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Notes -
My favourite conspiratorial explanation for this is that the HRC team knew that she was such an unlikeable and unpopular candidate they went and kneecapped all her prospective challengers to make sure she'd have an easy time getting the nomination.
I think it's most likely that Dems just don't have enough people to run every institution they've seized, and the old political office pipelines look unappealing relative to, say, chairing a billion-dollar NGO you can use as a personal slush fund.
See the "embattled" mayor of Oakland and all those others for examples of how poor their pool of low level politicians is; they can't even do the minimum effort to hide their embezzlement enough for Dem prosecutors to ignore it.
Whereas Republicans who didn't go the federalist society judge route are pretty much stuck with starting a political career as mayor of Cowpatsie, Idaho. They don't even get defense contractor work now; it all goes to regime-friendly guys like the motte's Netscape or whatever.
Like, a Democrat Thomas Massie would have gone a very different direction after MIT, and reached a much more profitable office than junior representative in charge of sponsoring DOA livestock bills.
But there's definitely a crab bucket effect too, made stronger by the party's power over the bureaucracy. Much easier to sabotage a potential competitor when you can literally order their subordinates to undermine them.
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