2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Democrats Get Serious About Voting Rights [View all]wildeyed
(11,243 posts)Again, the DNC is not some giant living in the mountains. It is mostly made up of local and state level volunteers. Just people like you and me. And in my experience, it can be a massive bureaucratic clusterfuck. It DOES need fixing, but how to do that is a complicated problem. IMO, they dropped Dean's system, not because it wasn't a good idea in THEORY, but because, in PRACTICE, it was unworkable. So many state and local parties are FUBAR. It is hard to get anything done. And it takes ages to get consensus and for ideas to percolate up through the system. 50 states is a very good idea, but there is not enough infrastructure, money or volunteers to execute at this time.
I have been paying close attention to these issues for more than a decade. You know what most "progressives" said to me when I tried to warn them about voter ID ten years ago? "Who cares, doesn't everyone have ID?" Groups that worked to mobilize young, urban, immigrant and/or black voters knew what voter ID meant from the start. It was white, middle-class progressives who didn't get it. They do now that it hurt a primary candidate that many preferred and had an impact on their lives. The media is also to blame. They bought the GOP line about how voter ID would protect the system from fraud, even though there was zero evidence of widespread fraud and it would clearly disenfranchise a TON of voters.
Now that we see some consequences and the white middle-class portion of our base is educated on the issue, we see some change. But this is NOT the fault of "party" Dems. It is the fault of Democrats who didn't pay attention and a broken media. None of it was nefarious or corrupt. Shit happens. We try to fix it and move on. If we kick GOP ass this November, we have a much more open road on voting rights issues. Imma work on doing that, not berating my own side for understandable mistakes made in the past.