I believe Johnson will take more votes from Trump than from Hillary... it is two former Republican governors on the ticket. He may pick up some young voters disillusioned because Bernie didn't win, but I kind of doubt it. If Hillary makes it know what the Libertarian Platform is, that should end any infatuation with the prospect of legal pot. Are the people who found single-pay healthcare and free college education so important REALLY going to vote for a party that wants to abolish the income tax and drastically cut government in all areas, including getting it totally out of healthcare and education? I just don't see it. You have to remember that Nader took votes from Gore because he was also liberal. Johnson is definitely not liberal.
Well the choice is I either vote for Johnson or I don't vote at all. I do want to have a say so I vote Johnson.
Voting for Johnson is giving up your say so. You have 2 choices. It's always 2 choices. That's the way we're set up. Not voting for either one is giving up any say so in the government.
No I'm voting for a third choice, we always have more than one choice. Once again I stand behind my vote. I make zero apologies. And if nobody likes it, that's on you not me.
@mawnck - classic! Frightening that's pretty much where we're at this time around. Blech. I dunno. Maybe Dar's right.
DAR would only be right if the two candidates were exactly as bad. One conservative commentator said it was a choice between Ebola (Trump) and Malaria (Clinton). To him it was an easy choice: Malaria is curable. Here's the article. He has this exactly right (except that I think the odds of Trump going the dictator route are a lot higher). Hillary Is Preferable To Trump Just Like Malaria Is Preferable To Ebola That's why I don't think you can seriously go with Johnson. Aside from the fact that he REALLY isn't any better (his entire party really is bats**t insane, for one thing), the only two plausible victors in this contest are Clinton and Trump. One of those is a bad choice, whereas the other is a card-carrying fascist. You don't get to vote Hitler out of office after four years, folks. Once he's in, that's it. The scariest thing about democracies is that they can vote themselves out of existence. A vote for Trump is exactly that. A vote for Johnson is the same thing. That's how high the stakes are this time: Either vote for Hillary, or lose America as we know it. This time, it's LITERALLY true. Don't be stupid. This election is too important to waste your vote on a snit fit.
But Johnson is a Libertarian, which is a legitimate third party. I get a little tired of Democrats and Republicans blaming their losses on third party candidates, as if those votes are their birthright or something. If Clinton or Trump can't close the deal, then I don't think shaming people wanting to vote for someone else is appropriate. I personally probably can think of a dozen good reasons not to vote for Clinton. But I can think of a million not to vote for Trump. I will vote for Clinton but it's not like I'm skipping happily to the polls to do so.
I wouldn't shame anyone for wanting to vote for someone else. I'd like to vote for someone else myself. But we don't have that option in this election. We just don't. Sorry. And I will gladly shame anyone who votes third party in a state where it could make a difference. In some states it doesn't matter. If you're in California and voting third party, go right ahead. I did it myself in the last POTUS election. Otherwise, now's no time to be asserting your individuality. Events have conspired to make that a non-rational choice. As for the Libertarian party being "legitimate", uh ... Libertarians Let It All Hang Out in Florida, by Ian Tuttle, National Review
It's a wasted vote in the sense that Johnson has zero chance of winning. But I get where DAR is coming from. If more people didn't settle for the lesser of two evils so often, perhaps more appealing candidates would have a chance. That said, I don't think Hillary and Trump are even close in terms of awfulness, I agree with you there. Hillary might actually do a good job as president even sans charisma (sans charisma is my favorite font, by the way), and I think she will have a cast of competent advisors in her administration. And there is the supreme court nominations to consider as well. Meanwhile I am sure the bullying and blustering and glowing orange stupidity of Trump will be terrible for this nation and the world. Every day in his administration will be more of a clown show, bragging, anything to cause shock and awe with sometimes deadly consequences. So I will be voting for Hillary for sure.
Americans love to hate the two-party political system and blame it for all of our ills. It's portrayed as some rigged system and if only people would just stand up fer cryin' out loud and vote third party, all would be well! Yeah...no. Sean Wilentz, a great historian and a true expert on American political history, sums it up in the introduction to his new book (which I highly recommend): “Despite their intentions, the framers built a political system which inspired partisan politics. After some badly-needed constitutional tinkering, the system soon fostered the rise of professional, mass-based, national parties. A nation as large and diverse as the United States has required parties both to turn discontent into laws and institutions and to prevent chronic political breakdown. Americans devised election rules that hand victory to the winner of a plurality of votes, which according to the axioms of political science virtually assures a two-party system in which third parties do not last. Possibly partisan politics is built into human nature. It is certainly built into the American version of human nature. And partisan politics has survived because, in the United States, it has worked well, or well enough.... Party democracy has succeeded even in addressing the most oppressive of all American problems, which was slavery, and which in the end could only be settled in blood. Impeded by a party system designed to keep slavery out of national politics, antislavery partisans and politicians built parties of their own; and the carefully rigged party system fell apart; and the election to the presidency of one of the antislavery party politicians, Abraham Lincoln, forced the crisis that led to the slaveholders’ rebellion and, in time, emancipation. Ever since, all of the great American social legislation, from the Progressive Era to the New Deal to the Great Society, has been achieved by and through the political parties.” The frustration people have with the two-party system says more about the fundamental failure most Americans have to understand how our government works than it does about the failure of those two parties. tl;dr - Complaints about the two party system can be summed up as "I didn't get my own way and government is doing stuff I don't like, so the system is broken!"
