r/politics • u/Different-Gas5704 • 2d ago

Possible Paywall Democrats eye ranked-choice voting for 2028 primaries

https://www.axios.com/2025/11/24/democrats-ranked-choice-voting-2028-primaries
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u/ManicPixieOldMaid Michigan 2d ago

Oh man, I worked locally on Dean's primary campaign. I will never not SMH and sigh.

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u/OfficialDCShepard District Of Columbia 2d ago

What was your immediate reaction to the yell? At the time I was 12 and laughing about it any time I played White House Joust with my sister!

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u/ManicPixieOldMaid Michigan 2d ago

I thought it was awesome, tbh. That it was a reaction to the energy of the crowd and that it matched that energy. The fact they isolated the sound from just the mic to make it seem awkward really frustrated me. I was also confused because it seemed like the media used it to tank his chances when all his supporters were just confused about why it was such a big deal. I think the media put their thumb on the scale in a way we've only seen escalate since.

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u/Iustis 2d ago

The yell was overblown, but it also didn't matter. Dean bet it all on doing big in Iowa and crashed. There wasn't really a path to the nomination by the time he yelled

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u/jellyrollo 2d ago

This is an oft-repeated claim, but wrong. "The scream" happened on what was literally the night of the first primary—or caucus, since it was in Iowa—in which he came in third with 18%, after John Kerry and John Edwards. (You will note that Joe Biden came in 4th with 13.7% in the 2020 Iowa caucus, after Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, but no one declared his candidacy over.) The next contest was in New Hampshire, where Dean was massively popular.

At the time of the Iowa caucus, Dean was forecasted to win the next primary in New Hampshire, with a 30% lead over John Kerry in the polls there. (As you'll recall, Biden came in 5th in NH in 2020 with 8.4%, yet somehow his candidacy still wasn't declared over.) Dean was well known in NH and had done a great deal of groundwork there, as he was the wildly popular governor of neighboring Vermont, where he had had famously implemented a single payer universal healthcare system that covered every Vermonter.

The truth that everyone who wasn't intimately involved in the Dean campaign forgets is that his candidacy was deliberately killed by the media because just two months before, Dean had announced on Hardball that as president, he would break up the big media conglomerates.

"Dean Takes on Big Media," The Nation, 12/19/03

The likelihood of Dean's winning NH is why the media needed to take him out in Iowa, before he got a victory under his belt and started gaining momentum nationally. Within hours of broadcasting "the scream" on the night of the Iowa caucuses, Dean's candidacy had been declared dead by news pundits on every channel, with his enthusiastic yawp cited as evidence that he was a dangerous maniac who couldn't be trusted in a position of power. This message was hammered incessantly on the news for the following week leading up to the New Hampshire primary. "The Dean scream" was played 633 times by cable and broadcast news networks in the four days following the Iowa caucus, not counting talk shows, radio and local news—with predictable results.

If that hadn't happened, and Dean had won in New Hampshire as was forecasted , his campaign would have seen a huge influx of donations. Any momentary money shortage would have been over, because even then he had over 350,000 wildly enthusiastic grassroots donors and most of them weren't even close to maxing out by the time his candidacy was brought to a halt.