Primaries are the immune systems of political parties. You know how we’re in this big terrible mess because Joe Biden looked too infirm and compromised to win a presidential election? You know how everybody’s been freaking out for a month about it? Well, there was one way that we could have averted this disaster: holding an actual fucking primary. Had there been a primary, Biden’s weakness would have been made apparent months ago. Had there been debates, Biden’s vulnerability in that format would have been unmistakable. Had there been a primary, all of these decisions about how to replace Biden could have been made not just with democratic legitimacy but with the added data that a primary provides, with the knowledge of who performed better and who performed worse. I’ve said before, the fact that Harris looked so feeble after she was attacked by Tulsi Gabbard in the last primary cycle - attacked quite effectively, I might add, simply with an accurate representation of her record as a prosecutor - is the kind of thing that primaries reveal. They weed out weakness. They give us more understanding of how candidates perform on the trail and under pressure. We’ve been robbed of that information.

And, if you’re a big Harris partisan, you should be mad that she never got that chance! You should want her to have been given another crack at the primary process so that she could have rewritten the ugly 2020 story and demonstrated that she’s the best woman for the job. You should want her to have had the chance to silence the doubters and prove that she was the choice of ordinary Democrats. Now, win or lose she’ll likely never face a real primary again.