I don't blame HRC's team for trying the pied-piper strategy in 2016. It would have seemed rational enough at the time. It didn't come into play in 2020 at all, though -- do you have any insight to the contrary?
It is an emergent behavior and the negative consequences, that HRC was insentiviesed to use the strategy is why it’s an emergent behavior. I don’t expect parties to learn from this mistake and not use the strategy - but for the sake of the country I really wish they didn’t.
2020 was an incumbency, I doubt the democrats felt they could realistically replace Trump with someone less likely to win.
HRC was insentiviesed to use the strategy is why it’s an emergent behavior.
That's not what emergent behavior is... Emergent behavior is unexpected behavior that occurs as result of the addition of new rules or variables into a system arising from unexpected local maxima created by the confluence of those new rules/variables.
Parties trying to get a disliked opponent to win the opposing primaries has been a strategy since the very beginning of the U.S. party system in the late 1700s. They do it because it can be very effective. Case in point: the GOP and Fox News urged Biden to run for re-election in 2024 because he was so unpopular his campaign virtually guaranteed that whoever the GOP candidate was would win. Similarly, the GOP has spent extensive resources supporting Jill Steinman and Bernie Sanders in the last 3 presidential elections, and in 2 of those elections the margin of votes those candidates got in battleground states was enough to give them the win.(Contrapositive: Obama was the pied piper candidate in 2008; Fox News promoted him with the expectation that the GOP candidate would have an easy time winning and if McCain hadn't completely bungled his campaign that likely would have been true. )
