It’s not party loyalty. I have my reasons to not be a Democrat and in our two party system it makes sense to register as one or the other instead of independent/third party. At least as a registered Republican I can vote against the crazy-ass candidates.
If you are talking about the Paul Simon who was a U.S. senator from Illinois in the 1980s and 1990s, he was a Democrat.
How about you try running for office yourself? If even the “good” options kind of suck, offer a better option.
You’ll almost certainly lose, because the Republican party as it is now is entirely insane, but at least you can say you tried.
“Fiscally conservative but socially liberal” is a meaningless cliche at this point. Fiscal conservatism as practiced by Republicans means cutting taxes to run up the deficit at best, or the failed Sam Brownback Kansas experiment at worst. I’m baffled that Republican economic ideas are able to persuade anyone.
Other than the “crazies” of the Republican party, by which I mean the religious zealots and white nationalists, and the true communists of the Democratic party, everybody is a fiscal conservative and social liberal. It’s a giant bucket of people and tells me nothing about whether someone should vote R or D. I bet if we lined up your personal beliefs with both parties’ national platforms, you’d have more in common with Ds than Rs. That’s true for me, at least, even though I don’t consider myself a Democrat and think political parties are dumb.
It became real easy for me to stop voting for Republicans at the national level in March of 2003, when Bush II unilaterally invaded Iraq on fabricated evidence and Republicans called me and other “libtards” un-American for, what turned out, being right. But at a local level, even back then, I still probably voted for more Rs than Ds. Why? Because in my local elections, Republicans had, by and large, much better resumes. I want my elected representatives to have actual government experience. I don’t want “political outsiders” to try and wing it with the levers of power.
Eventually the obvious dawned on me – if I never voted in any Democrats, nobody would ever get the experience I desired. The 2016 election, when the RNC refused to repudiate Trump and Trumpism int he primaries, was the first election I’d ever voted straight D down the ballot. And I will continue to do so until Republicans pull their heads out of their asses.
So my response to the OP is, vote for your moderate Republicans in the primaries. Attend Republican party meetings and speak your rational mind. Talk to your friends and neighbors as persuasively as possible. But, at the end of the day, all that matters is which candidate you mark on the ballot, and if you keep rewarding the Republican party with your vote despite them putting up crazier and crazier candidates, nothing’s going to change.
Also, have you confronted your racist piece of shit neighbor? Or would he just accuse you of being a woke liberal snowflake while spewing talking points about “whoa ho, everyone jumps right to calling you a racist just for disagreeing with them.”
Isn’t that the problem, though? The crazies have taken over and they can’t be reasoned with, even from their “own” because that makes you the “enemy.” The moderate Rs don’t go to rallies and conventions, and if they do, they say nothing when the nutjobs are screaming insane things because they are afraid of them. They’re not wrong to be, granted, but if there’s no one there to hush and shame the nutjobs, they’re just encouraged to be nutjobs, and the “leaders” don’t discourage it because they LOVE rabid fans; they know it looks amazing on camera, even if they wouldn’t be in a room alone with one of them. Thus, your one vote is your only real voice.
I’m certain the OP already knows all of this is frustrated with it as well, so I guess what I’m saying here is: I understand.
Right. I think if more people got yelled at by the crazies they might realize that they don’t actually have as much in common with their “fellow Republicans” as they think.
HA! I did for a local office. Being a teacher (even Republican one) does not play well here. And teaching in that liberal hotbed of Denver? I was actually asked at a Meet the Candidates townhall, “What are you going to do to not bring those Denver ideas back to our town?” If you imagine that question in a redneck drawl you are right on.
Exactly. The “traditional, moderate, sane” Republican from the Reagan and Bush eras was never a viable long-term ideology, because it was economically and fiscally incoherent and nothing more than a mask for the radical right wing project being developed behind the curtain. Concern about “deficits and national debt” was never sincere. Those who advocated it on the right either didn’t really care about it and had no intention to do anything about it, or had no understanding of economic and fiscal policy. Significantly, it was under liberal administrations like Clinton and Obama when economic and fiscal policies actually improved the situation because they didn’t treat reducing deficit and debt as a goal but rather just a piece of the entire puzzle, which is what it should be. If you actually understand economics, you don’t think that zero debt and deficit is a value in and of itself. It’s merely a tool. Federal debt and deficit is not intrinsically a bad thing. Liberals handle the situation better because they don’t treat it as good or bad intrinsically.
