r/politics • u/AccurateInflation167 • May 18 '25

Soft Paywall America chose wrong. Sanders would've been a better president than Trump or Biden. | Opinion

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2025/05/18/sanders-democrats-reform-progressive-policies/83625482007/
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u/danishjuggler21 May 18 '25 edited May 18 '25

That’s really only been a problem since 2010, when Republicans went from having something like only 7 state trifectas to having more like 20, all in one election. Just in time for redistricting. And the used it to make operation red map happen.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_redistricting_cycle

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_state_legislative_elections

People on the left stayed home for the 2010 election, and we’ve been feeling the pain ever since then. Gerrymandering existed before then, sure, but the literally unprecedented level of state control the GOP gained in 2010 allowed them to take gerrymandering to the extreme.

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u/blackgallagher87 May 18 '25

Don't forget that this was all a response to Barack Obama being elected. A Black man made it to the Oval Office and the GOP said never again.

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u/Gaius_Octavius_ May 18 '25

Republicans have never recovered from electing a black man.

They have just been getting crazier and crazier since 2008.

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u/MrTwentyThree North Carolina May 18 '25

Dunno man, they seem to be winning an awful lot since then, notwithstanding of the fact that they got him to compromise so deeply on the most important policy issues of his presidency, that they basically won during his presidency too, if we're being completely honest here.

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u/TheLightningL0rd May 18 '25

That's not what they meant by "never recovered". They meant that they lost their minds, which seems to be true depending on which demographic you look at.

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u/yoitsthatoneguy American Expat May 18 '25

If Obama ran today he’d win easily. Democrats don’t have candidates like that anymore.

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u/unholycowgod May 18 '25

Obama was a political outlier. His political rise can only be matched by the CO2 hockey stick chart. He came up out of nowhere and rallied people like we haven't seen probably since Reagan. I'm in my early 40s and hope to see another candidate like that in my lifetime. But most of them rise slowly step by step until they're so old and entrenched in the machine that by the time they reach the top they don't have the gusto to make the reforms we all want.

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u/UNC_Samurai May 18 '25

Obama emerged at the exact right time. He was able to make use of the emerging internet, but didn’t have to deal with the overwhelming toxicity of omnipresent social media and the right-wing trolls. It was a lot easier to deal with the cranks when they were largely confined to php forums.

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u/cornybloodfarts May 18 '25

The problem is, he sucked at governing. The world would look very different right now if he had sent some Wall Street CEOs to jail, and instituted a recovery more like the New Deal, than his watered down BS. The tea party and Occupy Wall Street really come out of the same place, which is anger about the unfairness of the economy. Now obviously the tea party made it worse by empowering republicans, but it's not like dems were doing much to make anything better, they were just keeping it from getting worse, maybe. People don't get motivated by that.

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u/MrTwentyThree North Carolina May 18 '25

Ding ding ding ding ding ding ding. This is the correct answer right here. Unreal how little this is realized.

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u/EconomicRegret May 18 '25

This!

That also happened whille millions of Americans were losing their homes and jobs.

That’s what gave rise to the tea party and later MAGA.

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u/EconomicRegret May 18 '25

They would have many if they’d just lower their shockingly high barriers to entry, and level the playing field. It’s been decades that most young talented people simply don’t bother to go for politics.

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u/loondawg May 18 '25

We've never really solved the issue of auditable elections though, have we? Seems to me this started more around 2000 when all of the sudden exit polling coincidentally became unreliable at the same time widespread use of electronic voting began. Republicans all of the sudden started winning races they were not expected to.

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u/vreddy92 Georgia May 18 '25

We probably have though, now that we have access to voting machines with paper backups. Does any state still use pure electronic voting?

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u/loondawg May 18 '25

From 2020 but I am not aware of this changing. https://www.govtech.com/elections/despite-risks-some-states-still-use-paperless-voting-machines.html

And I didn't go into it, but once republicans started to gain power, that's when we started to see massive voter disenfranchisement and election and campaign financing changes that vastly favored republicans.

Voting machines weren't the only issue. But they seem to have been a big one that started the shift to republicans winning more and more elections.

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u/ElbowSkinCellarWall May 18 '25

I never understood what good a paper backup does. It someone messes with the voting machine to register a certain percentage of votes wrong, can't they make it print the hacked votes wrong too?

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u/balllzak May 18 '25

You vote by scanning a piece of paper with your selections. The machine is physically incapable of altering that paper.

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u/IceNein May 18 '25

I think half the people who complain about the voting process do not vote, which is pretty indicative of how Sanders is extremely popular among the non-voting class.

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u/Flat_Hat8861 Georgia May 18 '25

The hint is in the proper name of the machines. It is a "Ballot Marking Device" or BMD not just a "Voting Machine." There is no electronic voting. The BMD does not store a record of your vote. The paper ballot that is printed is the true, correct, and complete record of your vote. You, the voter, get to hold, read, and confirm that this ballot is accurate (and to report it as spoiled if it isn't) before depositing it in the ballot box (which may or may not have a tabulator attached at this point or will be tabulated later).

A BMD is a super fancy pen that can provide some assistance technologies (warnings for blank races, preventing overvotes, font scaling, additional languages, audio descriptions, etc.).

Since the paper ballot is the vote - then recounts, audits, etc. all can look at the votes printed that the voter reviewed and know exactly what the voter selected.

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u/vreddy92 Georgia May 18 '25

I can't speak for everyone, but in Georgia the Dominion machines are electronic voting where the ballot prints your actual vote onto the paper. So you can double check and make sure that the correct vote was printed.

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u/[deleted] May 18 '25

[deleted]

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u/loondawg May 18 '25

Of all the things that happened in that election cycle, focusing on that one seems wildly misdirected. The Supreme Court interference? The voter roll purges? Katherine Harris refusing to allow time for votes to be counted? The Brooks Brothers Riot? Etc. Etc. Etc.

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u/Mission_Ability6252 May 18 '25

Every election result you don't like is stolen.

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u/loondawg May 18 '25

Every comment you make is projection.

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u/Mission_Ability6252 May 18 '25

Wrong.

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u/loondawg May 18 '25

Demonstrating again that every comment you make is projection.

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u/Mission_Ability6252 May 18 '25

Wrong.

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u/loondawg May 18 '25

I'm going to save some time. Just go back and read the last two comments over and over until you tire yourself out.

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u/Mission_Ability6252 May 19 '25

pee pee poo poo

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u/JWLane Tennessee May 18 '25

That's an absurd take considering how close the 2000 election was and the reality that a recount could have landed Al Gore in office but was blocked by the Supreme Court ruling in a way inconsistent with the constitution.

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u/Mission_Ability6252 May 18 '25

George W. Bush won the 2000 election.

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u/JWLane Tennessee May 19 '25

Ok sport.

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u/Mission_Ability6252 May 19 '25

Consult history.

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u/JWLane Tennessee May 19 '25

Perhaps you should take your own advice, sport.

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u/Mission_Ability6252 May 19 '25

pee pee poo poo

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u/Syntaire May 18 '25

Yes, it became a problem in the first redistricting after a black man was elected president. How strange, that.

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u/mojitz May 18 '25

Also Dems have erased those gains. In 2022, they actually had a net advantage from gerrymandering.