Of course, this formulation still relies on a conception of voting that many people might not share. It works if your only goal is to change the course of the current election, but if you have a longer-term objective (such as, for example, forcing the Deomcrats to shift back to the left), then it is not necessarily a wasted vote, even if you later express concern that your vote might have helped a Republican win the White House.
You rely on a rather economic view of a vote’s value, and even incorporate marginal analysis, arguing that “a vote’s value depends on its marginal chance of deciding the election.” But if you’re going to offer such an economic formulation, then you also need to acknowledge that people view issues of “value” and “waste” very subjectively, and that arriving at objective values in any system is a difficult thing to do. While i might not think that, for example, an Apple computer is “worth” the extra cost (over a similar PC), others feel differently. While you might feel that a vote for Nader in Florida is a wasted vote, someone with a different measuring stick might not agree.
My apologies, I should have made myself more clear. I meant that I needed to some more investigation on him to make a better decision on him as a candidate.
At the risk of sounding like a Democratic Party operative …
So, now’s the time we can help them find their collective spine. With the public’s backing through word-of-mouth, financial support from those who can afford it and campaigning, formal and informal, Democratic officials will start to get the idea that they can vote their conscience and not piss off their constituents.
I know that some of them are late to come to the party in terms of the Patriot Act and other issues (and others have yet to come around), but they’ve been cowed into thinking that voting any other way would mean political suicide. So they shut up and took cover, hoping the last four years would pass with as little damage as possible.
What we need to do now as Democrats, liberals and independents, is vote for those candidates we suspect will see us prodding them into action and stand up and say, “Wait just a fucking minute; that’s my country you’re shitting on.” It’s too bad more elected officials don’t have the courage to stand independently, but if enough of us get up off our asses and say “This way,” our leaders will follow. Those that don’t shouldn’t get our votes.
I know Bush will only listen to his base of conservative, wealthy elite.
I’m more optimistic that Kerry (and Edwards, now) will listen to us and follow.
Hear, hear JonScribe. I will be voting for my party come November, and I hope maybe taking the white house from the Repubs will give some of my party members their, umm…members back. :queue Beavis and Butthead act: uhhh he said ‘member’ uhhuhuuhuh.
Okay, fair enough. But if that’s how you value of your vote, you simply define its value by reference to its marginal chance of effecting the desired long-term change. Of course, you also have to offset that long-term value by the amount of any short-term cost of the vote–e.g., thanks to the Nader vote, we’ve got fucking Bush-Cheney-Rove running the country. From previous discussions of this subject, I don’t see too many unrepentant Nader voters who are willing to own up to their responsibility for the bastards currently in office and the terrible policies the bastards have implemented.
And you probably also ought to consider the efficacy of such long-term voting strategies. That is, if I’m the Democratic Party and you fuck me over for the sake of sending a message that I should be more like you, I am not real likely to accede to your wishes.
Well, i’m not even allowed to vote in American elections, but one thing that’s really amazed me since 2000 is the vitriol directed at Nader voters.
Sure, in statistical terms it is relatively easy to see that if, say, even half of Nader voters had voted for Gore instead, we’d have someone different in the White House right now. That’s pretty much beyond question.
But what surprises me is not the fact that people point this out, but that they actually blame Nader voters for keeping the Democrat out of the White House. A few things get ignored in all this mudslinging.
No third party candidate is taking away votes that belong to another party. Votes belong to those who choose to use them, and there’s no rule whereby they must be cast for the Dems or the GOP.
Every time someone slams Nader, that person also seems willing to overlook the sheer ineptitude of Gore’s campaign. Hell, if Gore had been able to tell his ass from a hole in the ground, even a 5% vote for Nader shouldn’t have been a problem.
Dems are happy to rain abuse on voters who deserted the Democrats for the Greens, but voters who deserted the Democrats for the Republicans get a free pass. Is this simply because they chose to vote for one of the two main parties?
There is none of the same vitriol reserved for those who are too lazy or apathetic to get off their asses and vote at all. Again, if a few more nominally-Democratic voters had actually gone to the polls, the Nader vote would not have been an issue.
