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this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
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politics
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Like I said, I can excuse the ratfucking. Its the name of the game. But what I can't excuse is people taking a guy who has never won an election of any material substance seriously. We can't afford to run candidates who don't have a track record of winning federal elections. The number one qualification for a candidate needs to be their ability to win the election.
How may viable Democratic candidates exist that have a track record of winning Federal elections?
"Viable" is a loaded term, which is specifically why I default to an actually testable litmus: Have you won a Federal election? Demonstrating you can win an election is the "proof" of viability. Everything else is hand wringing.
So viable Democratic candidates: Any House or Senate Democrat, or any Democratic governor is viable. All of them are viable under my definition: Buttigieg is not.
I can't excuse ratfucking. The name of the game is literally democracy.
There's no predicting who can win what election anymore. There's no predictive value in knowing someone won such and such demographics on whatever type of ballot. I don't want Pete to run because I think he's paper thin on almost any meaningful issue. He'll say whatever he thinks will get him the most votes in the moment, and he'll abandon those principles the minute the winds change. He would be better than Trump, because he isn't a felonious child raping grifter, but that's not a reason to support the guy. That's a reason to find someone who is actually a leader, who will stand on their convictions, and fight for actual justice.
I 100% agree on not wanting to win, but I make the argument that the flimsiness of their political identity is their liability; and this is because I don't agree with you on your first point, because I do think that we can build up effective analyses that are fairly predictive of elections.
And that difference is critical, because what we're identifying, that Buttigeig is about as deep as a puddle in their political identity, the traditional political consultant class "wisdom" sees that as a feature, not a bug, because they can recast the candidate for whichever donors they plan on trotting them out to. To them, a lack of political depth to a candidate is a good thing. And I'm citing that specifically as a determining factor in both recent and future elections: People will not show up for people who's only reason for being in politics is the pursuit of power.