No, that’s how voting for every office but President works. A vote for Gary or Jill or Mickey Mouse for President is a vote for the elector which has pledged to vote for Gary or Jill or Mickey Mouse.
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i’ve read several of your statements about your third party vote and your reasons for rejecting either of the major candidates over the past couple of months. it seems to me that you have a very poor understanding of the history of political parties in the united states as well as a remarkably idiosyncratic way of understanding the way parties work currently. having been fascinated with politics in this country along with the intersection of politics with civil and economic rights since i was in my teens and having spent a lot of time reading and studying the history of our political system along with political theory over the 40 years since then i have a hard time taking your theory of the vote seriously. given the enormous differences in the consequences of a trump presidency compared to those of a clinton presidency your apparent stance that it makes no difference to you whether clinton or trump is elected president strikes me as amoral at best.
i find it quite remarkable that the efforts of a cluster of far-right billionaires over the past 30 years to paint the clintons as utterly corrupt appears to have succeeded, which i think is a great pity. despite bill’s misguided efforts along the lines of welfare reform and criminal justice reform, he was capable of doing a lot of good for this country and although he hasn’t been as profound a humanitarian as jimmy carter, still the clinton foundation has managed to do a great deal of good globally.
if the democratic party had nominated rob blagogevich from his jail cell as their candidate for president i would have been unable to vote for him. even then i would not vote for a candidate like gary johnson who supports tpp, who supports fracking, who opposes any federal policies that would make college more affordable or reduce student debt, who thinks citizens united was a great piece of jurisprudence, who favors a balanced-budget amendment and has previously suggested that he would slash federal spending 43 percent in order to balance the budget, who opposes net neutrality, who wants to increase the Social Security retirement age to 75, who opposes any kind of national health care and wants to repeal obamacare, who opposes practically all forms of gun control, who opposes any kind of paid maternity or medical leave, who supported the Keystone XL pipeline. who opposes any government action to address climate change, who wants to cut the corporate tax rate to zero, who wants to block-grant medicare and turn it over to the states, and who wants to repeal the 16th amendment and eliminate the income tax, the payroll tax, and the estate tax. nor would i vote for jill stein who represents a party that has never attempted the hard work of creating a grassroots constituency with party offices and candidates from the local level up. were i to go with a third party candidate it would likely be alyson kennedy and i would have participated in the hard work of getting enough signatures to qualify her and her party on the texas ballot.
fortunately i don’t have to do that because i have an eminently qualified candidate in clinton. true, she is boringly conventional but conventional in ways that will allow us as a nation to keep moving forward rather than backward into a new era of racemongering and anti-immigrant hysteria garnished with the danger of filling the supreme court with some of the least progressive justices since roger taney died. i have lived long enough to understand that boredom is sometimes a luxury good. i wish you well but i also wish you a better understanding of the system we have.
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Clinton is extremely competent, no more dishonest or corrupt than other politicians, is liberal enough to do some very good things but pragmatic enough to compromise. She’s also apparently very good at making allies which is very useful it she’s going to get stuff through congress.
And yes, she’s also not Trump, and that is a great quality for anyone to have.
If I recall she’s played soft with anti-vaxxers, basically trying to be vague enough so both sides think you really agree with them.
It’s a very common strategy, though I’d prefer she not use it with anti-vaxxers.
This isn’t a beauty pageant.
George W. Bush started and then horribly mishandled the Iraq war, that war killed hundreds of thousands of people directly then spawned ISIS which sparked the refugee crisis which is tearing apart the EU. And George W. Bush was vastly more competent and fit to be President that Donald Trump is.
Here’s a question, what will a Donald Trump Presidency cost you? I’m a Canadian, I’ll lose some money as a result of the recession, but my quality of life will be otherwise unaffected.
But a Hispanic American? Welcome to 4 years of demonization as a potential illegal, or actual deportation if you discover you were one a 1 year old illegal immigrant. A black American? See a new wave of police militarization as he tries to “fix” black communities. A Muslim American? You’ve just become public enemy #1. Someone who lives in the Middle East? Prepare for a new invasion, or enthusiastic support for your local autocrats latest abuses. Live in Eastern Europe? Well welcome back to the USSR.
If I had the choice I’d vote for Clinton over Stein. Hell, I’d vote for Bush over Stein because Stein can’t win and my empathy won’t let me damn those above groups to a Trump Presidency.
Does your vote for Stein still sound like the ethical choice? You get stand on your high horse while everyone reaps the consequences of your unsullied conscience.
I don’t know your ethnicity but this is pretty much the definition of white privilege, decrying utilitarianism while avoiding the consequences of your own actions.
