I’m pretty sure trivial numbers of write-in votes don’t even get recorded. Instead, they are counted as undervotes, the same as if the voter had skipped the race entirely. So no one will get your “message” except the civil servant who has to take the extra time to hand-count your ballot.
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Which is fine. The point is not to get Sanders elected or to have him show up in the results. The point is that Clinton sees a lower overall Dem vote count in my state than Obama or her husband got, so she’s motivated to follow through on her promises during her first term. And yes, I’m voting on principle, so I am skipping the Presidential race this year while voting for other politicians. If there’s a way to do that without inconveniencing a vote counter I’m open to suggestions.
Just don’t vote in the presidential election. If you look at the reporting (by the Auditor’s Office, not the media) of elections, you’ll see that they report the total number of ballots received along with the results of each race.
The total number of ballots is almost always greater than the number of votes in any given race. The difference is called the undervote. Downballot races tend to have especially large numbers of undervotes. Many principled Republicans are predicted to skip voting for Trump.
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That works. What’s the preferred notation? Leaving it blank?
Yes!!! This is how you win politics!
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Yep, leave it blank.
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There’s reason to believe Merrick Garland was the appointee for a GOP dominated Congress in a lame-duck session. I wouldn’t be surprised to see someone to the left at the beginning of a new Dem admin.
I see a lot of people saying this, and I understand that in some states this is really, deeply true. I just hope people are being careful not to assume that the past is going to be a good predictor of the future in this election.
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Qualify “many”. Millions or as in hunter gatherer arithmetic, i.e. 1, 2, 3, many?
Even the bookmakers lost money on the UK independence referendum, because it turned out that more than 50% of the electorate was easily deluded. I agree. Any assumptions at this point must be tempered by the sheer fact of Trump.
(Yes, I was wrong as pointed out by @anon50609448 (I bow in your general direction). It appears that the enthusiasm for voting Remain was such that the bookmakers were able to offer much worse odds than were justified by the polling. I should have remembered rule #1 of casinos: The house always wins given a sufficient time period.)
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Nate Silver gets this, and I have no reason to doubt his analysis here. The HRC campaign should 100% be listening to this and doing something in response to it.
However…
If what energizes them (us! I’d count myself as a pretty big Bernie supporter who is by no means in the bag for Hilary personally) is Bernie’s agenda, Hilary is the most likely candidate to get some of that through.
If you want Bernie’s agenda to gain any ground, Hilary is who you should vote for, pragmatically.
If ideological purity is more important, don’t vote for her, but also don’t be surprised if she loses and zero of the things Sanders stands for get traction, as opposed to 10-15%.
A token HRC campaign position isn’t a sideways firing. She’s out at the DNC, and it’s a significant victory for Sanders, as is the Democratic party platform (though not perfect!), as is basically everything everyone said last night in their grand and moving speeches.
It is completely reasonable to continue to push on HRC to remember that Sanders voters turning her way is not a guaranteed thing, and to continue to push her and the DNC in general to be more like him.
Where it goes of the rails is in the “If I can’t have everything I want, I’m going to do what feels good for me, and fuck everyone else!” attitude of the “never Hilary”/“jail Hilary”/“boooo” crowd. That’s playing right into the hands of Trump and his Russian provocateurs.
The word is “progressive,” and progress is always gradual. It must be continually pushed for, but you also can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good if you hope to accomplish some good.
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I wouldn’t be doing it (leaving the Presidential line blank) if I wasn’t confident that she’ll win my state by a very comfortable margin. If she somehow lost my state she’d have blown the entire campaign big-time all on her own. In other states I’d hold my nose and vote for her.
Worth remembering. There is a progressive school in North London founded by the founders of University College. It’s school song is “Paulatim sed firmiter” - slowly but surely, and that has proved more successful than revolutions. Social progress only really got going in the 17th century and it has had many setbacks. Michelle Obama reminded us of how many of our existing structures were built by - or paid for by - slave labour. It’s all around us. (Well, not around me personally, but all too visible in most large cities in the UK and older ones in the US).
I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that both Trump and the people behind Leave in the UK are motivated by the desire to helotise the majority. Wall Street shares that view - it wants to make labour cheap and disposable in the interests of ever more wealth transfer. Without Sanders, Clinton would just be supporting a slightly cosier relationship with the helots.
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Something they don’t seem to get is that they ARE leaders of the Dem Party now. All of those Sanders delegates are Dem Party officials.
They can go home - or build upon that power they have.
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No, the bookies cleaned up. When people say the betting odds showed 75% for remain, that means the majority of the bets were placed on remain. The bookies were praying for leave. Here’s a piece written the day before Brexit:
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Jill Stein won’t win, isn’t qualified to be President and there’s no reason to think she’d be any good at it if she did win.
Yes, you can vote third party if you’re not in a swing state. It’s what I’d be inclined to do if I had a vote. But beyond making you feel better, would it really achieve anything?
Clinton will be meh. Much like Obama has been a mixture of very positive and very disappointing. The alternative doesn’t bear thinking about.
If you want progressive government, make sure progressives get elected lower down the ticket (luckily for me, looks like my next congresscritter will be someone definitely progressive - whichever of the two likely candidates it ends up being). A progressive Congress would empower/encourage/force Clinton to govern to the left of where she has been previously. She’s a pragmatist. If the window goes left, so will she.
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I’ve likened the rhetoric of demonizing your political opponent to turning the contrast up to the max in Photoshop. It’s now black and white, there’s no gray areas between the sides. The subtle information is gone. Of course you can’t support Hillary (or Gore before her) because they’re every bit as bad as the GOP. Just look, it’s all black! They’re the same!
Clearly Trump and Clinton are NOT the same, but these self-brainwashed people have rendered themselves incapable of seeing the gray areas. A similar process has happened in Congress where even when the opposition has an idea they agree with, they are incapable of cooperation. I posted a link to Warren’s antitrust speech in a forum of mostly libertarian leaning conservatives, and sure enough, even though they agreed with the message they dismissed it because the messenger was a Democrat and “Pocahontas”.
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Absolutely spot-on. And I too sense that many forget this. The Bernie-or-Bust electorate is the elusive cherry on top that the Dems may well need to win the presidential election. Possibly even more essential, however, is that the BoBers realize that their vote matters at least as much in the Congressional elections and that they can extend their voice beyond mere votes. In short, the Dems need their energy if for no other reason than to seed a progressive movement in Congress.
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Politics is about the art of the possible, not about being right, its not even concerned with how it wrongs people, just that its goals are accomplished.
He is not the candidate but he does still have an agenda, if his agenda is best served by Clinton rather than Trump (by whatever value of best you care to define), then by all appearances he did not give up because he lost the presidency. That’s pretty damned respectable if you ask me.
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You missed a couple of thank you’s at the beginning there.
Bastards, always trying to cut Bernie down!
I agree with you, but not totally. I don’t see Clinton as “as bad as Trump”. I see plenty of grey area.
What feels bianry however, what looks black and white are the calls for me to vote for Clinton, or else I am supporting Trump.
You can’t have it both ways or, well,… then you are as bad as Trump! Har har har…
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