The last person to stand for president who managed to get political momentum and wanted real change in the system was Eugene Debs, and they arrested him.
The last person to stand for president who managed to get political momentum and wanted real change in the system was Eugene Debs, and they arrested him.
Two others:
Bernie Sanders (prevented from winning the primary via unelected superdelegates)
Ross Perot (suddenly withdrew under murky circumstances and later claimed his family was threatened)
Both wanted significant change, although they were reformists rather than revolutionaries.
Am I missing something here? Perot was on the ballot in 1992, and he won a bunch of votes. IIRC he was the most successful independent candidate in modern times, by vote count.
Sanders ran an insurgent campaign while denigrating the party, and didn't win more votes. I seriously don't understand the argument that the person with fewer votes should win the nomination, although I am receptive to hearing a coherent articulation thereof. (Superdelegates did not enter the picture until tens of millions of votes were cast, with Sanders trailing by millions of votes.)
Perot dropped out, then reentered the race at the last minute. This cost him a lot of votes and the media framed him as unstable. He had many more votes before withdrawing.
Sanders was on track to win in 2015 but the media counted all superdelegates for Clinton throughout the campaign, costing him votes in later states where voters didn’t show up, assuming he lost. I guess this isn’t entirely the party’s fault and they did reform the system somewhat afterwards.
> This cost him a lot of votes and the media framed him as unstable
This was...an eminently reasonable response to Perot's own actions?
> Sanders was on track to win in 2015
Yes, like Clinton was "on track" to win in 2007. "On track to win" is necessarily filtered through a set of lenses that don't mean anything compared to actual votes. He didn't earn the votes, so he lost. There's nothing unfair about that.
there was a ton of ratfuckery. clinton's team got debate questions ahead of time from a friendly moderator. debbie wasserman schultz resigned as dnc chair because it was shown that the dnc tried to undermine the sanders campaign in favor of clinton. the clinton campaign was given operational and fiancial control of the dnc prior to the end of the primaries.