You asked for it! The Democratic Primaries forum opens TODAY! [View all]

This is kind of important. You might want to read through the whole thing.

There are only 348 days left until the Iowa Caucuses! Which means it's well past time for the official Democratic Presidential primary season to begin here on DU. As usual, we will require that all discussions about the Democratic presidential primary take place in a dedicated Democratic Primaries forum. But this year we are making a few changes that will hopefully improve the experience for everyone. Check it out....


WHERE TO POST ABOUT THE DEMOCRATIC PRIMARIES

Discussion of the 2020 Democratic Presidential primaries is only permitted in the Democratic Primaries forum, and in the dedicated candidate supporter groups. These discussions are not permitted in Latest Breaking News, Editorials & Other Articles, Video & Multimedia, General Discussion, The DU Lounge, or anywhere else. In certain forums you will be prompted with an interrupt page directing you to post your Democratic primary discussions in the Democratic Primaries forum.


THE DEMOCRATIC PRIMARIES FORUM & CANDIDATE PREFERENCE FUNCTION

In order to post in the Democratic Primaries forum, you must select your preferred candidate. (If you are undecided, don't worry -- "Undecided" is one of the options.) Your selection is logged by our software, and then presented on your Profile page, and in place of your signature line when posting in the Democratic Primaries forum. Currently you may select from the following: Undecided, Biden, Booker, Brown, Buttigieg, Castro, Delaney, Gabbard, Gillibrand, Harris, Hickenlooper, Klobuchar, O'Rourke, Sanders, Warren, and Yang. We can easily add additional candidates later if necessary, and candidates will be removed when they drop out of the race or officially declare that they're not running. You can change your candidate preference at any time.

Keeping track of members' candidate preferences has the following benefits: 1) When someone posts about the primaries, their stated candidate preference will provide useful context to their post. 2) We can tally the number of people who have indicated a preference for each candidate to get a general idea of how much support they enjoy on DU. 3) We will use stated candidate support as a means to grant access to dedicated candidate supporter groups. 4) We can potentially use candidate preferences to balance the partisan makeup of juries that are called to judge alerted posts, if we deem it necessary. 5) We can use candidate preferences to display or hide posts from candidate supporter groups on the Latest Page or elsewhere.

Members' regular signature lines and avatar images do not appear when posting in the Democratic Primaries forum. Instead, only the special candidate preference signature line appears.

Remember, if you don't want to see posts from the Democratic Primaries forum, you can trash it. Just click the "Trash this forum" button at the top of the forum.

+ The Democratic Primaries forum is here.

+ "If I were to vote in a presidential primary today, I would vote for..." Set your candidate preference here.

+ View current candidate rankings here.


CANDIDATE AVATAR IMAGES

We have added new Democratic primary candidate avatar images to our collection of available avatars. For officially declared candidates there are two avatars, a photo and a logo (potential candidates just have a photo). Currently we provide avatars for the following candidates: Biden, Booker, Brown, Buttigieg, Castro, Delaney, Gabbard, Gillibrand, Harris, Hickenlooper, Klobuchar, O'Rourke, Sanders, Warren, Yang. We can easily add additional candidates later if necessary.

To change your avatar image, click the "My Profile" link at the top of any page (or just click here) Click the "Edit" link next to "Avatar image." Candidate photos are available under the "Politicians" section; candidate logos are available under the "Logos" section.


CANDIDATE SUPPORTER GROUPS

Sometime tomorrow, we will close down the existing candidate supporter groups. Within a few weeks we will open new candidate supporter groups, incorporating some changes which we will announce later.


A REMINDER ABOUT THE DU RULES

In case there is any question, let me be very clear: DU rules apply to the entire discussion forum, including the new Democratic Primaries forum and candidate supporter groups. If you haven't read them in a while, RIGHT NOW would be a good time to go refresh your memory. They are good rules, they make DU better, and we intend to keep on enforcing them. You can read the rules on our Terms of Service page.

To preemptively respond to the inevitable complaints: The rules make clear that constructive criticism of Democrats is always welcome on DU. But if you are incapable of presenting your criticism in a thoughtful, substantive way and end up losing your ability to post, that is YOUR PROBLEM not mine.


A FINAL THOUGHT

All too often in the past Democratic Primary season on DU was a cesspool of toxic partisan ugliness, and I am much too jaded and cynical to promise you that this time will be any different. But I do believe that it is possible (maybe?) for primary season on Democratic Underground to be better than it has been in the past. If you post with the attitude that all of our candidates are good enough, and they're all far superior to Donald Trump, then you should be fine. But if post with the attitude that any Democratic candidate is The Enemy who must be destroyed by any means necessary, then you are going to cause problems for DU and for yourself.

May the best candidate win.

BTW, if you encounter any bugs or problems with the software please post them in this thread. Thanks.

Skinner, EarlG, Elad
DU Admins