Don't wanna **** of the gays or the stoners in the NW.

You just don't want to be a Republican candidate for political office in the Pacific NW.  The Dems could trot out a labotomized mule (Jay Inslee) and still win.

Posted by tecwrg on 10/17/2013 2:48:00 PM (view original):
"The amount of people who vote for a party rather than a candidate is staggering."

Agreed.  A brief story.

I loved my dad, and greatly respected him.  But he was a very strict "vote the party line" Democrat.  When I grew up in Pennsylvania, I believe the voting machines still had the "party lever" lever, so that you can just flick one lever and the machine would cast votes for all the Democrats (or Republicans) on the ballot.

We were a lower middle class family, my dad worked in a factory, he belonged to a union, and as I mentioned, he was a very staunch Democrat.  The one (and only) political discussion I can ever remember having with him, right after I turned 18 and was first eligible to vote, was very brief.  He told me how (a) the Democrats always looked out for the poor people and the "little guys", (b) the Republicans only cared about the rich people and themselves, and (c) therefore I should always vote for Democrats.  Implied (not directly said) was that Republicans were bad people.

This stuck in my mind as being a very narrow minded approach to voting.  One should not vote for somebody just because they were a Democrat, or a Republican, or whatever the hell they were.  Your vote should go to the person whose positions on the issues best align with your own beliefs on those issues.  And you're rarely going to get a complete alignment between your views and one of the candidates, so you need to think things through.  Voting is a responsibility.  Voting for somebody for no other reason that they have a (D) or an (R) next to their name on the ballot is irresponsible.

This is one reason why I am, and always have been, registered as an unaffiliated voter.

But don't you think that, for the most part, if your personal beliefs fall more towards one side or the other, then that party's candidate will almost always be the one "whose positions on the issues best align with your own beliefs?"

I'm fairly liberal. I think Keynes was right about the economy, I think gays should be allowed to marry. I think drugs and prostitution and abortion should be legal.

At the state and local level, Republicans can be an option for me. But, at the Federal level, the Republican's are almost always the exact opposite of what I would want. So I vote Democrat, even if that Democrat only aligns with me 40 or 50%, that's still better than 2% from the Republican.

Not to start another argument, but Keynes was dead wrong about the economy.  His model was based on the assumption that inflation and recession were mutually exclusive.  That was proven false in the 60s and 70s.  Adherents have massaged his original theory since then, and we can argue New Keynesian vs. neo-Classical until the cows come home, if you'd like.  You can also say that Keynes had ideas you agree with.  But to say Keynes was right is silly - he was proven wrong.

Posted by examinerebb on 10/17/2013 5:21:00 PM (view original):
Not to start another argument, but Keynes was dead wrong about the economy.  His model was based on the assumption that inflation and recession were mutually exclusive.  That was proven false in the 60s and 70s.  Adherents have massaged his original theory since then, and we can argue New Keynesian vs. neo-Classical until the cows come home, if you'd like.  You can also say that Keynes had ideas you agree with.  But to say Keynes was right is silly - he was proven wrong.

I think you have that slightly wrong.

His idea is that you can't sustain full employment and low inflation for a long period of time. He never said you couldn't have both a recession and inflation.

Posted by examinerebb on 10/17/2013 2:39:00 PM (view original):

Posted by The Taint on 10/17/2013 1:51:00 PM (view original):

Posted by examinerebb on 10/17/2013 1:33:00 PM (view original):
The amount of people who vote for a party rather than a candidate is staggering.  Our election for governor here in WA was a joke.  Rob McKenna (R) was endorsed by 90% of the (mostly very liberal) newspapers here, with many of them running editorials on how Jay Inslee (D) had absolutely no plan to deal with the issues the state was facing.  Inslee won.

McKenna was anti-legalization of pot and gay marriage. I think that cost him. It was close.

I think we're in trouble if "will they let me smoke weed with my same-sex spouse" is the defining question of our potential elected officials.

Freedom, equality, and another income stream.

I may have it wrong - I may be associating Keynesian Theory as a whole with his own book.  The idea that the two are mutually exclusive was a central tenet of Keynesian Theory for years until the late '60s/early '70s.  That said, it's been years since my economics/political science classes.  I'll try to get a copy and re-read, and happily 'fess up if that's the case.

Posted by tecwrg on 10/17/2013 6:03:00 PM (view original):
But don't you think that, for the most part, if your personal beliefs fall more towards one side or the other, then that party's candidate will almost always be the one "whose positions on the issues best align with your own beliefs?"

Of course.  But it's not like I go into each election season with a predisposition of automatically voting Republican at the federal level, even though it may work out that way more often than not.

As I already mentioned, I believe I may have voted for a D for congress last fall (I'm not 100% sure I remember that correctly) because I didn't think too highly of the R candidate.  And I didn't vote for anybody for CT's Senate seat on the ballot because I strongly disliked both candidates (even though Linda McMahon's positions on the issues aligned with my own).

I also can't see myself ever voting for a Tea Party Republican because, even though I mostly agree in principle with what they stand for (a Tea Party supporter friend of mine pointed me to the TP "mission statement" on their website), in practice they're pretty much all ******** who are doing more harm than good for the country.

I get that. I think a lot of people fall into the same camp as you. At least I do.

An Obama vote wasn't automatic for me in 2012. My primary concern was the economy. I looked at the positions that both candidates held on the economy and decided that Obama was the better choice  and that Romney would be a disaster.

I say that with two big asterisks. Obama's economic record wasn't great during his first term. But I think he failed mainly because he wasn't able to get more liberal policies put into place. A better President would have found a way to get the necessary stuff passed. That's his failure and he deserves criticism. The second asterisk is that I don't believe that Romney was buying his own bullshit. The guy is smart. He's run businesses. He knows that the ideas he pushed during the campaign would have crushed any recovery we have had. I doubt he would have followed through with them. 

I don't think very many people at all fall into the same camp.    Far too many vote all blue or all red because that's "how we do it."

Posted by MikeT23 on 10/17/2013 7:20:00 PM (view original):
I don't think very many people at all fall into the same camp.    Far too many vote all blue or all red because that's "how we do it."

I think you're making a big assumption about people you don't know.

In the 2012 election, did you vote in New York?

There was a senate vote in NY in 2012.

I'm actually making a statement about people I do know.

If you want to argue "Small sample size", feel free to do so.   But I believe you said "I haven't voted Republican in 13 years on the Federal level."    That's a pretty solid trend.

For the 2012 election, I did a lot of research on the candidates where I live, and although I generally lean left on most issues, I actually did vote Republican for HOR (he won easily, he's quite popular).  I'm sure I knew more about the candidates than the vast majority of those voting.

That said, when I got to vote, and I found more things to vote for than I anticipated.  Judges, mostly.  I voted blue across the board on those I didn't know.  And minutes after I left, I was kicking myself for doing that.  I shouldn't have voted for people I knew nothing about.  All I knew was democrat/republican.

My point is - I agree with Mike.  I'm sure there are many, many people who just pick "their side" across the board without thinking.  It's the wrong approach.