A young relative’s take post-Super Tuesday
This just all feels so pointless. Why have we had a primary at this point. The DNC wanted Biden, they got Biden. Politics is a rigged game and nothing the common people want or need or care about matters at all. How much time and money was wasted in what feels like a preordained coronation of a senile and deeply flawed bowl of oatmeal. It’s like they just let us all play a game like we are children for a year and now The Party has spoken and we can go back to being irrelevant serfs who provide background noise to their real lives in Washington
Ambiance 
Heidi Menocal said,
March 4, 2020 at 11:02 am
I feel a bit the same way. MD hasn’t voted yet. By the time we vote, it is all decided.
wj said,
March 4, 2020 at 12:43 pm
Almost everybody lives in some kind of information bubble. (That is, it’s not just Fox News viewers. Although their case may be more exteeme than others . . . outside college students.) Which makes it easy to assume that, since everybody you know holds an opinion, therefore most people nationwide must hold that opinion, too.
Then, when events reveal that they don’t, it’s not hard to see it as some kind of conspiracy. Could be “the establishment” or “coastal elites” or “the Masons” or “the Jews” or “Catholics” or any other convenient whipping boy — including, as in this case, the DNC. The pattern just keeps repeating.
In this case, your young relative might take a look at how many votes Sanders (who I’m guessing was his preferred candidate) got in each primary, vs how many Biden plus Buttigieg plus Klobuchar got. Surprise! Even when he “won”, Sanders barely managed 1/3 of the votes in most cases. Even adding in Warren’s votes, that part of the party just wasn’t as popular as the “moderates”.
At most, if he really has to have someone to blame, he can blame Warren for not dropping out the way Buttigieg and Klobuchar did. But she’s quite a ways from “the DNC”.
Polly said,
March 4, 2020 at 1:13 pm
I agree — Sanders might not be as popular as it seems. The word “socialism” has been misused in confusing ways, and people aren’t really sure exactly what he stands for.
amba12 said,
March 4, 2020 at 7:37 pm
The conspiracy theory is that the DNC somehow coopted Warren to hurt Sanders, because she isn’t pure and has already “betrayed” him. But even if she had dropped out, a lot of her supporters would not have gone to him, given especially how nasty some of his followers were to her.
I think that other than voter suppression and deterrence (which is very real—people in black and student neighborhoods in Texas waited up to 6 hours to vote, and hundreds of polling places have been closed there since the Supremes gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013), the outcome was predetermined more by the official mainstream narrative (both deliberately shaped and conventional “wisdom”) than by outright rigging. But Sanders’s and his followers’ conduct also played a role. With their absolutism and nastiness they remind people of Trump and Trumpers. They intimidate the timid and repel the gracious.