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As a European, I will never understand how, having primary elections, this hasn't happened decades ago.
Education.
Corrupt politicians siphon money away from public education to create an manipulatable class to consume their propaganda.
They own all of the means of communication, so they make sure everyone is consuming, by and large, the same shit.
They hedge the bet that enough people are dumb enough to keep listening to them.
Because the wealthy used their capital to seize the means of democracy. The same thing is happening across every liberal "democracy", with varying degrees of success.
There is lots of money in politics here in capitalism land, and unfortunately propaganda works. It very much works :(
It works so fucking much.
It's because most Primaries are carefully controlled by the party leaders. Yes, there are requirements that are open and technically anyone with the correct paperwork/signatures/whatever else can run. But the people who control the two major parties locally have a lot of influence, and can make the job easier for theor preferred candidates.
Combine this with a dynamic where most general elections are already decided for one party or another, and this means the general election is basically a formality. In Congressional elections, you have gerrymandering that ensures that districts are drawn to drive certain results. But even in these Mayoral elections, you have the same problem because Republicans have abandoned the cities, and most cities here lean Democratic.
You might ask about third parties, but our FPTP system screws them over, too. There is just enough influence from the minority party to mean that a third-party bid that takes 25% of the vote might just hand the election to the minority major party, making all that effort on the part of the 3rd party counterproductive.
Our 2 party system is not formalized in any document. It is a result of how our electoral systems are structured. But that makes it even harder to reform, because we have to reform lots of little things (and a few big things) all at once.
The Republicans didn't abandon cities so much as living in cities require living with rules that are made to make things better for everyone. This requires governing. The Republicans didn't abandon cities, they abandoned governing.
Because most larger elections are decided by the Electoral College. Which is separate from the popular vote, yet holds more power/sway for a candidate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_College
Electoral college is only for the prez/vp ticket
The has nothing to do with these local races and the reason why it hasn't happened more often is exactly what happened during mamdani's run; dems undermined him at every turn and republicans pushed support for his opponents. The uniparty threw everything they had at him, and normally that works.
Like with the Platner controversies, it sort of seems like people are wising up to the bullshit and voting for the candidate anyways, against the wishes and efforts of the party. Normally that amount of coordinated repression has a significant effect. The ad money alone is normally enough to bury a campaign; sprinkle a hint of scandal and most up-and-coming campaigns fail. For some reason, now, it's just not working
Yeah I guess they figure that the scandals don't matter for Trump so they may as well not matter for the guy that's gonna do good stuff for them