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It works great for any community no larger than a hunter-gatherer band, for all those lovely evo-psych reasons.
@L_Mariachi: I actually think Nixon was a pretty decent president. Horrible human being, many scandals, rightfully resigned. But his administration did give us the EPA, detente with China, end to our involvement in Vietnam, arms control treaties with the USSR, and proposal of a health insurance bill very similar to Obamacare. If I had been around then, I would have voted against him, but I wouldn’t have seen him winning as a disaster. I feel similarly - either party winning not being a disaster - in every election since then other than 2004 and 2008 (I admit I didn’t really get how bad GW would be in 2000, and I think Romney was at least sane enough).
Two-party politics is the only stable strategic equilibrium given our voting system. Anyone who wants to change that system, I’m interested, but doing it with a third party candidate during an election is not plausible. If you live in a “safe” state for either party, vote your conscience! If not, be strategic! One of two people, not four, will be president next year. You will not convince pluralities in even a single state to support anyone else six weeks from now.
And if the goal is to send a message to the Democrats, trying to change the platform for next time even if it makes Clinton lose: did it work with Gore and Nader? I’m not saying anyone should or shouldn’t be angry about the whole Nader business, but just, did it have any impact at all? Did it move the Democratic party platform in the desired direction, let alone enough to have been worth the immediate electoral impact? If it did, I don’t see it. And yes, I am arguing that until you build a better voting system, you really should vote for the better lizard.
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Drive over the bridge to the Eastern Shore sometime. I know, the state will still go for Clinton, but still… shudder
I didn’t see that many Trump signs (in fact I don’t remember any at all) when I was visiting family in North Texas (new home of Glenn Beck). Granted, that was a few months ago, but still right after the RNC.
Also see “The Glossary:”
Libertarian: It has been said that a libertarian is just a Republican who does drugs. Most libertarians are in favor of free enterprise and a minimal (but nonzero) amount of government. There are some libertarians who are anarchists, and just to confuse things, anarchists used to call themselves libertarians. To confuse things further, there are the civil libertarians, who worry more about rights than about profits. Anyhow, the libertarian movement in America seems to have peaked, so you might not have to worry about this kettle of fish for much longer.
I still say that “libertarian”-Capitalists are neither libertarian or anarchist, as a quick examination of their beliefs and practices will show. Even the people they claim their beliefs are based on (Like Benjamin Tucker) were far more anti-capitalist and pro-individual freedom than they are.
They’re good at the old Anglo-American tradition of stealing things from other people and claiming they weren’t being used though .
Update: If I wasn’t burned out by everything that’s happened to me this year I would write a longer post about this in a new topic.
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I viddy horrorshow, droog.
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“Well over a thousand scientists” sounds like a huge number until you realize that there are millions of scientists in the world. It’s like if I were to say well over a thousand people will vote for Gary Johnson this election.
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Not sure if this is supposed to be sarcastic or not.
Seriously, I have never heard any argument for voting for Clinton besides “you have to vote, and it has to be for one of the two major parties, and Trump is awful”. Which is actually sad, considering that I’d gladly vote for Clinton if I had convincing evidence that she shares my values.
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If only they’d actually watched the video in the first place, they’d save a lot of typing and tweeting.
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I get the feeling that Peter Kropotkin wouldn’t have been a fan of evo-psych, considering it’s beliefs on altruism.
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But that’s not how things work. You spot a provocative title, immediately vent outrage, then perhaps look into things further, but only if you aren’t required to double-down.
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Either way, Rob wins.
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But don’t we all win, in a way? No? Oh…
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Another problem is if you are someone like me that primarily consumes BB by going through the BBS, there isn’t any indicator that there is a video unless you click through to the story on the main page. All context is lost.
Also to steal a page from your playbook, requiring watching a video to “get it” is like DRM, man.
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From a game-theoretic standpoint, you have four possible outcomes:
- Trump win
- Clinton win
- Stein win
- Johnson win
Either of these last two has such a vanishingly small probability that you’d be more likely to win every state lottery in the U.S. for fifteen consecutive days.
The first two outcomes each have a very high probability. Each outcome will have its own consequences—some forseen, others not. One likely consequence of a Trump win is a multi-generational setback from appointments of conservative judges to the Supreme Court—to say nothing of his incompetence, authoritarian tendencies, and an idiological [sic] vice president whose role model is Dick Cheney.
Your move.
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Nate Silver’s model currently gives Johnson a 2.3% chance of winning an electoral vote. That seems remarkably generous to me.
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That’s…several orders of magnitude higher than what I expected.
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Maybe they’re factoring in the chance of a pissed-off elector in Utah or something…
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