It's not just about pledged delegates

The leadership of the DNC, DCCC, DSCC, etc., are chosen by election, by members of each committee. State parties send their delegates to participate in these things.

despite not being an incumbent

Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. These are processes that longtime party members participate in, and run on, about the structural rules and procedures to follow, and they're open to everyone. Elections often pit "establishment"/"insider" candidates against "insurgent"/"outsider" candidates, and there are examples of each kind (or hybrid candidates) winning the nomination in the modern primary system.

It's more of a spurious correlation: incumbency doesn't buy the advantage in the nomination race, but reflects that a candidate has the network and resources to have the popular support of their own party. That's why incumbents always win the nomination, and tend to win reelection in the general.

Tell me, during an incumbent primary, who controls the DNC?

Same as during a non-incumbent primary. The person who won the most recent nomination tends to have an outsized voice in the selection of party officials (because it's their pledged delegates who vote on all the other stuff). Yes, that means Biden-affiliated insiders had an inside track in 2020, but that's also true of Clinton allies in 2016, Obama allies in 2012, Obama allies in 2008, and Kerry allies in 2004.

More than a year ago, the DNC adopted new rules—including a primary calendar that ignored state law in Iowa and New Hampshire and eliminated any primary debates—designed to ensure that Biden’s coronation would proceed untroubled by opposition from any credible Democrat.

Which of those changes in the rules do you think were designed to benefit Biden specifically? De-emphasizing the role of Iowa and New Hampshire? There's been people clamoring for that for decades, within the party.

There's basically no set of rules that will ever create a credible challenge to an incumbent who wants to run for reelection. It's a popularity problem, not a structural problem.

No one deserves to be a president any more than anyone else, and treating an incumbent as though they do, without having to go through an open, democratic primary process, is to treat them as more deserving of future authority than other citizens.

There was a primary, and Biden got the most votes/delegates under the rules. Nobody is saying that incumbents should automatically get renomination. Or even that the incumbent should get some sort of rules advantage (like say, the way the defending world champ in chess gets an auto-bid to defend his title against a challenger who has to win a tournament to get there).

The rules are already set up to where any challenger has an equal structural change of winning the primary. They just won't have the actual popular support. You know, the core principles of democratic elections.

My 4-person household has one car, one electric cargo bike with two kid seats, a regular bicycle, accounts with bikeshare/scooter options around our city, plus mass transit passes, plus the option of Uber/Lyft.

Bikes might not work as a replacement for a first car, but they can work pretty well as a replacement for a second car, and a tool for reducing total mileage on the car you own.

Everything depends on where you live, of course, but a substantial number of people live in a place where a bike can reduce the number of miles you drive, even if you never actually give up the car.

Huh, weird. I believe you, but I don't see it when I load the page (Lemmy sync, Firefox on Android), in either desktop or mobile mode. Maybe the server is doing something with different browsers/environments.

Just stop using "clean."

Um, ok, done.

The article doesn't use the word "clean." Your first comment is the one to introduce the term into the thread.

I probably shouldn't dunk on a student newspaper opinion piece, but what's the proposal here? For rich people to avoid healthy eating in solidarity?

Singular "they" is older than singular "you." And note, of course, that the pronoun "you" is conjugated as a plural, and we deal with it just fine.

This shifts balance from unelected officials who can be fired by the president (administrative officials) towards unelected officials who can't be (judges). It doesn't actually reduce regulatory power, just puts that regulatory power under the supervision and review of even less accountable officials.

Rage isn't sustainable. Enthusiasm is down across the board, and the question will be whether enthusiasm among left-leaning voters has ~~wanted~~ waned to the same degree as among Trump's base.

Your description of a drink that takes the world by storm, increasing in market share but dropping in quality may be roughly accurate analogy for a lot of consumer goods, but even in this telling the market is improving if that drink is displacing even lower-quality competition.

In terms of non-alcoholic drinks sold in coolers in convenience stores and grocery stores, we've seen the steady march of improving products as an average across the shelves, even if the same product name might be getting worse. In the 80's, the dominant market share for orange juice in grocery stores was frozen cans to be mixed with water at home. But Tropicana and Florida Natural and a few other brands made a splash with not-from-concentrate orange juice. Old brands like Minute Maid got in on the action, and new brands like Simply rose up, too.

Now, it might be that these brands have gotten cheap with stuff since dominating market share. But if you look at who they took that market share from, it's unquestionably a lower quality product they've displaced.

Across the beverage industry as a whole, you've got a whole bunch of newer higher priced drinks, where the unfathomably expensive for 2000 Red Bull is basically the middle of the pack for energy drinks, and where there are so many beverages that cost several times as much as Coca Cola.

So that's a story of a forward march in higher prices for qualitatively preferred items, over that amount of time. This story I do think applies to processed food and drink, as well as electronics, prepared food, home furnishings, and cars. We expect a lot higher quality every year, as the things get more expensive, and we feel annoyed that any particular brand or model seems to be slipping in quality while we as a consumer market tend to move up the chain.

We're angry that streaming seems to be slipping back to cable-like quality, when streaming as of 2024 is still a much better value proposition than cable in 2014. The displacement is happening in two directions, for a net benefit to the consumer in a way that doesn't feel like a benefit. Same with music, video games, etc.

The real story is that housing, education, healthcare, and dependent care (both childcare and elder care) have gone up so much faster than inflation that these things are finally squeezing normal people out of their comfort zones right when the other stuff stopped dropping in price as much as before.

The non-cynical answer is that they're counting contractor/vendor time in this full time equivalent answer. Which would probably be a good thing, because I imagine that the best people in cybersecurity aren't actually employees of Microsoft.