> He’s a candidate in a primary. Big difference in the audiences.

The Democratic primary electorate is probably the segment of the population with the strongest negative impact around the 2016 election hacking that was evoked in the grandparent post, so while true your comment reinforces rather than negates the point.

It gives him at least a touch of credibility in a time where the Democratic primary voters increasingly turn on CSPAN to watch Congressional Committee hearings and watch as a vast majority of their 535 representatives butcher basic facts about technology that they internalized since teenagers. Given the rapid pace of technological development, I don't see this as a negative, assuming he didn't do anything more nefarious than phreak or pirate as a kid.

And he's just somebody new. Parties seem to have a tendency to wheel out old candidates who have tried and failed to get past the primaries multiple times already (thinking of Biden, in particular here, but that's just one example). Not sure why that is.

> Parties seem to have a tendency to wheel out old candidates

Parties don't wheel out candidates, candidates seek the party nomination. Candidates who have done so in the past and whose on-paper qualifications and public esteem have increased since then often remain inclined to do so and have a basis for expecting they might do better.

Many party voters are also inclined to vote for these candidates; some of these are long time supporters.

I'm more surprised that candidates whose resume includes only some local politics, a few terms in the House, and a failed Senate bid throw their hat in to the Presidential ring than that those that spent 36 years in the Senate and run for President twice before, serving for eight years as Vice President after his most recent Presidential run, do so.

Highly politicized voters tend to see things through a tribal lense: our tribe resists bad people with fists if necessary, their tribe does violence. Our leader has a freethinking stance to sex, their leader is sexual predator. There are of course a few of universally bad, and universally good things, but "hacker" certainly doesn't fall to these categories.