General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Progressives storm Democratic primaries [View all]Sophia4
(3,515 posts)What I meant is that the incumbent Democrats have a responsibility for making sure the Party is open to new candidates, new ideas -- especially in some case, YOUNGER candidates and ideas.
If you are too old and tired to compete in a primary, then you are too old and tired to serve and you should encourage younger, more energetic people to run for office.
Those who get elected represent the Party. If they are closed off, self-satisfied and unwilling to compete with challengers in primaries, they create an image of closed off, self-satisfied and unwilling to compete -- for all Democrats in all districts across the nation.
Note what happened in Alabama. Doug Jones ran. His chances were dismal. He brought the right energy to the race. He won.
We can do that everywhere -- run unlikely candidates, create excitement in our primaries and then wait and see. Doug Jones happened to run against a candidate, Roy Moore, whose past came back to bite him. You never know. Sure there is a lot of money involved, but lively primaries help to create an image for a party that it has some life in it.
Always supporting the incumbent or even generally supporting incumbents can be good, but discouraging primary challengers makes a party look to staid, philosophically conservative in a strange way (in spite of stances on the issues) and boring. I repeat -- boring.
We need to be the Party of excitement, of new answers to the new challenges.
We aren't that exciting Party that meets new challenges with new ideas when we have this concept that incumbents should not be primaried.
I am not planning to primary anyone, but I think primaries and frequent elections serve the purpose of revitalizing the Party, and I am for them.
Incumbents may have won their election if you look at the issue narrowly. But the incumbents in our Party are also responsible for seeing to it that their Party wins the majority of seats in elections around them. That's not happening. And the incumbents who say "I've got mine." That is, those who say "but I won my seat. Ha. Ha." are precisely the problem in the Democratic Party. The incumbents pretty much run the Party and represent it, and it's their failure if their fellow Democrats don't get elected based on the record of the incumbents. People vote in part for the Party and if those representing the Party in office are not doing it well, people don't vote for that Party.