Did you read my OP? I vote Dem when they are the better candidate. At the local level, many races are just a one person (R) running in the general.
I hear Republican people saying curious things like this all the time. “I can’t be a Democrat.”
You don’t have to be a Democrat. You don’t need a membership card, you don’t have to wear a T-shirt, you don’t have to go through the hazing ceremony.
You don’t have to change your identity. All you have to do is vote for the people who fight for the things you outlined in the OP (which are Democrats). Put on your Republican T-shirt, walk to the polls, vote for Democrats, then walk out and say “This changes nothing, I am still a Republican.”
Why on earth wouldn’t you vote for the only party that’s fighting for things you care about? It just blows my mind that someone could say they support legalization of abortion, weed, and gay marriage, and then give any support to politicians who fight against that. It tells me that you only like the aesthetics of those positions… that you don’t want to seem like a jerk… but when it’s time to act, you’re going to vote against everything you said was important just because you don’t want to wear the Democrat T-shirt.
I did, and if you read my post, I used to vote R when they were the better candidate. What I’m saying is, I stopped doing that. (Hint hint.)
Did you read my OP? I vote Dem when they are the better candidate. At the local level, many races are just a one person (R) running in the general.
Do you support (or have you supported) Republicans who have stayed silent (or worse) on Trump’s election lies, January 6th, and the lies of Trump’s enablers like Kevin McCarthy?
BUT, being a registered Pub, I can vote in the primary for the least Trumpinistic candidate. Like I would tell people in 2020, the best thing about being a Republican is I can vote against Cory Gardner twice.
I was raised Republican in a very strongly Republican area. Liberal was a snarl word long before I had any idea what it actually meant. The “D” next to a politician’s name may as well have stood for “Demon.”
I still live in the same area, but I have overcome much of my upbringing. The only thing that I would side with Republicans on at this point would be fiscal issues, if they actually stood for the fiscal issues they claim to represent, and not just cutting taxes at any expense.
Social issues, the Republicans have completely bankrupted themselves, and I find no semblance of common ground there.
But I usually vote in Republican primaries. As I said, I live in a Republican dominated area, so voting in the Democratic primary is just voting for who will lose in the general. It’s not my “job as a Republican”, but rather my job as someone who lives in Republican dominated area to try to “pull the party back” to try to choose the most moderate, least crazy.
And for years, this has worked, to some extent. The Republicans would field some reasonable candidates, and also some whackos. The wackos didn’t get the nomination, and in the rare chance they did, that was also the rare time that a Democrat would win.
Then the wackos started winning the primaries and the general, and so the object has been for each to try to out wacko the other. In this most recent primary, I couldn’t find a single Republican on the ticket that wasn’t a loony QANON Trumper, for any office, large or small.
I applaud the OP’s efforts of trying to pull the party back, but I’m afraid that this game of tug of war is becoming more and more one sided.
Nope. Any candidate that has supported the Insurrection, even if it is ‘Trump really won in 2020’ does not get my vote. There is one primary office here that, because of that, I didn’t vote for anyone in the primary and I’ve committed to voting Dem for that office … as long as its not Maxine Waters lol.
At this point, Dems are always the better candidate unless they have a felony conviction.
I just cannot see the reasoning in saying “I’ll just give power to parts of the group that are trying to take away our rights.”
The only way Republicans have any incentive to change is if they start losing elections, repeatedly, and are forced to respond to the needs of the voters.
But that’s impossible to sell in a 30 second TV ad.
OTOH When you apply the “household budget” analogy, i.e. lie, that’s instantly relatable, even if it’s totally inaccurate and irrelevant. “If I ran my household finances like that, I’d be bankrupt 100 times over in no time!” is the ONLY thing people hear.
Good for you (and I mean that). But that does seem rather difficult, at least from what I’ve seen – there are many Republicans running for office who refrain from echoing/supporting Trump’s lies and the insurrection, but rather few (at least that I can see) who actively call it out.
Not necessarily. Statewide in Colorado, maybe. But I would vote all but the most crazy-ass Pub over Hancock (D) as mayor of Denver unless you want a sexual-harassing, women-are-only-valuable-for-their-looks mayor. It’s not always about statewide elections though. In my area, the Republican primary winner is a lock in local elections. As I’ve said many times they run unopposed in the general. Voting for the moderate in those elections is right now the more powerful vote.