There's no such thing in this country. Can't happen. Our system is set up in a way that pretty much forces us into two parties. Unfortunate, but if you're not voting one of the two parties, you're wasting your time. And vote. It may give you a self-righteous glow, but you're not helping the country.
The two parties certainly change. Occasionally one even collapses and another rises in its place, often after several other parties compete for that spot. But throughout the history of the United States, there has never been a sustainable third party. I'd just suggest people ask themselves if that's baked into American identity and our system of government (I'd say it is) instead of lamenting that it's because our two parties are super corrupt and have rigged the game. Part of what gets me worked up about all of this is I'm a firm believer that we get the politics and the candidates we deserve. Americans have a loooooong history of acting like things they don't like or bad things in our past (from slavery to Trump) are somehow these external things that just sort of...happen. They fall from the sky and are imposed on us. But in fact, these things are who we are. These things happen because we the people make choices and do things and we, like every country, create a culture and an environment where this stuff happens, good and bad. This is what our country is. Our self-important, heavily skewed belief that our country is somehow magically amazing and great is constantly clashing with the reality of our mundane government and politics. It's weird to me that the people who claim to love their country the most seem to also be the kind of people who hate its government the most. You can't really separate the two. Stop comparing American politics and government to the myth of what you think America is and start comparing it to what America actually is. What you see right now in American government and politics isn't all that different from what we've always had. There was no golden age when things were just super grand and everyone got along. Americans have whined and moaned about their politicians and about their government since day one. At some point, you have to reckon that this is what we are.
>>Unfortunate, but if you're not voting one of the two parties, you're wasting your time. And vote. It may give you a self-righteous glow, but you're not helping the country.<< The Whig party approves this message.
I feel really torn over the "vote third party" group. On the one hand, I'd never ask someone to vote for a candidate they can't support or stand. So maybe voting third party or staying home is their best option. OTOH...it feels like the ultimate in middle- or upper-class privilege to just wave your hand in disgust at the whole thing and vote for someone who will not win. This isn't a thought experiment: we know Gary Johnson and Jill Stein will not win. So saying you'll vote for them sounds to me an awful lot like Susan Sarandon saying Donald Trump would be better than Hillary because he'd be so terrible it'd wake America up and we'd get the change we really need. Here's this privileged wealthy woman saying that we basically need the country to go to hell...and she'll watch the whole thing from her mansion behind a high fence with security while her private chef whips up some foie gras. It's so beyond gross. Trump and Hillary aren't the same. Full stop. So frankly, when I hear people say "I'm voting third party," what I hear is "Trump won't take away my healthcare, he won't be deporting me, when he signs Paul Ryan's legislation to cut food stamps and defund Planned Parenthood, it's no skin off my nose. I'm straight, so when he appoints people to the Supreme Court that role back LGBTQ rights, no worries here. I have a car so cuts to public transit is fine, I have a Kindle so shuttered libraries is cool, I won't need an abortion so close all the clinics you like." On and on and on it goes. In short, you are cashing your principled outrage check with someone else's butt. There are people whose lives could be devastated by a Trump presidency. Just because yours won't doesn't mean theirs don't matter.
I was about to say the same thing. In most elections, a great many states have wide-enough polling going into the election that the outcome is a foregone conclusion. For example, Texas is never going to vote for Hillary. So, a vote for Johnson is no more a wasted vote in Texas than is one for Hillary. In fact, you could make the argument that one for Johnson is much more effective, as his success in the campaign is not going to measured by electoral votes (most likely 0), but by national popular vote. Each vote for Johnson will help that stat, while having no real effect on Hillary in states that aren't swing states.
Not so fast, bucko! Hillary Clinton: I can beat Donald Trump in Texas - CNNPolitics.com There's only been one poll that I can find that put Clinton and Trump head-to-head in Texas, and that was from last September. It had Trump up by just two points. Texas is in play. There are lots of Trump-despising minorities in Texas, and they're upset enough to go vote.
Nah. Just tryna keep it real. There's no reason this election shouldn't be an epic landslide. My pessimism is grounded in the fact that if anyone could possibly blow this on the D side, it's the Clintons. This election is going to be like watching two sick horses race. One of them may be heavily favored, but either one (if not both) could drop dead at any second. The suspense is killing me. Although watching the Rs conclusively prove that we were TOTALLY right about them all along has been indescribably entertaining. "Pass the popcorn" indeed.
I agree. I would feel much more relaxed about Trump's likelihood of election humiliation if just about anyone but a Clinton was running. Their personal history takes a lot of slam dunk issues that could have been used against Trump off the table. However, I don't think Trump can stop himself from saying a series of very offensive things about women for the next 5 months (5 minutes?). And those comments play perfectly into ads that will indeed leave a mark. Trump is his own worst enemy, if team Clinton gives him enough rope. I don't think the VP choice matters much for Trump. But it is incredibly important for Hillary to select someone that can get people very excited about the election. I think Elizabeth Warren would be the best choice -- she is fierce, smart, and I think would go a long way to keep the Bernie supporters showing up to vote, too.
