Ralph Nader and I voted for him and I was still a registered Republican back then. I did not like Gore and hated Cheney and thought Bush was an idiot so I voted for the Green Party candidate. In theory my vote would have Republican.
Anything over a year is a long time in politics. I remember circa 2003 and the “Can anything stop Howard Dean” articles. He was definitely flavor of the day at that time.
In the end he didn’t do squat.:rolleyes:
So I’m not worried about CC right now. But if he even runs in '16 I will be one of the majority that keeps him off the ticket.
So can heterosexual behavior. AIDS is devastating Africa, and not because they’re all gay there.
I’ll echo the call for a cite. That many Republicans sitting it out would have led to a decline in turnout and an even bigger win for Obama.
McCain nominated the right wing’s darling for VP, remember? It wouldn’t have mattered in any case, since Bush screwed the pooch so badly McCain didn’t really have a chance.
Romney definitely turned right, though he was a bit all over the map. What he said in the secret video was quite conservative. His problem was that he couldn’t even put away the line of bozos he faced.
However, I think you opinion is common, and it won’t change until the Republicans nominate a true blue Tea Partier and he gets crushed. And even then it will be the fault of the mainstream media, no doubt. That you don’t win by moving to the extreme is Politics 101.
Depth of hate is really not very important. It doesn’t matter if you dislike Clinton or hate Clinton with the burning rage of a thousand suns. The result is identical - you cast your vote for somebody else.
Elections are not decided by the people who love or hate the candidates - those people made up their minds who they were going to vote for decades ago. Elections are decided by the swing voters in the middle who really are genuinely willing to vote for either either side. These are the voters you have to reach to win.
That’s why the Democrats keep winning elections. They reach for the center where the needed votes are while the Republicans are reaching for the right. The Republicans want to win in 2016? Look for a candidate who’s more moderate than Clinton instead of looking for a candidate who’s more extreme.
I think Romney said it best when he said that President Obama bought the election with promises to the poor people of this land and in the end that’s who put him over the top.
Can you name anything in particular that Obama promised to poor people? Didn’t think so.
Imagine! Wanting to govern in favor of the actual majority instead of just the billionaires…
Devout conservatives like Santorum? Palin? Bachmann? Cain? those 2-3 million who decided to sit out would have been canceled out by the tens of millions who would never vote for one of your “devout conservatives”. The problem with McCain and Romney was that they had to pretend to be right wing loons to get through the primaries then had to attach right wing loons to their campaigns to appease the base. What if McCain had ran with a solid business man like Romney instead of a complete moron? what if he had not had to disavow immigration reform he fought very hard for because “devout conservatives” are racists to the bone? What if Romney had not had to be the “self deportation” candidate for the same reason? or had not disavowed his greatest accomplishment because suddenly a republican based health care reform plan was the worst thing to happen to America? Your “devout conservatives” are the biggest problem with America right now and the reason the Republican party is floundering when they should be thriving.
Pat Buchanan. That’s not what you meant, but it’s true.
If you vote. The people in this forum aren’t representative of the US electorate, which shows up at about 55% for an average presidential election. When they really hate the opponent, it’s more like 60%.
Yep, a winning streak that’s as long as…
two. One candidate, two elections.
Before that, the Republicans won two in a row with a guy that was not moderate.
I don’t know, but I do know that if he won, they would be united in opposition to his legislative proposals.
First rule for a new American political party is that you have to get your people in the legislatures before they can go into executive positions.
P.S. Actually, I do think I know who he would take more votes from. I think he would take more votes from the GOP. But since that wasn’t the point of my post, I didn’t mention it originally.
If Romney said that, it was a dumb move. Romney’s problem throughout the campaign was the perception that he was a rich person who only cared about the interests of other rich people. Romney would have been foolish to badmouth the poor because most of us realized we’re the poor in his eyes. Romney needed to put out a Roosevelt/Kennedy message of “I may be rich but I care about the needs of the poor.” The fact that he failed to sell this message (and barely tried) is a big reason why he’s not President.
I still say if McCain had picked Pawlenty (who was supposedly his first choice) he could have won.
I think it was fox news (it’s been a while). And, by the way, I left out an important detail; these people actually had two** reasons for not voting:
- Like I pointed out before, they said Romney wasn’t conservative enough.
- Many were Evangelicals who refused to vote for a Mormon.
People are not born gay, and they’re not born straight either. No one is “born” with a sexual preference; sexual preferences originate during adolescence/puberty, not at birth. I believe that a child who grows up in a normal, healthy environment will be straight when he or she hits puberty; if he or she turns out to be gay, lesbian or bisexual, my theory (emphasis on “theory,” seeing as I’m not an expert) is that it may have something to do with unusual childhood experience (molestation, exposure to pornography, etc.).
Homosexuality is not “natural” because the way human beings were created/designed is indicative of the fact that procreation is meant for opposite sex couples. Males have sperm and females have ovaries. The only way for procreation to work is when male and female organs work together.
I’m not an expert on HIV or AIDS, but I do know that one of those things can be the result of homosexual behavior. Not to mention, bleeding from the anus is another result.
The attitudes I’ve expressed about you*? I didn’t even know you were gay.***
All of my responses to your questions are inside the quote box. It was a mistake.
Which, see, makes it okay for him to express those attitudes, since they were directed at the Great Faceless Homosexy Masses, not at an actual individual. Not deliberately, anyway.
By the way, I’m gay, too. So are a whole bunch of Dopers. You might want to consider that you ARE talking about us, even if you’re not intentionally directing your remarks at each of us as individuals.
Substantially true, but amend that: Elections are also won by voters on the extreme fringes, who might stay home on e-day unless one of the candidates at least gives the appearance of being extreme enough for them in their way. They’re the RW voters who gave the Tea Party its 2010 boost, and the LW voters who got behind Obama in 2008 and, for the most part, in 2012.
Well, that’s exactly the way it always should be, isn’t it?
Okay, thanks for the heads up.
True. But most campaign decisions risk alienating some voters as you seek the support of others. So it’s about deciding whether you gain more votes than you lose.
By that logic, moving towards the center makes sense. First, there are more voters there - by definition, most voters are in the middle even if the location of that middle can shift. Second, if you lost voters on the extreme, your opponent doesn’t gain them. Voters who thought Obama was too conservative or Romney was too liberal either sat home or voted for some third party candidate - they didn’t defect to the other major candidate. But lose voters in the middle and they might switch to supporting your opponent and that means he’s gone up by the amount you went down. The damage from those lost votes is doubled.