That would work if all candidates are interchangeable if they assert the same plank. In practice, however, candidates X and Y may both have identical planks but wildly different levels of efficacy. People aren't machines.
My point was more that since they’re from the same party, these things can get smoothed over. The losing candidate will be far less likely to cry foul. The winner might appoint the loser to their team, etc.
You're making an unsupported inference here. Neither I, nor anybody else in this discussion that I see, has made any (serious) suggestion that the article needed to mention anybody else. Not even Gary Johnson or Jill Stein, much less Hedges, etc.
What the author should have done however, is write an accurate statement by simply saying "both major party candidates for President..." instead of "both candidates for President..."
The party primaries are more or less independent from "real" elections. This is how the parties like it— the DNC argued in a lawsuit that they don't have any obligation to make the process fair.
> How so? If you're referring to the open primary system, that doesn't mean there are no primary challengers. In a sense, it means everyone but the incumbent is a primary challenger
It means "primary challenge" (which refers to an intra-party run in a partisan primary with a segregated pool of cnadidates) is a meaningless distinction when running against someone, since any time you run for an office, it means running in the general, non-partisan pool of candidates in the "primary" election.
The thing being suggested here is that the campaign of the incumbent is reading all the communications of the campaign of the challenger. I don't think anything of the sort actually happens or is really that easy to (completely secretly!) make happen, but that's the proposed scenario.
The point is that if voters would otherwise support someone, but they can't run because an inner circle of political elites won't let them, then those people are an obstruction to democracy
I think we agree. I'm just pointing out that this is not a problem with this specific decision by the Democratic party, but an inherent problem with any system that allows a small number of powerful political parties to act as the gatekeepers deciding who can appear on the ballot. This is the system we have, and it is an impediment to democracy.
Which the lawsuit we are talking about explicitly alleges is not the case.
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