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Originally Posted by RainMaker
If you can't beat Donald Trump, a notorious conman who brags about sexually assaulting women and is under numerous indictments, maybe you're running a shitty candidate.
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Or, maybe the electorate sucks and just doesn't care a great deal about those negatives.
Your statement assumes that a lot of voters care about those issues enough for them to change their vote. The evidence I see is that voters care about who is on 'their' side, meaning aligning most with the policy proposals they want to happen, and don't really give a crap about much of anything else other than at the margins. The greatest determining factor of whether a candidate will get a person's vote, by far, is whether there is an R or a D in front of their name on the ballot.
The people on the ballot are chosen by the people after all. They aren't appointed. Your point about primary interference is noted, but any popular candidate is still going to be able to get on the ballot and win, almost every time. To the extent we have bad candidates, we have them
because the people want them.
I don't want to speak for anyone specifically, but the impression I get is that we want to believe democracy can work in the modern world, so we look for things to blame other than people just sucking at picking those who govern them. It's a lot more comforting to blame it on systemic issues or a particular candidate. It also makes a lot less sense of what we see in practice IMO.