No, of course not. No one owes me anything.
But when I ask someone to explain his thinking so I might begin to understand it, and his response is “I don’t owe you an explanation,” then I feel free to draw my own conclusions, some of which may not be accurate and most of which are not very complimentary.
Sure. But, the gist of this thread which you created here seems to be, “why won’t you tell me?” Sometimes – maybe even often – the answer is “it’s none of your business,” which is an answer you don’t seem to appreciate.
Seems to you maybe. To me, the gist is what it is–why is so hard to change your political affiliation?
This.
And I think some in this thread are conflating two very different things.
There’s “I am a Republican/Democrat because that’s an essential part of my identity.” And it seems to me that that indeed is what some people are doing.
And then there’s “I can never be a Republican/Democrat because they did/are doing X, Y, and Z; but I’m currently voting the Democratic/Republican line because the other party has been doing Q, and I believe Q is worse than X, Y, and Z all piled in together”.
It seemed pretty clear to me that the person in the other thread said their reason was the second one; and I don’t think that insisting that everyone in that position must be doing the first is useful. They’re not at all the same sort of motivation.
This is also true.
It’s true even if they’ve refused to say anything whatsoever about their reasons. But I’ll note also that if they have said something about their reasons, a response of refusing to accept their explanation is unlikely to be useful.
There are a multiplicity of explanations that have more validity to me than others. One might be “I promised my dying mother that I would never be a Democrat.” I could respect that loyalty to one’s promise, even if it’s largely an irrational one. Another might be “I detest the concept of identifying with a political party. I made an error previously identifying with one party, and now that I’ve decided that’s a bad idea, I refuse to identify with any party.” Another might be “My ex-husband is a Democrat and I won’t join any party he’s a member of.” Another might be “Al Sharpton once said something I was offended by and since he’s a Democrat, I don’t want to be affiliated with him in any way.”
I might find each of these explanations a little bit loopy, but I can begin to understand the process that got the speaker where he or she is.
But suppose the speaker is convinced that something that is objectively false is true. Like “I hate Richard Nixon, and Nixon was a Democrat.” It might do a person good to hear that Nixon wasn’t in fact a Democrat.
Or maybe this speaker is someone I have nothing against, because I know very little about his views, but his or her secret explanation is “I oppose miscegeny, and the Democrats support the mixing of the races” but doesn’t want to state that in public because he or she is aware of the grief coming his/her way for saying that out loud.
In California until mmm 2020, the Democrats would apparently let voters vote for any candidate (Dems or otherwise) if they registered Democrat. If they registered Republican, they could apparently only vote for Republican candidates. It sometimes didn’t felt hard to switch parties in a few of the elections since '94 since the registration rule seemed so black and white. I’ll bet other states may have had a similar rule.
The OP’s premise is fundamentally flawed. In the United States, one does not have to register ether Republican or Democrat but can be a member of a third party or unaffiliated. However, we effectively have a two party system with general elections so I don’t think there is a contradiction in saying I’m not a Republican or a Democrat but I will vote for the D or R candidate for this particular office for these specific reasons although I don’t agree with their platform in toto. So for example you could just hold your nose and vote for the more moderate candidate regardless of their party. This election the Republicans may be too religious-right so you vote Dem but next cycle the Democrats may be too progressive so you vote Pub.
And YMMV depending on your state. In Colorado as an unaffiliated voter you can choose R or D primaries to vote in so you can still work to influence your former party although not registered with them. Or it might be that you disagree with your party in your state. I could see where people might not want to be a Floridian or Texan Republican and choose to disaffiliate in those states in protest but are still Republicans in their heart.
But my biggest objection to the premise of the OP is the complexity of political thought. A person could come out and say they disagree with the insurrection and war on abortion and they support LGBTQ+ rights to which the OP may say then why are you not a Democrat? Because they have a hundred other views that agree with the Republican Party instead of the Democrats. And as I stated, political affiliation is not a binary choice.
I think this is a very judgmental statement. Who are you to judge the validity of another person’s personal choice in party affiliation? And different people have different standards of validity. Let’s say you say you are a Democrat because of Trump. I say your reason is invalid because Trump is only one guy who won an election against a badly-run Democratic campaign and then lost re-election. Is your reason valid? To you, yes but to me no. And ultimately the only judge of the validity of your reasons is you.
To clarify for anyone reading from outside the USA who isn’t familiar with USA election rules: that refers to the primaries only, which are in most states held separately by party (though usually at the same time and place, you just get a different ballot.) In the general election, anyone can vote for any candidate of any party; or write one in, though write-ins only win in really unusual circumstances.
This is true; but in some states (New York included) one has to register with a party in order to be able to vote in their primaries; so someone unaffiliated doesn’t get any primary vote at all, and nobody gets to vote in the primary of a party they’re not registered with.
