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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

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She wants to win, and winning in this scenario does not involve pandering to the more extreme elements of the party. You need to win to actually achieve anything.

The reality is that the more extreme elements of her party are not actually that popular.

In other words she's not really powerful, because she's ultimately beholden to the electorate/political machine and has little leeway to affect change in anything she believes in.

...yes? You have to win to do anything at all. Would you prefer she were ideologically pure and irrelevant?

To be fair it never felt like these were deeply held convictions during Harris's first primary campaign.

And this is how we get trump as president.

"Oh, Hillary is not a PERFECT candidate, I'm going to punish the Democratic party because of it and vote for Trump".

Or, one of my favorites,

"Those jerks, they totally passed on Berny! I'm going to vote for Trump!"

Idiots that vote against their (and everyone else's) own interests just because they can't have THE PERFECT candidate is why things are such a mess right now. Always letting PERFECT get in the way of BETTER.

Not in US, but my reasoning in similar situation is following. If I keep voting for a party that is getting worse and worse for a long time, that will enable people at the top to keep doing the same.

Why would I vote against my interest looking long term? Why should I enable people I don’t like?

>And this is how we get trump as president.

Not sure how this got derailed into a "trump vs harris" discussion. The comment I was replying to was arguing about the "power" of the presidency/vice-presidency. That's entirely orthogonal to whether you think harris is a good candidate or not. Indeed, you could even argue harris is a good candidate for not being powerful, because she's doesn't narcissistic and will defer to staffers/experts rather than sticking to her agenda to the bitter end.

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