can you imagine what a truly progressive president could do. actually, no need to imagine, FDR did this on a federal level and created a new deal majority in the house that lasted until Reagan. this is also why the democrats will maintain an iron hold on the primary process, they literally risk their political future with a progressive president.

Please don't give me hope...

Defeatism is the catalyst of resignation. Resignation is the enemy of progress.

If movements get more successful the more support they have, then participating in hopes of success becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more people hope, the more people stand together, the more likely it is that their hope will come true. It's worth a try, because the more people try, the better their chances.

The Civil Rights Movement was fueled by pent-up frustration, catalysed into courage by hope, guided by cunning strategists. It didn't achieve all its goals, and what it did achieve is being rolled back bit by bit, but it did achieve something. It took more than just hope, but without, it would have never taken off.

Hope is the antidote to defeatism. Allow yourself to hope, no matter how ridiculous it may look now. Better to hope and be wrong than to despair and be right.

The gilded age is passing...

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Why does there seem to be such disparity in the views of candidates from the same party?

Because we only have two viable parties

Democratic Party and Republican Party are big tent parties. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_tent

The members of each party are loosely ideological associated with each other instead of everyone closely believing in the same ideology like in a normal political party.

It’s basically the result of the first past the post voting system where the winner takes all instead of proportional representation. Like every election for every seat eventually ends up being a race between the two biggest parties. Hence why people who want to run for office join one of the two biggest parties. And why you get politicians who are opposites of each other in the same party.

In the US, we have Primary Elections and then General Elections.

Primary Elections are intra-party. The allow multiple candidates to run against each other under each party's banner. For instance, in Illinois this year in one of the House of Representatives races, we had something like 15 Democrats running in the Primary. One 1 Democrat made it out, as well as 1 Republican who had to go up against their other Primary challengers. Voters see all those candidates on whichever ballot they registered with: Democrat or Republican.

General Elections are inter-party. They allow the chosen Primary candidates from each party to run against each other. The result of this election is the person who wins gets the position in government they were running for. In the General, candidates need to get half or more votes (>= 50%) to win. On the ballot, voters can only choose the 1 candidate from the party they registered with to vote: Democrat or Republican.

This kind of system is called First Past The Post (FPTP) and is the default voting system in the US. New York, which is where these elections were held, has a different voting system called Ranked Choice Voting (RCV). RCV allows voters to rank candidates on the ballot rather than just choosing 1. Under RCV and in my Illinois example about, I could rank someone 1st, someone else 2nd, someone else 3rd, etc. Votes are counted by everyone's 1st choice to see if there's a winner. If no one takes >= 50%, the candidate with lowest votes is dropped and those people's ballots are counted by their 2nd choice. If still no one takes >= 50%, the bottommost candidate is dropped and you start looking at those people's 2nd or 3rd choices, etc. etc. etc.

There is such disparity between candidates of the same party, Democrats in this example, because of money basically. Many people describe the Democratic party as having "establishment" or "corporate" candidates backed by billionaires and corporations on one hand, and young, new candidates backed by working class, everyday people on the other hand. Because the Democratic party still in part answers to Big Money'ed interests, you have Democrats that want to defend the rich, but at the same time you have Democratic Socialists that defend the poor and working class who want to take the reigns of the Democratic party because of our FPTP system. We basically have rich politicians defending the rich, and working class politicians defending the working class in the Democratic party, and that difference breeds hostility.

Primaries are for selecting who's going to stand in the election.

Theoretically, anyone in the party can vote in the primary (in most states) but normally, it's nerds and diehards that vote. Americans don't get time off to vote, and have been getting "your vote doesn't matter" propaganda for most of their lives.

America has a 2 party system. The far right party are the democrats, the fascist kill everyone if it makes a dollar party are the republicans. The democrat socialists of America are a center right offshoot of the democrat party that are branded by the 2 main parties as the radical left.

You vote in the primaries of the party you are registered to vote as. If you are Republican, you vote in Republican primaries, or Democrat if you are Democrat. Think of these as the party deciding who will run in the general election later this year, where everyone will vote.

Please stay asleep.