First it was the midterm elections. Then some of the early primaries. The reason we lost so many midterms was “voter turnout”. Then as Clinton was winning Southern States early in the primary season the observation was made again.
So here we are after another Democratic primary has ended with thousands having been denied a chance to vote. It doesn’t add up does it? Somehow you can’t get people to come out to vote if you make it clear that they can only vote when it suits your needs.
One of the reasons Bernie Sanders decided to run was that so many Americans were sitting out our elections. He vowed that he would get that fixed. By any criterion I can imagine he has been immensely successful. Oh wait! Not those voters.
This primary season has brought into clarity a severe difference in attitudes about democracy within the Democratic Party. Bernie Sanders has shown the world where the fallacies in our system are. Clearly the Republicans are responsible for so much of it. But that is not all. A sizable faction of the Democratic Party either knowingly or unknowingly is also responsible for the failures in democracy that allow our electoral system to serve the oligarchy.
What has been happening during these primaries can be spun off as incompetence and poor management. That seems a bit glib. Too much of the same patterns and too much one sidedness seems involved. We will leave it to the lawsuits and investigations to determine if what appears to be true is actually true.
Meanwhile we have a big election in November. It is not clear to me how this will all unfold. Too many people out there have been hurt by the system once again. Yet the democratic Party leaders seem confident that the damage can be overcome. They seem to base this belief on the fact that people behave differently during Presidential elections than they do during off year elections. How sound is that idea this time?
Rather than having had made an effort to get people fired up to support the Democratic candidate they have put all their eggs in one basket and it shows all too clearly. his is not a trivial problem nor does it have an easy answer. I see no plan to deal with it. The fervor to get Clinton the nomination seems to be at all cost. Will that cost be too great? We can wait and see. We could wake up and deal with the problem now while there is still time. Otherwise the turnout issue may be very real and very damaging.