No, a vote for Trump is a vote for Trump. Vote for a leader you can support.
Not really the case when the election is first past the post.
Do you want Kodos? Because that’s how you get Kodos.
Meh.
We’ve had this conversation several time before where we have (foolishly, I think) tried to define what “conservative” means.
DJT may indeed be no true Scots… er, conservative… but he has absolutely done lots of stuff that will tick a couple of the boxes for most people that consider themselves to be “conservatives”… whether that be Bill Kristol, George Will, or Rush Limbaugh:
- Strengthened the borders
- Reduced taxes on businesses
- Reduced the regulator burden on businesses
- Prevented the weakening of the 2nd Amendment protections for current gun owners
- Reduced the avenues available for legal abortion
- Reduced the breadth of entitlements (if not the cost)
- Protected/strengthened religious exemptions
Now you could argue (and I would agree) that most of what he did for the above list and the way he did it was terrible for the country and ineffective, but those are all “conservative” policies,either socially, fiscally, or both.
And yeah, yeah: you could counter those with non-conservative actions like the protectionist tariffs or supporting abortion-rights in the recent (pre-POTUS) past. But that doesn’t change the fact that he’s enacted policies that no centrist or progressive would ever have touched.
Why I am a strong proponent of ranked choice voting.
And, again, the argument only is effective when talking about people living in 8-10 states. A person living in Kansas, Nebraska, New York, Illinois, Washington, Alabama etc have fuck all impact, and voting third party is fine.
If you live in Pennsylvania and vote third party, but don’t want the blame for Trump? Well fuck you, it doesn’t work like that. But in Hawaii? Knock yourself out.
I agree and would never vote for Donald Trump. I also stopped voting for Republicans before he was even a candidate, because I don’t think they’re a conservative party.
A vote for a fringe candidate is the only way of clearly stating that both parties are unacceptable.
I’m with philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, circa 2004 (although he promoted abstention).
Then I’ve poorly described myself. I would take away most of the power of the federal government and return it to the states. My taste for socialized medicine (and any form of socialism) gets higher the more locally it is exercised. Mainstream Democrats are still a party of global capitalism and elite internationalism, both of which I would dismantle. Democrats (including ones I admire, like Barack Obama) have explicitly tried to strong-arm religious institutions like schools and hospitals to abandon their religious principles and practices for their (the Dems’) political purposes. The Democratic party has broadly abandoned blue collar workers and their interests in favor of big tech and global finance; in that respect, I’m probably more pro-union than a lot of Democrats in office.
To @Tin_Wisdom’s point, I would consider these things NOT conservative:
- Separating families at the borders
- Threatening other nations with military retribution
- Passing tax cuts and regulation reductions that benefit big businesses over small
- Nominating an entitled cronyist lawyer to the Supreme Court
- Enacting protectionist policies without adequately promoting domestic economic growth
Anyway, not everyone has to agree with what I think is “conservative”, and I also think there’s a different thread for this anyway. To return to our regularly scheduled program:
Can we get Trump impeached already??
Pennsylvania was considered more solidly blue than Colorado at this time last cycle.
It is very hard to know where the line is until very close to the election. I’m fine with people choosing to support third-party candidates they admire, and with them only voting for the lesser of two evils when there’s a chance their vote will matter, but I think people are not very good at understanding when to draw that line.
To put it more directly, when you go to vote in the Presidential general election, you have 2 choices: 1) vote for the Democratic nominee or Republican nominee, based on which you prefer between the two, or 2) vote for the candidate you most strongly support. For some people 1 and 2 overlap, for those where it doesn’t, there’s a complex calculus:
If you vote for your preferred candidate, their party gains a very small amount of power, which gives them a very small amount of additional influence on the course of future elections.
If you vote for the lesser of two evils, the person you voted for gains a small chance of winning the election, or a small amount of additional public support, making their mandate stronger if they win and their opponent’s mandate weaker if the opponent (the greater of two evils) wins. If you are in a swing state, this effect is strong, if you are in a possibly-swing state, the effect is weak, if you are in a no-chance-in-hell swing state, the effect is very weak. Likewise, if you strongly prefer the lesser evil to the greater evil, the effect is strong, if you have only a slight preference, the effect is weak.
So, at what point does voting for your preferred candidate gain more for the causes and ideas you care about than roundly rejecting a fuckup as big as Trump?
For the record, If I were in some of these places, I might vote differently because of how abominable Trump is. I may think most of the candidates have bad positions, but only one is an existential threat to the union.
(That said, Colorado is not the bluest of blue states or anything.)
I’m not sure I agree with any of that at all. And I say that as a Democrat who is VERY interested in seeing better regulation of big tech and capitalism.
Can’t disagree with you there but I’d edit that sentence to be more inclusive. It’s not Democrats specifically who have abandoned blue collar workers, it’s the American political system, both in terms political parties and institutions, that has been generally captured by the richest elites to serve their interests.
