I considered voting for Bob Dole in 1996. I didn’t. I ended up voting for Nader as a protest vote, but I just couldn’t vote for Clinton after the Lewinsky thing.
Howe do you come up with this stuff?
I’ve never voted Republican and can’t see myself ever voting Republican. I’m so disgusted with them.
I voted for Reagan in 1980, because Carter had just made me register for the draft. I’m not likely to vote for another Republican unless a democrat reaches out and bites me in the ass again.
I voted for Ford, and would have voted for Eisenhower, but since that time, no, the party has lost its former sense of responsibility. Don’t tell me about voting for the individual candidate and not the party - the party matters; a lone wolf or a system-bucker just can’t get much of anything done without it and therefore has less claim to my vote on that basis.
I, too, came close in 1988, but eventually voted for Dukakis.
I’ve voted for Republicans farther down the ticket, but the party is getting conservative a lot faster than I am, and the candidate pool is less appealing with each election.
The current republican party, on the national level at least, is deserving of hate by almost all standards. That doesn’t make us “blinded by hate rhetoric,” but accurate observers of the situation.
At one time I was a Republican. Then they sold out everything they supposedly stood for and allied themselves with the Religious Wrong. That kicked me to Independent. Then they declared war on Iraq. That kicked me to Democrat. Then they declared war on America. That kicked me to “They must be driven from their homes into the snow. Harry them. Let them find no rest, no place of sanctuary. Let them and their posterity be driven swordless into Palestine. Let their names be erased from History. So let it written. So let it be done.”
The Lewinsky thing didn’t come out until 1998.
I’ve only been eligible to vote since 2004, and I pretty enthusiastically voted for Kerry and for Obama (though I really didn’t hate Bush or McCain). I remember thinking in 2008 that the election didn’t really matter much to me, because either McCain or Obama would have made great presidents (I still think McCain would have been pretty good, despite how conservative he has since become). I was very scared of Palin though. If it had come down to Clinton vs McCain, and Palin wasn’t part of the equation, I might have voted for McCain.
I am gay though, and since the Republican party is so anti-gay these days, it’s going to be hard for me to ever vote for one of their candidates.
I guess chock me up on the side of “I’d vote for a republican if the democrat were grossly unacceptable to me for some reason, and they were pretty moderate.”
I would vote R if the candidate were the better qualified and not demonstrably insane and/or immoral. As politicians go, Mittens is as close as any R has come in a long time to these criteria, and I’m not entirely certain he’s qualified. He’s certainly not moreso than the incumbent who, although arguably weak, has at least acquired experience in the position.
I really wish the parties would move away from Left/Right and just present compelling arguments for different philosophical choices. I would love to have to make a tough choice in an election.