It seems to me that slamming Nader has been a convenient shibboleth for Democrats who are unwilling to examine their party’s failings. And of course, if you had instant runoff voting in America, this wouldn’t even be an issue. Under the current first-past-the-post scenario, we have the somewhat paradoxical suituation whereby the more candidates you have, the less likely it is that the result will actually reflect the will of the electorate.
So? That’s effectively what every politician decides in every campaign–which potential constituents should be mollified, and which should be ignored for the sake of the bigger picture. It’s a simple cost-benefit analysis.
Why would that be? It’s not as though you get to avoid the crap by not choosing - you’re gonna find yourself wallowing in it either way.
Besides, no one ever manages to come up with a justification for their oh-so-trendy disgust with both parties (besides the dedicated third-party voters). So you’re not in love with Kerry. What are you people in love with, besides anything that comes across as alternative? What exactly makes the major parties identical? Sure, both parties are a little to the right of yours truly, but I still don’t see many policy issues that are identical.
I have mixed feelings about Nader voters. On one hand I completely understand that they have the right to vote for whomever they feel would be the best President. On the other hand I wish they would be more pragmatic with their votes. Principles are great, but sometimes, IMHO, the lesser of two evils, especially when so many people are affected, is more important.
Considering that their votes are both the cause in fact and proximate cause of the current s.o.b.‘s ending up in charge and happily enacting their fucked up agenda, you’re damn right I blame Nader voters for this mess. They’re hardly the only ones who are responsible, of course–I’m lookin’ at you O’Connor and Kennedy–but they sure as hell were the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Certainly, the votes “belong” to the voters who cast them. But the moral responsibility for casting those votes also “belongs” to those voters.
Even assuming that Gore ran an inept campaign–a matter of some debatability, I’m sure–that still doesn’t excuse Nader voters from the moral consequences of their protest votes.
It’s harder to fault those voters, who at least got what they wanted: George W. Bush. Nader voters, on the other hand, decided they had to burn the village with the hope that maybe one day the workers of the world really would unite and thereby save the village. Pretty darn stupid, if you ask me.
Why should I save “the same vitriol” for those who are merely lazy and unmotivated, as opposed to those who affirmatively chose and acted upon a morally reprehensible course of action?
I suspect that what you really mean by “unwilling to examine their party’s failings” is “unwilling to embrace the far-left agenda espoused by the Green Party and its hangers-on.” But in case you meant your statement literally, allow me to rebut your perception with the following GD classic: Memo to Democrats: You Can’t Beat Something With Nothing.
While knowing full well that a possible result of their vote was the election of a person whose policies are completely and unambiguously opposed to their own.
Just to nitpick/clarify. The truth is much more painful and teeth-gnashing than 50%. Fewer than one in one-hundred, actually. There were 97,488 Nader voters in Florida, while Bush beat Gore by 537 votes. If somewhat less than 1% had voted for Gore, our country would be a far far better place right now.
Of course, if we had also not had the Jews for Buchanan and the Homonym Felons…
I read from a very different book. IMO the best option, nay, obligation, when faced with crap is to choose the least crappy.
Look, there will never be a candidate of any party who completely satisfies all members of even that party. Politics is the art of compromise, after all. I can’t think of single candidate from all the time I’ve been voting who’s jibed completely with my beliefs. So I take the closest one who has the best chance of actually winnning the office. To not vote at all, write in someone frivolous or vote for an obvious non-starter negates that vote.
I’m not a party animal and neither Kerry nor Edwards fit my template exactly. That doesn’t matter. IMO Bush/Cheney have been so direly, dangerously incompetent–not to mention disgraces to actual conservative values–I honestly think Kerry/Edwards must be better. Compromising on philosophical points of disagreement is chump change in light of Bush/Cheney’s abysmal track record these past four years.
Obviously YMMV, but I’ll choose less-than-ideal over flat-out incompetent any day, but especially on election day.
I’m not speaking out against John Edwards. Frankly the only visceral thing about him that had bothered me was when he was being touted as Jonothan Edwards, which happens to be the name of a historical religious figure - one I still find a little frightening. I know that John Edwards has nothing to do with that, but it’s still an emotional reaction I have to deal with.
Having said that, he was a candidate in 2000 for the presidential nomination, he officially put himself into the ring or was just being touted by others. So, I have to say on this one point, Minty that I think you’re wrong. I don’t disagree with any of your other points, however.