> Trust me when I say that if I could, I would be voting for people closest to the middle, people who would work with everyone else to better us all.
Sounds like you want something similar to Brett Weinstein's idea of a new Unity party. He had 2020 in mind but that was insanely over-optimistic, so 2024 might be a more rational goal.
> The radicalism of the Primary process is contributing strongly to our split. Abolish it.
Well, when you have an incumbent who has done as many things to help the country as Trump has, I guess it's a done deal for the Republican Party (no matter how much some people hate his mannerisms).
But for the Dems, the primary process sure failed them bigly this time around. You had the only semi-centrist-sounding candidate being (maybe) Amy, but she's as boring as watching tea brew.
Among the rest of em, they all seemed to want to out-socialist each other to the point of making the debates seem like a bunch of crazy people all trying to shout each other down. Medicare for all? Medicare is the most poorly designed, f-ed up system ever invented by mankind, and it just barely hangs together (while processing only the subset of people over 65) thanks to great efforts from our (health) insurance industry (which, by the way, the screamers were all proposing to eliminate that entire efficient industry with one signature, when they should be asking that industry to help them design something much better than medicare for all to provide a baseline medical coverage for everybody but still allow people to buy additional insurance from the industry, perhaps partly paid by your employer). Not only are primaries a horrible idea for selecting presidential candidates, primary debates are a ridiculously stupid way to redesign health-care policy. Kinda-like, let's let a dozen or so of the stupidest (copy-cat) people in the country stand up by podiums with microphones, and while standing there, let them make the worst possible decisions possible about what our future health-care system should look like. Sheesh.
The Dem primary debates, all by themselves, were just about enough to convince me that I couldn't vote for a Democrat. They were all a bunch of blathering idiots on that stage!
Then out of all the (admittedly bad) options that they had, the Dems settle on the absolute worst choice, with the second-worst choice being picked for running mate? WTF? Not only that, they picked somebody who has Alzheimers and can't remember who he's running against, or where he is, or what's his stance on fracking. And has to be hopped up on drugs to make it through a debate.
The historians will truly agree with
@cncmin that the year 2020 marks the time that we truly discovered that the primary process is broken.
Maybe we should abandon primaries and just go to a ranked-choice voting system in which, if your first choice (in your state) doesn't come in the top two, your vote is allocated to your next choice. The top two in each state get the state's electoral votes allocated among them on a pro-rated basis. Then the state's electoral votes are merged in the electoral college, again using ranked-choice at the electoral-college level.
It's complicated, but it eliminates that ridiculous primary business.
The top-two electoral-college vote-getters would become President and Vice President. They would have to work together, even if they hated each other. So things would be more centrist and less partisan. This is actually the way the founding fathers started things out initially. Then they invented political parties, and politics has gone to hell in a handbasket ever since - especially after the invention of PACs that let business interests have an infinite number of ($) votes while the people are limited to one vote each.
