AFAIK parties in America straight up can’t expel their members or otherwise control their membership. It sounds dumb but it’s the only way to make a two-party system even vaguely democratic.
Parties might not be able to purge voters from their membership, but at the very least, the Democratic Caucus can expel members by a 2/3 vote. Straight from their site, rule 1 on page 6 of the pdf they have embedded there. On the face of it, she should no longer be considered a member in good standing, and should be expelled from the Democratic Caucus as a result.
In order to maintain membership in good standing, Members shall not participate in campaign
activities for any candidate in a partisan federal election who is not a Member of the Democratic
Party.
I kind of figured there had to be a way for parties to prevent just anyone from running under their party, or the Republicans would have ran deliberately terrible candidates as Democrats in races to try and rig things long ago, by this stage.
To your second point: The centrists are already as terrible as they can realistically be and still win primaries (and they usually lose them anyway when progressives get serious), so that niche is already filled. There’s no point in running terrible candidates when they’re either going to lose their primaries or be Chuck Schumer clones.
Eh, I wouldn’t put it past them to run someone and keep handlers on them at all times to win the primary, and then let them loose on their own during the general election, if such a thing were feasible. The one thing I have confidence in the GOP to do, besides line their pockets, is any dirty trick they think they can get away with, no matter how crazy a scheme is involved, if it’ll let them get ahead and cement their own power. Besides, there was a point where those centrists certainly did play better with the general population than anyone even accused of being a socialist not all that long ago, and I don’t think the GOP of the time had much in the way of moral scruples back then, either.
That’s theoretically possible, but there’s a limit to how well people can repeatedly lie about their core beliefs. Also it’s not as if progressives aren’t watching out for stuff like that; most potential plants will have some kind of history that can be inspected to ascertain their intentions, and large-scale conspiracies have a tendency to leak. It’s not impossible (see: Fetterman), but the noteworthiness of Fetterman should tell you how hard it is to pull this kind of thing off, and even Fetterman had people warning about him during his campaign, not to mention he literally had a stroke. So basically the GOP doesn’t do this sort of thing more/at all because it’s really hard to pull off and would have diminishing returns as people wisen up (again the progressive attitude post-Fetterman is informative). They probably have better (meaning worse) things to be doing.
I’m kinda scratching my head over his statement but the party system in the US is weird. States have their own parties.
It IS entirely possible she never registered with the Michigan Party, and was backed by the DNC exclusively. The DNC has way more money and can get candidates to Primary quite easily.
AFAIK parties in America straight up can’t expel their members or otherwise control their membership. It sounds dumb but it’s the only way to make a two-party system even vaguely democratic.
Parties might not be able to purge voters from their membership, but at the very least, the Democratic Caucus can expel members by a 2/3 vote. Straight from their site, rule 1 on page 6 of the pdf they have embedded there. On the face of it, she should no longer be considered a member in good standing, and should be expelled from the Democratic Caucus as a result.
I kind of figured there had to be a way for parties to prevent just anyone from running under their party, or the Republicans would have ran deliberately terrible candidates as Democrats in races to try and rig things long ago, by this stage.
To your second point: The centrists are already as terrible as they can realistically be and still win primaries (and they usually lose them anyway when progressives get serious), so that niche is already filled. There’s no point in running terrible candidates when they’re either going to lose their primaries or be Chuck Schumer clones.
Eh, I wouldn’t put it past them to run someone and keep handlers on them at all times to win the primary, and then let them loose on their own during the general election, if such a thing were feasible. The one thing I have confidence in the GOP to do, besides line their pockets, is any dirty trick they think they can get away with, no matter how crazy a scheme is involved, if it’ll let them get ahead and cement their own power. Besides, there was a point where those centrists certainly did play better with the general population than anyone even accused of being a socialist not all that long ago, and I don’t think the GOP of the time had much in the way of moral scruples back then, either.
That’s theoretically possible, but there’s a limit to how well people can repeatedly lie about their core beliefs. Also it’s not as if progressives aren’t watching out for stuff like that; most potential plants will have some kind of history that can be inspected to ascertain their intentions, and large-scale conspiracies have a tendency to leak. It’s not impossible (see: Fetterman), but the noteworthiness of Fetterman should tell you how hard it is to pull this kind of thing off, and even Fetterman had people warning about him during his campaign, not to mention he literally had a stroke. So basically the GOP doesn’t do this sort of thing more/at all because it’s really hard to pull off and would have diminishing returns as people wisen up (again the progressive attitude post-Fetterman is informative). They probably have better (meaning worse) things to be doing.
I’m kinda scratching my head over his statement but the party system in the US is weird. States have their own parties.
It IS entirely possible she never registered with the Michigan Party, and was backed by the DNC exclusively. The DNC has way more money and can get candidates to Primary quite easily.