No. You’d have to whack me on the head repeatedly to get me to start voting Republican.
Unless maybe that Republican was pro-choice and the Democrat wasn’t. No, really, there aren’t a lot of things that’d get me to swing the other way (reproductive rights, Civil Rights, Israel), but you’re talking about ONE issue that fundamentally changes your voting pattern/habits.
Even if I had a single big issue that I could drop, I won’t go back to being a Republican because the GOP still doesn’t have a sound economic policy, a sound science policy, a sane educational policy, or even a minimally-workable approach to healthcare policy.
Or, I suppose, the day I go back to the GOP is the day either it has changed irretrievably for the better, or I irretrievably for the worse.
It would take much more than that to get me to vote Republican. 
Well, serious brain damage might make me go Republican…
Just because you lose your brain doesn’t mean you lose your heart.
Nope, I’d still vote the way I currently do even if I suddenly became pro-choice. I’m in favor of gay marriage/adoption, but most of my other beliefs are still fairly conservative, so the balance wouldn’t tip.
I kinda did this when swaying between Labour and the LibDems and looking at their policies and voting history, and voted LibDem based on their opposition to the war in Iraq. They seemed mostly the same otherwise. I was completely and utterly wrong.
We do have a different system - we can vote for all sorts of parties, depending on where you live (my pen hovered over the Pirate Party last time) - but I was responding based on a system with two or three main parties.
Right now, I see the ConDems as one party and Labour as the other party, and the ConDems have gone for James Bond style villainy. I don’t agree with a single thing they stand for that Labour doesn’t also stand for, so no single issue would sway my vote.
nah.
I can’t even pick which of the issues is my most strongly-held one. Dropping any one of them wouldn’t change my position.
I’m pretty progressive, across the board.
I’m an independent, so no party to switch. And it would take a lot more than changing one position to make me vote Republican; they are a collection of incompetent lunatics. You’d pretty much need to scoop out & replace my whole personality and cut away about half my IQ to make me vote for them.
So far as I can tell (and I don’t mean this as a political potshot, really), the only issue that the other party stands for right now is that taxes need to be lowered (maybe in order to magically create jobs). They don’t seem to have any other agenda at all that I can discern, or vote on any other criteria. And to be honest, I don’t think most of them even care about the job creation, just the tax lowering.
Since tax policy isn’t even in the top ten things I care about (and further, that position is counter-factual–extensive lowering of taxes on “job creators” over the last twelve years not only hasn’t created jobs, but has reduced them), it would take a lot more than one issue changing to make me change sides.
So I suppose I qualify as the opposite of the OP’s hypothetical. It would only take me adopting one political belief (so long as I adopted it fervently and all-consumingly) to get me to change sides.
No. I’m an independent as well though I usually vote democrat because of their better track record of supporting a liberal position on social issues. I would LOVE a republican candidate who was strong and responsible fiscally while socially liberal. I don’t have any one single issue that defines my political beliefs, I don’t believe in litmus tests. The problem with the current GOP is that they are catering to their religious lunatic fringe as well as the extremely wealthy, and I do not find that to be responsible or even sane policy making. I cannot in good faith vote for them currently.
Well, my biggest belief is that the government shouldn’t oblige me to do something at the point of a gun. Lacking that belief, I’d be a liberal Democrat leftist anti-corporate quasi-socialist Obama supporter.
Yes we get it. All republicans are drooling idiots.
No.
I’m a conservationist, so it’s not like either major party in my country are playing to me much anyway.
But if I dropped my egalitarianism, well, the GOP is still worse from a conservationist p.o.v.
If I dropped my conservationism, well, the GOP is still worse from a egalitarian p.o.v.
I guess I’m in the same boat either way?
Equal rights slightly edges out fiscal responsibility in my book, only winning by such a small margin because we have largely achieved equal rights already. But if I magically didn’t care about equal rights for the alphabet soup crowd, I’d still vote for the Democrats because they have the edge in fiscal responsibility these days. Also, UHC is important despite the fact that if they passed it, it would tend to be via deficit spending and thus be almost as irresponsible as the current GOP attempts to ruin the economy, but hey, then we’d at least have UHC.
If the Republicans were as good as their narrative on foreign policy and immigration would imply, I’d support them on those issues, and so it would almost be a toss-up if you ignore equal rights for American citizens. But the parties are basically equally effective on those issues (even if Obama has the edge in the foreign sphere these days due to his recent successes.) Throw gun control in there as well: while I support the 2nd amendment, the number of Democrats who wish to severely curtail gun ownership is much much less than the GOP and NRA would suggest.
I’m independant and don’t see that changing. During my first election (Reagan) I did have one single guiding principle: ratfuck the moral majority. That belief hasn’t changed and the Republican embrace of the religious right nutjobs pretty much guarantees that I have to vote the opposite of Republican.
Then as I’ve matured and moved into what are considered Republican tax brackets, I have added the second guiding principle of fiscal responsibility. You know, actually being responsible instead of lip service, single payer healthcare, Keynesian stimulous when needed, saving core industries (like keeping the banking and automotive industries alive), serious banking regulation (since they obviously cannot self regulate nor avoid systemic risk), avoiding unfunded tax cuts, etc.
So, yes, if the Republicans actually told their lunatic conservative religious nutbags to pound sand and embraced a fiscal system that would benefit the US broadly (and prove it wasn’t just lip service as we’ve seen over the past few decades), then I might even vote for the Republican candidate. As it is, I vote for whomever has a chance of being elected and following my guiding principles.
If the government didn’t have guns, it wouldn’t be a government, and someone who isn’t part of a government would be obliging you to do things at the point of a gun.
I can see how that would be infinitely better.
My most deeply held political belief is in a small, limited federal government. So if I drop that, then yeah, I’m probably on the other side.
No.
My impression is that some would turn away from the GOP if not for the single issue of gun control. This confuses me (I’ve thought of starting a thread) because AFAICT gun control advocates in America are mostly trying to make it harder for psychopaths to buy combat weapons, not to take away Joe Q. Sportsman’s pistol.