I would have been registered as not a member of any party, all of these years – except that doing that when I first registered to vote lost me my only chance of ever voting for Shirley Chisholm. Not that my vote would have gotten her to win, of course; but I still regret that.
Yep–this is how I think about it for myself. If the Green Party ever becomes a legitimate political force, I’m much likelier to vote for them than for Democrats, as they’re much closer to my political beliefs (please don’t lecture me on how the current party is a toxic dumpster, I know that). I vote reluctantly for Dems because that’s the best chess move I can make to move society in the direction I want it to move.
But the Dems could, theoretically, move in a different direction. Imagine if a populist union leader came into power in the Dems and was really pro-American-labor, to the extent that they were virulently anti-immigrant. Imagine they despised rural populations and did everything they could to disenfranchise rural voters–like, they ensured that polling sites were apportioned strictly by population and were really inconvenient to access for rural people, or they held polling in places without parking lots, or they gerrymandered such that rural populations were divided amongst urban districts, diluting their power. Imagine that they removed all local educational control and gave all education funding to their cronies in business. That they repeatedly talked racist shit about China and Japan and Mexico in order to further their “Buy American!” message. And so on.
At that point, would I be able to hold my nose and vote for someone like Mitt Romney, with his anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-worker virulence?
It’d be really, really difficult to do so. Not because I’m all “TEAM RAH RAH DEMOCRATS” and I want to keep my team shirt. It’d be difficult because I’d be voting for stuff I actively hate in order to avoid something even worse, because what I’m voting for is not quite as bad.
Which is what I’ve been doing all my life. But this would be moving the “even worse” into the “not quite as bad” column, and that would suck.
I’m sure I disagree with Saint Cad on a host of issues. But setting that aside, I can understand how tricky it’s gotta be for someone who disagrees with Democrats to find themselves casting votes for them.
I kinda disagree with this. I fully expect you, and everyone else, to judge the validity of my choices. Politics isn’t a personal choice, it’s how we influence the government to butt into each others’ business, whether it’s by stopping me from doing the murders I really wanna do, or by forcing me to get my children educated, or by requiring me to wear seatbelts, or by punishing the sonofabitch who conned my grandma out of her life savings. I am going to make political decisions, and engage in political activity, which necessarily affects you and other people. Of course you and other people get to judge me for those choices and actions.
Except you are talking about actions which affect others. I’m talking party affiliation. What difference to you does it make whether I’m Republican, Democrat, Green, Libertarian or unaffiliated. Do you think that you should be judging the validity of someone choosing a religion or is it more about the validity of their reasons to be protesting at abortion clinics.
I assume that if you’re Republican, you’re tending to vote for Republican candidates; and casting votes is the primary political action that most people take. The judgment is for voting for Republican (or Democratic, or Green, etc.) candidates, not simply for the identification.
If someone is affiliated with the Republican party but doesn’t tend to vote for Republicans, I’m not quite sure what to make of that.
When I was a teenager, I was told that one shouldn’t change one’s party affiliation too often. I don’t know if anyone ever said why. But there’s at least my anecdotal evidence that this belief is (or was) out there.
Personally, I have never identified as a Democrat, Republican, or Green, though I’ve been registered as each of them (for rather different reasons). I used to consider all candidates seriously, but since Trump I’ve registered as a Democrat and I won’t consider a Republican candidate, nor third party for major offices. The memory of Bill Clinton and DOMA is still a little too bitter for me to ever think of myself as a Democrat, though: I won’t identify as a member of any party that threw me or other minorities under the bus, though of course I’ll vote for the lesser evil.
I love your post. So clear and rational. If only more Republicans would allow those insights to penetrate them.
Thanks for describing your process. Wonderful to read.
In my instance, I went from being Republican to independent. It was fairly easy, because my positions never budged - the GOP moved far away from me. I was standing pretty much fixed in place the whole time.
You took the words right out of my mouth…although I may consider changing back to Republican just for the Presidential primary, for the reason I state below.
As for why anyone would become a registered Whatever: the only reason to specify a party preference that I can think of is to vote in that Party’s primaries - and even then, in California, that applies only to the Presidential primary, as all other offices’ primaries are open. In fact, in one year - I want to say 2000 - all of the Presidential primaries were open as well, but the Republicans asked for a separate count of just the registered Republicans, presumably because of a party rule that says that if a Presidential primary is open to non-Republicans, then it can’t be used to allocate the state’s delegates.
This is essentially the question of the OP, right? The answer seems to be “some people tie up at least part of their psyche or self-identification in their party affiliation.”
But, almost always, those people tend to cast votes for the party with which they identify. I’m addressing the concept of “identification without action,” the person who identifies as Republican because, I dunno, they have the best lapel pins? I’m just not sure that people affiliate with a party without tending to vote for that party.
Well, this is clearly false, I think – there are tons of leftover registered Democrats in red states that never vote for the Democratic candidate for president, right?