I had been thinking the same lines.
There are intelligent and honest people who will work for what I am against, and fairly dumb people with skeletons who will do what leadership tells them to do and make the goals I desire more likely to happen.
Intelligence and honesty are not enough.
I’d also support a useful idiot in this highly partisan reality.
And as it turns out how the “vote splitting” would have affected this by-election, it doesn’t matter, the “good guy” won! Congrats!
Yeah, I’ve been thinking along the same lines, when everyone was calling Republicans hypocrites for still supporting Walker after all the abortion stories came out.
Thing is, if situations were reversed, I’d probably do the same thing. If there were a race between a pro-LGBT Democrat, and an anti-LGBT Republicans, and someone releases tape of the Democrat talking about how much he hates queer people… I’m still going to vote for the guy who’s personally a piece of shit, but advances policies that I think are really important, over the guy who might be less of a piece of shit, but is going to advance policies that I think are really harmful.
Walker didn’t say he hates straight white people, he paid someone to murder his children.
That’s what makes them hypocrites, the stated belief that a thing is murder, coupled with voting for a man who did that thing to his own children.
Between you and me, I know the ‘abortion is murder’ thing is lie, but if they’re going to lie about their beliefs, we should at least have the right to act like they’re telling the truth, and call them out on how they willingly voted for a serial baby murderer.
Some people do genuinely believe that abortion is murder. I’m coming to realize that the pro-life faction is probably outnumbered by the anti-choice faction, but the pro-lifers do exist. And I still at least hope that the anti-choicers wouldn’t be competitive without the pro-lifers as allies.
I wouldn’t. If you are at all bipartisan, and there are some things that the honest candidate will do that you are for; vote for that candidate. The other one is just saying what he thinks will get him elected; no guarantee that he’ll vote that way in the House/Senate. Heck, you have no idea if they will follow up on any of their positions. Looks to me like the two will actually vote the same way on the issues you care about, so why not vote for the candidate with some morals?
But if he were elected, he’d pass laws that make it harder for other people to murder their children. Warnock is going to pass laws making it easier for other people to murder their children. If I’m a big pro-life voter, I’m not a hypocrite for supporting Walker. I can hate Walker for being a baby murder, but hate Warnock more for supporting policies that make it easier for everyone else to be baby murderers, too.
(Note for any readers who struggle with context: I’m not pro-life at all, and don’t view abortion as baby murder.)
If the option is between a guy who might be lying about doing something that I really want him to do, and a guy who is absolutely not lying about doing something that I really, really do not want him to do, I’m going to vote for the maybe-liar on the chance that I’m wrong about him lying about this thing. But, also, I don’t have any reason to think Walker is suddenly going to grow a pro-choice voting record once he gets in office. He’s a self-serving hypocrite, but in this case, he doesn’t gain anything by flipping on abortion once he’s in office, and stands to lose considerably when he’s up for re-election. Even if he really wants to keep his options open about paying another mistress for an abortion, he’s got enough money that a federal ban isn’t really going to limit his options all that much.
Yeah, but Walker is reality and has a whole hellova lot of other baggage; I was answering the hypothetical where one truth came out.
Besides that, I’m not a one-issue voter. I’m not going to vote “D” just because there’s a “D” there or because the candidate is pro-choice. I’m going to look at the whole picture, and vote for the candidate that best represents my interests, not the interests of the party.
I am, pretty much, when it comes to LGBT stuff. I’m also significantly to the left of most elected Democrats on most other issues, so the odds of me crossing over to vote for a Republican are pretty much nil. If I have the choice between an intelligent, honest Republican who will vote against every issue I think is important, and a cheating dumbfuck Democrat who will vote for every issue I think is important, that’s not really a choice for me. I’d rather have the reprehensible idiot voting the right way for all the wrong reasons, then the smart, morally consistent candidate who will vote against every thing I think is important. That’s not me putting party above personal interest, that’s me advancing my personal interests in the only avenue available to me at the time.
Before the runoff, folks here were wondering how the liberatarian vote would split.
The results are interesting:
General
D 49.44
R 48.49
L 2.07
Runoff
D 51.45 (+1.91)
R 48.65 (+0.16)
There may have been some folks that moved from D to R or R to D, but if we consider that a wash, then the third party vote from the general went to the D candidate 12:1
We can’t conclude that at all. Maybe most of the third party vote stayed home along with a lot of the R voters.
Fair enough, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
It will eventually be very interesting to see the actual data at some point.
The Oliver vote total was something kornacki kept mentioning last night. It depended on the county but it appeared that warnock kept picking up the percentage or created a wash with half going to him and half to walker.
I’m with @Miller and @Left_Hand_of_Dorkness. I don’t know what it would take to get me to vote for any Republican over any Democrat these days, especially with the House and Senate so closely divided. I don’t want anymore assholes in the judiciary or fucked up spending bills.
I think that the key difference between the parties is that we Democrats don’t have folks like Walker, at least not in the general election. Nor Boebert, nor Greene, nor Gaetz, nor Trump himself. We can talk about hypotheticals, but that’s all they are, because a candidate like any of those would never make it past a Democratic primary.
The runoff vote was 400,000 less than the election. However the third party vote split or stayed home was swamped by the lowered turnout.
I think I’d make a distinction between state and federal offices. Federally this country is just too polarized for me to take a chance - it would have to be a near felony-level offense for me to choose an “inoffensive” Republican over a shit Democrat.
State offices, different story. Decentish “CA-moderate Republican” a la Schwarzenegger vs. a shitty Democrat for governor? Especially knowing there is a Democratic super-majority in the CA legislature to keep them more honest? I might vote for the Republican. Maybe. And the farther down the chain you go, the more likely I might lean that way. Insurance commissioner? More likely than governor. etc.
However I am pretty liberal myself, so they’d have to be a pretty-fucking moderate Republican and the Democrat a real shit-heel. But that first is harder and harder to find these days. Newsom’s last opponent wasn’t awful but he voted for Trump in 2020, so he went into my automatically disqualified pile.
I think this is largely correct at the national level, but less so at the local level. I have seen (admittedly, NOT much in the last few election cycles) more qualified Republican candidates and fully underqualified (or unqualified) Democrat candidates for local office. In part that’s because the local area is so heavily (R) that most qualified local candidates don’t bother.
BUT, most recent (post 45) cycles have been filled with people who on the local scale are running on anti-CRT / Stop-the-Steal / Christian Supremacy doctrines to the point where I find myself reluctantly voting for an unskilled candidate because they can at least learn, while the other is either cynically appealing to the base or has gone off the deep end.
BUT part 2, if a local representative is one of the now vanishingly rare ‘traditional’ Republicans, I can consider it. Because the stakes are lower. Sadly, they are unicorn rare in my area, as they’ve been shouted down by so many MAGA types.
And Hajario’s comments above apply for most state positions and certainly voting for any Federal positions.
Personally, I think even the most qualified Republicans are poison to me for a generation. The ones that I would consider as responsible and willing to put the nation first have almost all been pushed out of the political arena, and the ones that remain that aren’t true MAGA proved more than willing to ride the Tiger until it cynically no longer served their purpose, and now claim that we should all “put it behind us for the good of the nation.”