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Counterfactuals. You can't ignore counterfactuals.
The counterfactual to Biden is even less successful progressivism than we got. You yourself agreed with this and it is the most salient point.
You can and should demand more. You can and should advocate for change far beyond this. But my original points stand. By the time we reached the general election, Biden had proven he was the candidate to vote for to cause the most positive change possible. There was not a better way to spend your vote.
That's all well and nice, but it wasn't republicans holding up far more aggressive and progressive legislation. It was Sinema, Manchin, and the other "centrists" who at least are smart enough to see the GOP for the totally evil lunatics they are, even if their politics really isn't much better.
Young people getting out and voting is WHY Biden won. He didn't win in spite of them.
Yes, young people showing up tipped it that way. It worked out better for Biden than it did for Clinton and I'm really glad about that.
But did they show up because Biden earned their vote, or because a ham sandwich vs. Trump would have got their vote?
Certainly in the general he was vastly preferable to Trump, but was he really a better choice in the primary than, say, Sanders or Warren or Buttigieg? I see a lot of confident assertions and untestable claims about that, but I suspect we'd all do well to consider the Democratic primaries as first and foremost a money contest, as secondly a process by which the money people signal to the voters which candidates they will support or tolerate- and in which whoever designates "the candidates that can win" has leverage to get voters to give up on what they might really want in order to get someone who "can win". In other words, are the primaries really a way of getting to know the will of the people, or are they a means of pressuring a critical mass of people to vote a way the donors will accept and then presenting that as the genuine will of the people?
There's a certain begging-of-the-question involved when we use confident claims about who "can win" to influence the way people vote. After all,
I'm not really sure what to say.
To me, the best evidence of a candidate's ability to get the most votes is their ability to get the most votes. And their ability to get the most votes from voters seems to be pretty damn predictive of their ability to get the most votes from members of congress.
I mean, I personally voted for Buttigieg and would've personally preferred Sanders or Warren. But I am also genuinely surprised at how much positive legislation Biden has gotten passed, especially the IRA, and am pretty dubious anyone else could've built that much consensus to do the same. Not to mention that I'm pretty disappointed in Buttigieg's lack of massive change in the DOT so far, as much as I know it is an ultra-conservative and hard to change department..
The rest of your complaint here is just that you don't like the way US politics works. Yeah, join the club. National popular vote and more ranked choice voting is probably the best first step to reform, but even they have serious drawbacks.