Florida

Ditto to what Steve said, Harry. And cheer up–this ain’t no 1994. (Though I suppose there’s both an upside and a downside to that.)

I think it was unclear, out of Meek and Christ, who the proper choice was for centrists and those further left who were looking to assemble a majority. As you note, there was probably no sensible majority available.

I get the sentimental value of Feingold, but what good does he do if the Republicans control both houses of Congress? What does he offer that is more important than 3-4 other Democratic senators (not to mention 3-4 less Republicans)?

Also it’s easy to blame Crist, but Kendrick Meek was polling poorly consistently throughout the campaign. It’s hard to say Meek was entitled to Crist’s 30% when he couldn’t make any serious inroads. Who’s to say Meek had any chance in a head-to-head with Rubio if voters pretty clearly decided they didn’t want him as their senator?

Well if Christ himself

Whoops. I actually know someone who pronounces it like Crist but spells it like the Redeemer.

Feingold wasn’t the best senator, and if you’re really willing to trade a Senate majority to keep him on board you need to have your head examined. His public attitudes regarding budget reconciliation during the health care debate made it clear that his rigidly held “principles” were more important to him than the public welfare, at a time when even a show of pragmatism might have moved the ball forward a few yards.

Florida is what Florida has always been, an amalgam of real-estate grifters, self-interested retirees and low information voters who drifted southward from the former Confederacy. Putting a criminal in the governor’s mansion is probably the most intellectually honest thing the residents of that hellhole have ever done.

As it turned out he was about the only person in Florida

You mean, besides 29% of the voters? Many of whom were Republicans and hence couldn’t be expected to flip to Meek?

Politics ain’t about takin’ turns. I hope the Dem establishment made it clear to Meek that he would never see a dollar from them ever again. Crist could still have lost it had Meek dropped out a couple of months back, but it was the only chance to deny the GOP that seat.

Crist could still have lost it had Meek dropped out a couple of months back, but it was the only chance to deny the GOP that seat.

Lieberman “denies” the GOP a seat in Connecticut. What has that accomplished? (And if both Bennett and Murry should lose I’ll bet money he’ll switch sides along with Nelson.)

Sorry, but- fuck Crist and all turncoats of his kind. The chance to keep Rubio out was Crist not engaging in a futile, ego-driven run.

Yeah sorry no seconds. The same people who point out (rightly i might say) that Crist would just be a second Lieberman would have everyone vote for a Lieberman over a left alternative every time as long as he calls himself Democrat. It’s put up or shut up time.

What is a bit embarrassing is that in three-way races (Florida, Alaska, and the Maine and RI governorship) the Dems have come in consistently third. Ok there’s Colorado as counter-example.

Is there information out about voter turnout? When I go to the split screen at http://elections.nytimes.com/2010/results/senate and compare 2010 to 2004, the numbers clearly are dramatically lower even when they show 95%+ reporting.

My assumption was Meek was kept in the race even after he looked doomed was to help bring out minority voters for the governor’s race and people down the ballot. If he had been a Generic White Pol the Dems would have been more able to push him over the side.

Harry – I’m not even a strong opponent of Daniel’s argument (in the sense that while I disagree with it, I generally find it a bit silly to berate people for their votes), but I’d absolutely say Dems in Florida should have voted for Crist, yes.
And that’s certainly what mainstream Democrats seemed to think – I didn’t hear much protest after Clinton’s attempts to get Meek to drop out of the race became known.
It would actually seem like that’s what a lot of Democrats did, too.

We could start a committee to persuade Feingold to primary Kohl in 2012. :P

…

For those who care, in 2012 the establishment Democrats have a lot to lose and not a whole lot to gain, even if you presume an Obama downticket bounce. There are many races which will be competitive with a fairly respectable leftish-of-center establishment-oriented vote at stake.

As well, the Democrats are almost certain to lose Ben Nelson in Nebraska (a loss I won’t emotionally mourn any more than Blanche Lincoln but which raises the stakes for Democratic establishment supporters). But much more importantly to me, it would not surprise me to see a ton of money dumped into Missouri to make that race extremely competitive — those of us who appreciated Russ Feingold ought to be gravely concerned about the prospects of Claire McCaskill.

