I actually get what TGW is saying. Not someone who elicits such strong feelings. Not another Clinton, no one from the old Obama guard, and not someone who’s being dubbed a socialist in the progressive wing. Not sure who that would be though in dems
So no one who is actually a Democrat?
Clinton's never running again but Clinton and Obama were the last two presidents and had 8 year runs and have huge infrastructure. There is almost no one who is in the Democratic party who doesn't have some kind of connection to them except the people who are in the progressive wing and even half of those people do.
Add in that everyone who is a Democrat will be called "socialist" anyway and you have a problem.
You can make an argument that the longer someone has been around the longer the propaganda machine has had to make up shit about them (Clinton being the perfect example) and so you always need to get someone completely new or relatively new like Obama just to minimize the amount they have been lied about, but that doesn't really hold true because Biden has been around forever and there was a minimum of how much damage they were able to do to him.
The quality of the candidate is only so important, really. There is a baseline you have to get over and after that anyone who is capable of winning the primary is viable because of negative partisanship and the two party system. The specifics of a given campaign moment also are huge. Biden probably couldn't win in any other year than 2020 when he was the right man for the moment given all the shit going on. This year, at this moment, he was really strong.
Someone that could beat the Republicans in the next presidential election. It’s pretty self explanatory.
Every candidate? Last time I checked the election isn’t for another 4 years
Yes. Clinton got more votes than Trump. Biden got more votes than Trump.
In fact, a Republican has won more votes than a Democrat exactly ONCE since the 1990s - George Bush in 2004.
The electoral college is a huge problem in how it distorts things but there also remains the fact that the public is really polarized and most races are going to be stupid close for the foreseeable future no matter who gets nominated.