems very much result of this trend.

edit: changed verb is to seems

>> Most Democrats and Republicans will vote for their party in the election, no matter who the nominee is.

>> So I would think the best person to win the election would be a candidate that is able to get the most support from across the aisle, from Independents and Republicans.

Well that means picking a candidate specifically for the swing votes, which may be very different than what party members want. In other words someone that almost nobody likes. But hey, they can win. Because people will vote their party regardless.

It’s no surprise that internal polling numbers, when reported, favour the candidate that collected the numbers.

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