Voting based on issues is dead and is never coming back. People vote for their tribe. If you’re in the blue tribe, I think you should vote in the primary for the candidate most likely to win in the general election. In the general, vote Democratic up and down the ticket. If you’re in the red tribe, I don’t have any advice for you. If you want to waste your vote on a third party, that’s your choice but keep in mind that is literally throwing your vote away.
Not only that, but the person is giving up their ability to shape who will actually be in charge of things. Even if the person doesn’t like either of the top two candidates, certainly the person feels one will be better than the other. One of those two is going to win. Not voting for those two increases the chance that the worst one will end up wining.
I sometimes think of it like voting for what the office should order for lunch when the choices are something like sandwiches, pizza, or sushi. In most workplaces, the winner will almost always be either sandwiches or pizza. Someone voting for sushi is going to end up with sandwiches or pizza unless there is something very non-typical about their workplace. A vote for sushi is a vote for “I don’t care if sandwiches or pizza win.” For lunch it’s no big deal, but politicians are never so equivalent that it doesn’t matter which one wins.
An election is not a poll. The goal shouldn’t be to let everyone know what your opinion is (which is stupid because voting is anonymous unless you make a public proclamation about it), it should be to make sure that that the better of the top two candidates (and, until cloning is perfected, there will always be a difference between candidates) is put in office. If you think there is a third candidate that is better, the time to support that candidate is not at election time when that candidate is running a distant third(or fourth or fifth or sixth). Get in at the start, recruit as many as possible, and actively campaign…then later on evaluate that candidate’s real chance of pulling off an upset.
Problems with strategic primary voting include:
– Few American voters are familiar with the best political science research that could inform such a decision.
– While most rigorous research points in the same direction (moderates tend to win), there is other research suggesting candidate identity doesn’t much matter.
What most research says is here (including footnoted articles):
Candidate Ideology and Turning Out the Base in US Elections
This recent contrarian article says that the moderate candidate November advantage has dissapeared (unfortunately behind a pay wall unless you have a cooperating library account):
Man Bites Blue Dog: Are Moderates Really More Electable than Ideologues?
Nitpick - California has a top-two primary. Newsom’s November opponent could be another Democrat or an Independent, not necessarily a (R).
The state GOP seems to have completely written off this cycle. I have never heard of any of the other candidates on the ballot. I thought for sure Faulconer, the San Diego mayor, ran in the recall just to build name recognition for this year (lots of ads until Elder sucked all the oxygen out of the room), but he’s not running.
Yeah, but there really aren’t much in the way of Dem names there.
Personally, I back the candidate I love in the primary and learn to love whoever wins the nomination. It doesn’t hurt that one of the things I love about a candidate is their electability. In the general, there is one party that I think presents a grave threat to not only democracy in America, but to literally life on earth, so I do what I can to prevent them from gaining more power.
I live in a very red area, no Democrat has won a nationwide (or local for that matter) office in my lifetime.
The Democratic candidate is usually pretty terrible, often someone just out of school with a poli-sci degree, and they have very little support.
So, while in theory, the Republican is more experienced and would probably do a better job (if not agree with my ideals), I vote for the Democrat, as a signal to the party that there are votes out there for them to get, and if they run a more serious candidate with real support, they may have a chance.
The candidate I was referring to was Ed FitzGerald, whose disastrous run for governor in 2014 (both the Washington Post and N.Y. Times used the word “imploded” to describe it) wounded Democrats up and down the ticket. He carried a grand total of 2 of 88 Ohio counties in losing to Republican John Kasich*, while managing to lose in previously safe Democratic strongholds in northern Ohio. As the Times put it:
“Just five weeks before Election Day, Ohio Democrats have descended into recriminations, with many angry and frustrated that the state party did not do a better job vetting the little-known Mr. FitzGerald, handing him the nomination without a primary that could have aired his past. “It was incredibly foolish; Ed had never really been tested,” said Greg Haas, a Democratic operative in Columbus.”
There were a lot of people in Ohio sending a message to the Democratic Party that year.
*I actually voted for Kasich a second time (when he faced Donald Trump in the Ohio presidential primary of 2016).
Fair enough, and though I did vote for him, I have come to blame him for being at least in part a reason for Ohio’s move to the right. Lotta factors there, but his unpopularity certainly was a large one.
As did I. I typically vote in the Republican primaries as that is where the real choice for who will be in office is made. I try to vote for the least reprehensible candidate, hoping to move the party a bit towards sanity. Last week, I voted in the Democratic primary, as I have an acquaintance running, and wanted to show support, even though we all know he’ll get annihilated in the general.
I’d say vote for whomever you feel is the better candidate, regardless of what the news tells you everyone else thinks. Your candidate may not win, but if you feel like you’re being offered two flavors of shit sandwich there’s nothing wrong with going for the ham on rye. Everyone will tell you that you’re the reason the shitbag won, but that’s only because THEY were too afraid to go for ham on rye as well. Home of the brave indeed.