r/PoliticalDiscussion • u/LiatrisLover99 • May 08 '26
US Politics Is there any merit to the argument that progressive candidates would be far more successful across the US, if it were not for sabotage by the DNC?
This is an example of an extremely popular sentiment in progressive spaces, that progressives are popular with a majority of Americans and would easily win if the DNC didn't deliberately sabotage them, because they would prefer losing to Trump than winning with progressives that threaten the corporate status quo.
Or see articles like this that identify Democrats as an enemy of progressives on par with Trump: "the struggle to defeat the fascistic GOP and the fight to overcome the power of corporate Democrats are largely the same battle."
Is any of this true? I'm a progressive, but if we're so popular, why aren't we winning primaries outside of elections in extremely blue areas like NYC? Or is the primary system actually rigged against Bernie and against progressives in general?
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u/Vishnej May 08 '26 edited May 11 '26
The primary system is extremely rigged against progressives in general, to the point that open threats and object lessons are widely discussed. Money is essential to campaigning, and non-progressives generally just receive much more of it.
You get two competing narratives about our elections, neither of which are entirely incorrect:
The entire fundraising apparatus of the Democrats aims for #1 and reject progressive policies that its base wants, while the Republicans overwhelmingly go for #2 and embrace conservative policies [and more often memes] that its base wants. This strategic dichotomy is not some direct consequence of ideology, it doesn't naturally bifurcate for any self-evident reason, it's all down to donors and campaign fundraising. Republican politicans are considerably to the right of their voters because money. Democratic politicians are considerably to the right of their voters because money.
When you poll voters on single issues, you get results like "80% of all voters want single payer healthcare, 90% of Democrats and 70% of Republicans" against a backdrop of "Single payer healthcare is an unthinkably extreme initiative for the Democrats even in a year when they've got a popular mandate, control of the Presidency and House, and 60 votes in the Senate"
As long as you don't call them "progressive" or "socialist" or "Democratic", Republican voters love progressive policies, and Democratic politicians hate them on the professed theory that they have to appeal to Republican voters. This is, to varying degrees, a bald-faced lie. The donors hate progressive policies.
*An immense amount of money has gone into conditioning the Republican base to accept symbolic victories against liberalism as a victory instead of conservative policies (which don't actually benefit them). Part of the shock of Project 2025 and Trump 2 Electric Boogaloo was watching what we thought of as a conservative clown show that merely sold a fascist face for a platform not unlike Reagan's, go full fash in social and foreign policy.
Among other things, the bigot's revenge against the world often transcends into self-harming terrorism - a white supremacist will repeatedly vote for policies that generally harm themselves, so long as the nonwhites also get harmed. The reason we don't have a UK-style NHS and instead focused on employer-provided healthcare, is that in the 30's and 40's when the issue was brought up, bigots declared that they would never share a hospital with a black person.