How many people got a chance to vote for Bernie Sanders in 2020? As I recall the Democratic primaries were ... "abbreviated" to put it politely. I've seen the phrase "Obama's Night of Long Knives" used to describe that show.
If you have real, cogent criticisms of the Democratic primary, post them.
Here's what I saw: the primary played out fair and square, just as it's designed to do, and Bernie lost. Fair and square.
NBC called it before California, too. Because it was over. That's even assuming Hillary won ZERO delegates in California, which of course was not the case, and could not possibly have ended up being the case. It was a very conservative and well-justified call.
Please check your facts before posting misinformation.
The ACRONYM fiasco alone is enough to discredit the entire institution, but apparently news moves too fast for real public discourse about that.
But I think it's a far more damning image to the party that Tulsi Gabbard qualified for the debates under the rules at the time, and then was excluded because they changed the rules. You can't play the race or gender card every time your person isn't winning, and then go out of your way to very specifically exclude the only candidate left who isn't white and isn't male. You can't really make a principled argument against the way the electoral college currently works by ignoring non-mainland delegates. You can't claim every vote should count. You can't claim the two party system is the reason you can't incorporate new, non-adversarial ideas.
There's way too much to say in one comment, but just to summarize:
The "establishment" organized a quite effective takedown just prior to Super Tuesday. It was in retrospect a classic rug-pull: flood the field with candidates who provide each segment of identitarians a race-horse they can get behind; dilute the rhetoric and box out the candidates labelled "extreme" while simultaneously ripping off and diluting their core policies; pull all candidates except one, have all the other candidates endorse them, and bet (correctly) on the assumption that people don't have the time or inclination to look at all beyond the news headlines to inform their vote.
I am happy to dive much deeper into this if you are interested. There are many angles to investigate, but I would say the mainstream news media outlets were the most crucial factor, being used as effective tools of consent-manufacturing in many of the ways Chomsky describes.
It doesn't matter. A large percentage of Democrats describe themselves as conservative. Many of those people are minorities.
Sanders' popularity was an illusion due to the bizarre ordering of Democratic primary states. The voters in the early states are much whiter, more educated, and politically active than most of the later states. That means a candidate like Sanders (who is disproportionately popular with white, educated people) looked a lot more viable than he was.
I'm not saying I think Sanders would have lost to Trump. I think Sanders was actually more viable as a general election candidate than as a Democratic primary candidate for various reasons (one of them being that a small-but-significant group of anti-establishment voters were willing to vote for Trump or Sanders, but no one else).
The establishment candidates aside from Biden did drop out to clear the lane, but that only created the same head-to-head matchup that Sanders had with Hillary Clinton in 2016. Which was probably motivated by seeing what happened to establishment Republicans in the 2016 primaries.