If she loses in 2012, we lose a strong women’s rights voice that spoke out against the Stupak compromise. If she wins handily, we gain the prospect of McCaskill running for President in 2016. I can think of far worse plausible fates for this country’s executive branch, and few better ones.

Loss of Senate control in 2012 is a real possibility, and I suggest to those who predominantly whinge about this sort of thing right around election time that they have two years between now and then to do productive work.

Nobody loves a welsher.

Reckon we should check with D^2 before we make such blanket statements.

The effects of the Tea Party – the election of a lot of their candidates and their keeping Republicans from control of the Senate – offers an interesting case study in how movements can influence majorities.

A lot of what they do can’t be reproduced on the left, but generally speaking, I think they’ve got the right approach to getting their policy preferences enacted: Work through the Republican Party, and don’t fret overmuch about pulling the party too far in their direction.

Voters here are righteously outraged that they still don’t have jobs, that they’re facing foreclosures with no relief in sight . . . and that the Big Boys once again skate, but not before being assisted to the tune of billions of dollars. The frustration in Perryville, MO is palpable. Failing this sort of test, the typical voter will once again return to “values”, which means baby-killin’ McCaskill will be out and some creepy pro-business pro-Baptist dweeb will be installed.

Funny, I remember a Presidential candidate in 2008 who caught some flak for pointing out this obvious truth. “Bittergate”, they called it. What was that guy’s name again? Wonder what happened to him.

No, I’m just asking you not to complain when lefties vote for candidates they like who won’t win, instead of a Democratic candidate who is as close to or closer to his/her Republican opponent than Crist is to Rubio

Are we still allowed to complain about people who vote for Republicans?

And, I’d add, that Sebastian is right: Harry’s point is mainstream thinking, and Lincoln Chaffee won in Rhode Island (and the independent may win in Maine) precisely because of tactical voting on the part of Democrats. You might want to come up with, you know, examples of hypocrisy before assuming it.

“… Meeks should have withdrawn for tactical considerations.”

The issue was not what a failing Democratic candidate should do but, rather, what potential voters on the left should do. (In other words, the debate had shifted from Democrats blaming Nader himself to blaming noncompliant voters and non-voters on the left–while, as SOV points out, strangely ignoring or downplaying dissatisfied middle folk who decline to vote for Democratic candidates.)

“The fact that Clinton tried so hard to engineer that solution – and he’s a leader of the party – tells you that “Best of the possible choices who can win” is a pretty solid electoral strategy.”

This might well be true as a matter of electoral strategy. But the point is virtually a reductio–namely, to persons on the left who would vote their conscience or not vote at all rather than always vote for the lesser evil who happens to be a Democrat.

Harry, I haven’t got time to read the whole thread but for whatever it’s worth. I sent Feingold $100 as a personal finger in the air to Karl Rove. But as a rule my campaign contributions are a sure sign of impending failure, the only candidate I’ve given to who has actually won being Bernie Sanders, who I’ve sent money to for a long time now every cycle.

Feingold may be back in two years’ time.

kmack-

I’m a disaffected citizen on the left, too! Matter of fact, I voted for Nader in 2000. So I am not lecturing you about your duty to vote Democratic. I am, however, guessing that if you and I sat down with some random sample of Congressional elections, we would find ourselves agreeing that in a large majority of them, the most useful vote for us as leftists was for the Democrat, and also that we would find it pretty easy to agree on which ones a vote for the Democrat was not the way to go. (Where the Dem was especially awful, where there was a viable third-party candidate, where — as in this case — the Dem was effectively a spoiler against a more viable independent, where the outcome of the election was a foregone conclusion anyway, etc.) My point is just that what differentiates (or should differentiate) those of us on the left from the Democrats is not the small number of instances where we vote for a third-party candidate rather than a Dem, but rather our *non-electoral* forms of political engagement.

no one could have predicted a Republican president was far more likely to lower taxes on the rich, get rid of environmental regulations, hinder anti-discrimination laws, and otherwise act contrary to the interests of “the left” than Gore.<

I freely confess that my estimate of the expected difference between Gore and Bush was much too low. I thought that the costs of a R administration were much lower than they turned out to be. I was wrong about that. (I was also wrong about the gains from the Nader campaign, which turned out to be nil, but that’s a different story.) But, I’m not sure my beliefs, while false ex post, were so absurd ex ante. On most issues, it’s not at all clear that Clinton was much more progressive than Bush I; on certain issues (e.g. Israel-Palestine) he was certainly worse.

