That first group is made up of people like my mom, who would have gladly cast a ballot for Bernie in the general, but who didn’t have him as her first choice due in part to turbolib takes like “Mayor Pete seems like a decent candidate to me.”
These people would have never voted for Bernie in the primary (idk about your mom specifically, but this type of person). They will always find an excuse to not vote the socialist. Bernie's only path to victory was activating people who don't vote and a lot of those people fucking hate politicians. I don't know if this would have worked, but I think convincing Buttigieg voters is a waste of time for any socialist electoral strategy.
That first group of people is basically "libs who are not hardcore capitalists, and who aren't terminally online enough to obsess over every primary candidate." You're right that it can be difficult to convince them to vote for a Bernie-style candidate in the primary, but it's far from impossible. I remember walking to go vote with someone like that, and asking them who they were thinking of voting for. They said they liked some other candidate but also Bernie, and that they thought the other candidate was proposing some of the same things as Bernie. I mentioned that Bernie "seemed a little more serious" about those policies, and that's all it took to get them to vote for him. This lines up with polling suggesting that most primary voters had Bernie at least in their top two.
Now if someone's a Buttigieg voter, as in they have a Rat Boy sign on their lawn, yeah, appealing to them is not a great use of time. I'm thinking more of libs who haven't committed to a candidate yet.
These people would have never voted for Bernie in the primary (idk about your mom specifically, but this type of person). They will always find an excuse to not vote the socialist. Bernie's only path to victory was activating people who don't vote and a lot of those people fucking hate politicians. I don't know if this would have worked, but I think convincing Buttigieg voters is a waste of time for any socialist electoral strategy.
That first group of people is basically "libs who are not hardcore capitalists, and who aren't terminally online enough to obsess over every primary candidate." You're right that it can be difficult to convince them to vote for a Bernie-style candidate in the primary, but it's far from impossible. I remember walking to go vote with someone like that, and asking them who they were thinking of voting for. They said they liked some other candidate but also Bernie, and that they thought the other candidate was proposing some of the same things as Bernie. I mentioned that Bernie "seemed a little more serious" about those policies, and that's all it took to get them to vote for him. This lines up with polling suggesting that most primary voters had Bernie at least in their top two.
Now if someone's a Buttigieg voter, as in they have a Rat Boy sign on their lawn, yeah, appealing to them is not a great use of time. I'm thinking more of libs who haven't committed to a candidate yet.