My first election was 1976, and I voted for Jimmy Carter.
What was yours?
1992 - Clinton
'96, Clinton.
John Anderson in 1980. I registered Republican in the state of Connecticut to vote for him in the primary and keep one of the two major political parties out of the hands of assholes like Reagan, Bush, and Connally.
Eventually voted for Dr. Barry Commoner of the Citizen’s Party in the general, and felt horribly and personally guilty for the next 12 years for the Reagan/Bush presidencies.
Voted a straight Democratic ticket ever since.
McGovern.
I still remember the headline on the campus newspaper the next morning … “McGovern Sweeps Massachusetts”
Carter, 1980. Was not especially enamored with Anderson, though many of my friends were. I recall being quite angry at Kennedy for challenging Jimmy and glad he fell short. So unlike some I was very happy to cast a ballot for President Peanut.
McGovern in 1972. I sure wasn’t going to vote for a second term for Nixon – though incidentally I’d supported him in 1960 (at the tender age of 11 though my Father. I know. voted Kennedy. My mother would never tell us who she voted for that year.)
McGovern.
Reagan, 1980. I liked Carter’s (and hence the Democratic Party’s) social politics better but Carter had vetoed… umm something (conceivably some form of family leave act… it involved gender equality in a peripheral way), saying “it may not be fair but sometimes life isn’t fair”. Pissed me off. I thought “Fucking hell, if the Democratic party just gives lip service to those ideals and then vetoes the bills anyway, what’s the appeal? The Republicans will balance the budget. And I know Reagan has said things about being against the ERA and against abortion but I know that’s just pandering to Jerry Falwell and his kind of people and they won’t actually try to do anything like that when they’re in office. And I don’t like the government going deeper into debt each cycle, that’s scary”
Of course, Ronnie boy didn’t balance the freaking budget and his administration did a shitload of stuff to push back social equality (gender and otherwise including of course their handling of the AIDS crisis) and I was appalled.
Kerry
Clinton in '96
Clinton, 1992.
ISTR voting for Republicans in a couple of state elections. State representative or something once or twice. Maybe the D candidate was campaigning from prison or something. I don’t recall now. But otherwise, in nearly 25 years of voting, I’ve effectively always voted a straight ticket.
Carter, 1976.
1972: I was four years old. My parents insist I decided I liked Nixon for some reason, which probably would have made me the only Nixon supporter they talked to during the entire campaign.
1976: I was getting in fistfights with Ford supporters on the playground.
1980: I enthusiastically supported Barry Commoner. If only this thread were a representative sample of Americans, history could have been very different.
1984: As an obnoxious revolutionary teenager, I refused to participate in the bourgeois sham of elections, or would have if I had been old enough.
Finally, in 1988, I was old enough to cast my first vote, for Dukakis. I literally didn’t know what I was going to do until I entered the voting booth, and agonized for several minutes over radical purism vs. realistic pragmatism. Since then, I have pretty much voted for the Democrat when I lived in potential swing states and leftist no-hopers otherwise.
Ford, 1976. One of the only two Republicans I voted for. The other one was Reagan. I’ve voted for Democrats every other time.
Mondale/Ferraro in 1984.
In 2008, I was horrified at how few people remembered, if they ever knew at all, that we’d had a woman on a major party ticket before. :rolleyes:
Obama in 2008. I was old enough to vote in 2004, but I hadn’t registered early enough.
In the 1972 California primary, I voted for McGovern, my mother voted for Humphrey, my father voted for Nixon, and my sister voted for George Wallace.
Richard Nixon in 1968. Hey, everybody makes mistakes.