This is also something I don’t completely understand. Trump/MAGA, IMHO, has turned your elections into contests of good vs bad and, at this point subtle nuances of goodness are a dangerous distraction.
Not to hijack, but is there any evidence that happened to any significance?
There never was any proof. It happened but in small enough numbers to be insignificant.
<adam savage>“Well, there’s your problem!<\adam savage>
Stranger
Did it happen enough to put him over the top? I don’t know, and I don’t know that we could really ever find out for sure.
Did it happen at all, helping him get the nomination? Yes, unless the people on social media that said that that was exactly what they were doing were lying.
I assume the OP is a Republican because they agree with Republican policies and want to see them advanced.
Sometimes it is tough to let go.
I had stopped voting Republican by 1996 on the National (non-primary) level but didn’t officially leave the party until 2008.
It’s a numbers game though, Trump won by a large margin in the primary.
44.9% and 41 contests to Ted Cruz in second at only 25.1% and 11 contests. Those small number of Social Media warriors made no difference at all.
Even the state general elections don’t elect the President, exactly. Look up the Electoral College.
I live in Philadelphia. The anti Oz ads are transphobic, hateful and scary. The pro Oz ads are hateful, transphobic and scary.
It makes me proud to be a leftwing liberal bleeding heart Democrat. I will be voting in the Democrat primary. I’ve missed one election since I turned 18. The highest office was county coroner. There were no ballot questions. I had a bad flu.
Yep, Voters don’t elect the President, States do. It’s complicated.
This can be confusing. The primary elections were supposed to be the private election of candidates for political parties. Political parties are private affairs in this country, only regulated because of the great public interest in the results. So these primary elections don’t have much legal status. They choose a candidates to run for public office under a party name, but anyone can run for any office under their own party. Primaries are so intertwined with elections that a private individual has to make up a party name to go on the ballots. While political parties and primaries are not supposed to be an official part of our election process their impact is unavoidable.
So in the case, in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, only registered members of the Republican party can vote in the Republican party election to select a candidate to run under the Republican party name in the general election. In my state, only recently known by it’s shortened name of Rhode Island, anyone registered to vote can choose the party they will vote under at the time of the primary. In this kind of setup there can be large shifts of party status in order to vote against candidates in the primary. It’s actually a terrible system if you think about it.
My brother did the opposite. He was so outraged by the idea of Trump being a serious candidate that he voted in the Republican primary to cast a vote for Kasich just on principle.
As did I, and I do think that that is a perfectly acceptable reason to cross the aisle. Whether or not those who went over to vote for Trump made a difference, they should feel pretty shitty for having done so.
Through some quirk, their party politics are part of the official electoral apparatus. For the American speakers among us, Canadian party politics are private affairs that are of no concern to Elections Canada or the provincial counterparts.
Up here, party members either just sign up online for free or pay a token fee ($10 or so) in return for the right to vote for local party and leadership candidates. And to get called endlessly for donations…
In 2016, a friend of mine “supported” Trump from the start, the way you’d “support” Pat Paulson. He was laughing all through the primaries, and I’ll admit it was funny for a bit. Watching the monkey at the zoo masturbate, funny. He never thought Trump could possible really win it all.
He was never a Hillary supporter, but he was shell-shocked when she lost
I didn’t think Trump could win the Primary but I was pretty sure HRC had a good chance of losing.
Losing to Trump was shocking though.
So that’s the same.
To be fair, it made decent sense when it could take weeks to get to the Capital by horseback.
It’s a valuable strategy to try and change things from within rather than from without. If the OP is still holding out hope to try and get back the Republican Party he used to agree with, it can make sense to stick with them.
As I would prefer that either the Republican Party would die out or have to reform to something better than it has been in my entire lifetime, I don’t share this idea. However, I do live in a very red state, where, for national offices at least, the Republican primary is most often the de facto general election. So that’s my rationale for never changing my registration.
Here in the Soviet of Washington we use another system: “top two.” There’s no Democratic or Republican primary election; instead, all candidates for a particular office are listed and the top two go on to the general regardless of party (most candidates self-identify with a party, but that’s more shorthand than anything official). Party affiliation/preference is not part of voter registration.
Back in the Good Old Days we had a blanket primary where voters could choose any candidate. As long as this was confined to a relative backwater, the national parties kind of looked the other way; then California tried the same thing, and the resulting lawsuit caught Washington in the fallout. The present system is an attempt to get close.
ETA clarification: there are Democratic and Republican “primaries” in Presidential election years, but they’re for selecting convention delegates rather than candidates. And they seem to be on the way out.