The Lieberman/Lamont general election was a different situation than this Florida race. The Republican candidate, Alan Schlesinger, barely broke 10% of the vote and was considered such a long shot that the Connecticut Republican Party recommended that the White House not make an endorsement (in the hopes that Lieberman retained the seat, not the more liberal Lamont). Lieberman didn’t deny the GOP a seat in Connecticut because the competition in that race was between a centrist Democrat and a left of center Democrat. In Florida, Kendrick Meek had no chance of winning – Crist dipped significantly in the polls, but Meek didn’t make up any ground. Crist’s declining numbers correlated directly with gains by Rubio, not Meek.

As for what the Lieberman seat accomplished, he did cast a necessary vote for health care reform, and he voted for Dodd-Frank and other key parts of the Democratic agenda. I dislike the guy as much as any other liberal does, I think he weakened the Affordable Care Act, and I’ll be happy to see him out of office, but having Joe Lieberman in that Senate seat is better for the Democratic caucus than having a Republican, even though Ned Lamont would have been preferable.

HV @47: <How come Sanders does manage to run as independent, and Feingold doesn’t?
Mostly because Sanders runs in Vermont, a small state with an atypical electorate. Feingold runs in Wisconsin. Very different.

but having Joe Lieberman in that Senate seat is better for the Democratic caucus than having a Republican

As with Nader, Lieberman is one of those interesting cases by which you can test various theories.

If the only two choices are a creepy, contemptible, dishonest hack like Lieberman and the best Republican in the Senate*, you go with Lieberman, and it’s not close.

*I’ll leave it to y’all to identify the best Republican in the Senate. Whomever it is, Lieberman is better.

This is true even though the odds of one vote deciding an election are minuscule, since reports of early returns can influence people who haven’t yet voted, etc.

No, that doesn’t work. The odds of reports of your individual vote affecting early-return numbers enough to influence the outcome, are just as minuscule.

The only way to understand how voting can be rational, is to recognize that you are not voting as an individual.

@Norwegian Guy: By my reckoning, yes, but that’s a good counter-example.

Lieberman had the opportunity to vote for healthcare reform, and he made good on that opportunity. (You think Chafee would have voted for reform? I don’t, but I’ll grant there’s a strong counter-argument.)

Lieberman’s other key vote was for Harry Reid as majority leader. Chafee got that key vote wrong. So on one hugely important issue, Chafee stood with the bad guys.

Has he got anything in his record to offset that vs. Lieberman? I honestly don’t know.

If Feingold is such a great principled politician, why is he a member of the Democratic party

Paul Wellstone was a Democrat. Heck, even I’m technically now a member of the Democratic party, for technical reasons,^*^ but I pledge no allegiance to them.

^*^In part because they wouldn’t let me register as a member of the Socialist party in my state, and in part so that I have certain forms of access and can vote in Democratic primaries.

Has he got anything in his record to offset that vs. Lieberman? I honestly don’t know.

In the lame-duck session after his election defeat, Chafee stopped John Bolton from being confirmed as Bush’s UN Ambassador. I’ll give him that as a pretty significant offset.

Paul Wellstone was a Democrat.

What’s that have to do with anything? The Democrats fuck up – they get kicked out, it’s only fair. Feingold is one of them, he gets kicked out, what’s fair is fair. Now, that means that the Republicans win, and that’s bad, sure, very bad, but hey, this is how the system is designed, the game is rigged. But at least you can give the Democrats some incentive to shape up.