I agree we’ve wandered off topic, but I do think there are a lot of disaffected conservative voters like yourself who have to make a hard choice in the current political environment. Either vote Dem because that way some (not all) of the things you want get done, or vote for fringe candidates to soothe the conscience and effectively become a dropout from the national political process. It’s a hard choice.
On behalf of hopeful people everywhere, thanks for nothing.
He’s a bog-standard Republican and American conservative on policy.
What that shows is that movement conservatives never really gave a damn about free trade. It was always about adopting whatever position was best for capital and weakened worker rights. Before, that was being a free trader. Now, it’s targeted protectionism.
I hope you’ll reconsider. Everyone who votes in 2020 should have the ousting of Trump and the marginalization of the Republican party as his or her primary concern. The way to do this is by supporting his direct opposition instead of standing on the sidelines.
EDIT: Okay, I just read your longer response, so thanks for spelling that out. But I stand by what I just wrote!
Perhaps it’s foolish in the context of contemporary American politics, but it’s not foolish in the context of the political spectrum. There’s a reason we don’t have this issue using the word “liberal”, and that’s because they have a place in the American political scene. There’s no ambiguity about what they represent and what they want. They haven’t had their party appropriated out from under them.
I still maintain that “conservative” is a useful word when we talk about politics, even though it no longer applies to the party that used to represent it. The only way you can characterize Trump supporters and Republicans as “conservative” is that they were cultivated by the party that used to represent conservative ideals.
At this point, supporting Trump isn’t about political positions or policy. It is 100% craven tribalism based on racism, xenophobia, and resentment. “Revanchist intolerance wrapped in formerly conservative ideas,” as I believe @Enidigm so eloquently put it. That it happens to tick a couple of conservative boxes is mostly irrelevant.
-Tom
A vote for a fringe candidate is a vote for whoever wins. It’s the same as not voting at all.
It is a choice to delegate the decision to other people.
What does this really mean? It’s like saying, “Death is unacceptable”.
Like it or not, you will be forced to accept one of the major party candidates.
This.
And to jump off and address things generally and not as a reply to magnet, who knows this alreayd: If you live in a parliamentary democracy, you can maybe relocate to a precinct or voting territory where you can find a candidate who’ll win whose views match your own almost to a tee.
And then that candidate is going to work with either the coalition government, or the coalition of opposition. It’s democracy in easy mode.
With the US system of separating the executive fully from the legislative branch, you are going to end up with a two - party system and two candidates. And as voters, we’re likely to disagree and agree strongly with various positions held by both candidates. But at some point you have to be an actual grown up who makes tough choices for themself and pick one or the other, while understanding that picking neither is a vote and endorsement for the candidate who wins.
There’s a reason that history has been unkind to Pontius Pilate.
Just in case somebody has not seen David Sedaris’ quote
“ I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. "Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it? To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.”
I guess in this analogy the evangelical Christians want to be the vegetarians that have no choice but to accept the meal that doesn’t have meat in it.
It helps to think of it as coalition voting. I have a lot of reservations about the modern Democratic Party but the Republicans are actively hostile to everything I care about. I’m not willing to sacrifice the safety and well being of minorities so my moral purity can rest easy knowing it didn’t vote for a President who was a bit too liberal with drone strikes. Drone strikes are terrible but you don’t have to put a gun to my head to make me choose between that and Fascism. I won’t sacrifice everything I hold dear for the sake of being able to say that I’m morally pure. I’ll take the hit if it will protect others thank you very much.
That was a drift from my original point about coalition voting. If the party that is most aligned with my values doesn’t have a chance to win power, I want the party that is more aligned with my values and goals to have that power and will do everything within my power to help them. I don’t have to agree with them across the board, they are merely allies. Shit, I don’t agree with my friends across the board.
I think the closer analogy for third party POTUS voting is:
“You say you want fish instead. The attendant says ‘we don’t have fish’. So you say: ‘I’ll have whatever the guy next to me wants me to have then’.”
Without having a bone in this fight, I think a lot of what is being said above about voting for a third party is rubbish. Democracy is all about being able to vote for the person you want to vote for, whoever that is. If a moron like Trump wins, that’s because a lot of other morons have voted for him, or not enough people have voted for the other candidate (which, in that case, apparently isn’t popular enough). Blaming that on anyone voting for a third party instead, because they wanted to vote for that third party, is unsavoury in my opinion.
If you don’t really have a favourite, vote for the ‘good’ one instead of a third party that won’t ever win. But if that third party is your favourite, don’t get bullied or blamed into voting differently.
The analogies are nonsense too. If you don’t like chicken and you don’t want to have the shit with glass, you should order something else or eat nothing at all. But that doesn’t mean you are to blame for the rest of the plane getting shit with glass (or chicken, for that matter).
I totally get that everyone here wants Trump out, so do I even though I’m at the other side of the ocean. But you should stop with forcing your choice upon others. Or perhaps better: I should stop reading P&R.
I’ll go and hide now…