Interesting “demographics is destiny” analysis but Julian Assange is incredibly naive when he flippantly urges alienated Democrats into forming a new political party (the Progressive Party?). I well know for that was my occupation as a ballot drive coordinator for many years. Institutional obstructions such as labyrinthine state ballot laws and mainstream media disdain make the task almost impossible. The American electoral system is organized into fifty-two different sets of election laws (the federal laws and those of the 50 states and Guam). Each jurisdiction has entirely different ballot petition requirements for third party and independent presidential candidates.
These requirements are onerous, unduly burdensome, and chilling in their effect of squashing voters choosing candidates other than the Democrats and Republicans who draft and vigorously enforce these laws to protect their duopoly. I have been a litigant to several legal challenges to these restrictive laws at the state and federal level, some cases reaching the United States Supreme Court.
Assange should further know that the vast majority of campaign funds raised in such efforts must be expended, not in advertisements or campaign promotion of ideas, but on petition campaigns and ballot litigation suits. The administrative overhead and manpower requirements of enlisting squads of reputable professional petitioners (“Road Warriors”) in all fifty states and in every major (and minor) metropolitan area is beyond the organizational imaginations of most supporters. No successful ballot petition campaign relies entirely on volunteers, which is counter-intuitive to virtually all the efforts that such alienated progressive Democrats would seek in such an endeavor.
Finally, Assange should well know that such challengers are frozen out of the televised presidential debates and interviews on the mainstream network news and talk shows and delegated to the shadows.
No, unless the Democrats seriously change their ideologically bankrupt “identity politics” message and fundamental party organizational structure (particularly regarding “super delegates” of corrupt crony corporatist special interests and blindly loyalist drones and functionaries) they are indeed doomed.
I don’t see this happening.
I believe this all came to a head on election night last November when the elite party oligarchs saw their world crashing down around them. It was then they and their duplicitous “fake media” flacks gloamed onto intensively promoting the 24/7 narrative of the stolen election and the Trump/Russian collusion, aided by deep state forces seeking a Trump coup d’état (for different reasons). They have placed all their bets on this extra-constitutional coup strategy being ultimately successful.
2:59 pm on June 29, 2017
