>>>Wed, 05 Oct 2022 01:44:51 -0400, shawn <
nanof...@notforg.m.a.i.l.com>:
>>>>That's a bullshit opinion and I would have expected better from you.
>>>>After all I made my point about how horrible Walker is so voting for
>>>>Warnock becomes a non-issue. Doesn't matter if I think he's a good
>>>>candidate or not.
>>>And I think yours is a bullshit opinion. How's that? You totally
>>>missed the point yet again as the irony continues to allude you. It
>>>wasn't about Walker and Warnock. It was you and Suzeeq's allusion to
>>>people voting for someone just because the R is next to their name.
>>>My point is that goes both ways. You seem to think you're above that
>>>kind of behavior. Do you think only those dastardly Republicans vote
>>>that way?.
>>That's fine but yours is more BS because you ignored my point is that
>>I'm comparing the two current candidates and Warnock comes up as the
>>better candidate. I've voted for Republicans in the past but there was
>>no way in hell I was going to vote for Trump. As I said in another
>>post I was ready to vote for Huntsman and liked McCain but thought his
>>choice of a running mate was horrible. It's just that the current
>>crop of Republicans that can make it through the primaries all seem to
>>be election deniers which I'm not going to vote for, but you do you.
>That's the Republican litmus test today, far more than the R next to the
>name. The center-right Republican candidates usually get primaried by
>extremists, or simply retire before they can be primaried.
First of all, stop saying "primaried" as you are literally decimating
the language.
You've got this incumbent entitlement thing going here, and that
attitude stinks. This is America. We are supposed to have competitive
elections. We've had primaries since the late 19th century.
Incumbent politicians hate running for re-election. They think once they
hold office, they are entitled to retain it for as long as they wish.
Well, it doesn't work like that. If one is a partisan, then one must
turn out one's supporters in the primary. An incumbent who doesn't work
to get out the vote will find himself vulnerable in a primary challenge.
Thanks to extreme gerrymandering, especially in the election following
the decenial census, the action has shifted from the general election to
the primary. I heard a statistic the other day that gerrymandering was
done so well this time that we have the FEWEST competitive races for US
House of Representatives than ever before, that around 30 Democratic
majority districts in which Biden won bhy less than 10 points and fewer
than 30 Republican majority districts in which Trump won by less than 10
points.
This is hardly secret information. Everybody knows this. Yet, voters
will not participate in primary elections at the same rate as they do in
general elections.
Funny, though, when voters are highly motivated to vote at a primary,
they can actually make their wishes known. Perhaps you heard about the
failure of the Kansas constitutional amendment, the referendum for which
was deliberately held at the primary election instead of the general
because a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats vote in
primaries and independents cannot vote at all. Nevertheless,
independents turned out in record numbers at the primary to vote "no",
even though it was the only issue they could vote upon.
If you think this doesn't happen in Democratic primaries, then think
again. Ever hear of Dan Lipinski? He was a very powerful member of
Congress, son of the long-time incumbent who essentially inherited his
father's committee assignments and was quite good at bringing back the
pork in transportation infrastructure to the entire state.
Well, the Democratic Party used to be filled with Church-going Catholic
voters who opposed abortion due to religious doctrine. In the last two
decades, there has been a major effort among Democratic politicians and
primary voters to punish incumbent Democrats who oppose abortion rights.
Lipinski was a known votegetter among conservative Republicans in the
district and Reagan won a similar district in 1980.
In 2018, he won re-election with close to 3 out of 4 votes. In the 2020
primary, Marie Newman was nominated thanks to "win by plurality". In the
general election, she did win a majority of the votes by 56% but if the
Republicans had nominated a much stronger candidate it's possible they
could have come closer or possibly won.
The state lost seats in apportiomment and she ran in a primary against
another incumbent and lost. She didn't run in the Hispanic-majority
district she got drawn into.
There is no constitutional requirement for a member of Congress to live
in the district he runs in, just the state.
Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot and other prominent Democrats in Illinois
actively campaigned against Lipinski in the primary.
Another long-time Democratic member of Congress on the northwest side of
Chicago has faced a Bernie-ite candidate in many primaries. As he's a
decent politician who doesn't operate on a sense of entitlement, he
works in each primary to turn out his own supporters to vote for his
nomination. He's won the nomination with decent enough margins that the
Bernie-ites no longer think he's vulnerable.
>I've voted for Republican candidates before, but it looks like those
>days are gone.
Uh huh. Did it ever occur to you to vote in the Republican primary to
support candidates who would have represented you? If no one
participates in primary elections except single-issue voters and Trump
supporters, duh gee Tennesse, then they'll have an outsized influence on
who gets nominated.
Primary elections are quite vulnerable to shitty attitudes among voters
who just can't bring themselves to participate even though they know
that this will lead to a bad nominees that they won't support in the
general election.
How soon we forget: As recently as 2015, Mitch McConnell's Republican
Party was seen as a dying institution incapable of generating any
enthusiasm among very young voters and Democrats were patting themselves
on the back as the party ever expanding into the future. Well, Donald
Trump came along, saw that the Republican Primary was quite vulnerable
to a populist, and he was nominated thanks to bring into the Republican
Party people who didn't vote regularly or had somehow reached middle age
never before having voted.
Mitch McConnell's Republican Party is long dead and since they were no
longer the party of Lincoln and not even recognizeable as the party
of Ronald Reagan and had largely abandoned the politics of classical
liberalism, good riddance. Yeah, they remain in power in large parts of
the country in which they aren't routinely challenged.
But Trump proved that the post-Reagan Republican Party is vulnerable due
to its lack of depth and bredth of support and inability to work up any
enthusiasm.
Someone else will come along again and change the Republican Party once
more.
>The ones who make it to the general election are openly reality deniers
>in red areas, and are stealth reality deniers when they're campaigning
>in purple or blue areas, like Youngkin in Virginia, who feels
>comfortable backing election deniers now that he's in office.
You seem to ignore that they are trying to appeal to voters who
participate in the Republican Primary and that they aren't trying to win
your vote as you don't participate. If you want to be represented, then
you have to vote in the primary. It's really that simple.
>Herschel Walker is just a train wreck. He makes Trump actually look
>like a stable genius by comparison. It would be sad if his broad
>acceptance by Republican voters (probably the same people who claimed to
>be "values voters" in the past) weren't so alarming. The party
>seriously has no better candidates to put forward?
Walker was nominated because he was a well-liked football player. Maybe
people who don't think football players should be in the Senate should
have participated in that primary.
That's the way it works. Politicians say crazy things and vote on crazy
issues (that sometimes make it into law) because they are trying to
please a constituency that they know ACTUALLY VOTES as opposed to all
that shithead Americans who refuse to vote but sit on their hands and
bitch about lousy representation.