These debates about tactical voting crop up after every election and they are pointless. Ex post we can see that some outcomes would have been different if everybody had voted tactically but heck, not even do people not think tactically when voting, they tend to not think rationally when voting. That to me seems a rather more relevant problem. Does anybody have any idea what we could do about that???

In the Florida case, what is more relevant than this or that tactical decision is the fact that voters (for governor) sided with a health care entrepreneur whose company is known to have defrauded Medicare big time. If the Dems cannot manage to win against such a figure, what does it take?

namely, that the differences between Bush and Gore were not as obvious in 2000 as they became later

“Not as obvious” only to people so completely ignorant of American politics that in a better system they wouldn’t even qualify for a voting license.

Really, I despair of so-called “leftists” who don’t see the GOP as a few orders of magnitude worse than the Dems. I have to infer they’re pursuing some neo-Leninist tactic of making the gov’t as awful as possible in order to speed the proletarian revolt.

SoV: “So how does this translate into advice for the middle?” They are not reading this thread so what’s the point of trying to give them advice?

He’s chosen to be and to remain a member of a failed political party – if it can be called ‘political party’. I read their platform, there’s nothing there, just some slogans. But let’s say there is a platform, and one day (perhaps it’s that day when you alone vote against ‘the patriot’ act) you notice that no one in your party (except you) gives a fuck about the platform. Now you have a choice: you can switch your affiliation to ‘independent’, or you can go down with the ship. He’s made the choice.

I’m completely okay with that comment that went to moderation getting deleted rather than approved; there’s plenty in it that I could have said better.

if it can be called ‘political party’.

Fair enough, so don’t call it a ‘political party’ if you like, call it a loose federation of people who are all taking advantage of a peculiar and quaint system of designations. That makes sense to me. But just because you want a parliamentary system to flourish in the U.S. doesn’t mean we currently have one, or that we should interpret events that occur through that lens, right?

The Republicans are not orders of magnitude worse than the Democrats. That’s an absurd statement to make. They are clearly worse on a number of issues (mostly social ones), about equal on most issues (foreign policy – yes most US colonial wars since WW2 were started and or prosecuted by democratic administrations so spare me the faux outrage – comes to mind) and as a party (not necessarily individually) even slightly better on some.

The political differences between Democrats and Republicans are observably smaller than the differences within most of the main center-right parties in Europe. This is sometimes hard to see because of the extreme rhetorical polarization on socials issues in the US political sphere which creates the illusion of major difference where it doesn’t exist.

may I suggest that if you link to a post where I’ve supposedly treated you badly that you have the wit not to quote yourself calling me “childish”? People might get the impression that you’re a bit unstable.

Quote wasn’t from me. It was from one of the many other people you infuriated in that thread. But thanks for confirming my judgment.

A note to onlookers, if they aren’t familiar with the original Sebastian – he’s coming in a thread at post 74, not to contribute to the thread, but to attack one commenter.

“This is why I don’t think there was anything wrong with voting for Nader in 2000—given what people then knew. ”

I find this claim utterly bizarre. A cursory look at their agendas, history of public service, debate performances, and the like shows that Gore would have been immensely superior to Bush if he had been elected. On climate change and the surplus alone….

But even if you don’t buy that, surely there is an important reason why the “no difference” crowd turned out to be completely wrong: temperament and competence matter. Even if you grant that there the policy differences were minor, nobody with eyes in their head could fail to see that one person was a complete buffoon surrounded by knaves who whispered in his ear while the other was a fairly curious and intelligent, if admittedly moderate, public servant.

Competently administered technocratic centrism, mealy mouthed as it is, is quite a bit better than the clownish idiocy we could expect from Bush, even if you stupidly accepted his ‘compassionate conservatism’ at face value.

surplus

Actually, I think there is a very strong argument that if the only options in the 2001 recession were the Bush tax cuts or Rubin-style austerity, American workers were better off with door number one.

“People in the middle who didn’t vote for Democratic candidates this time around because they were perceived to be welshers get a free pass.”

What kind of joke are you trying to make SoV? If I had the power to bestow appropriate punishment on people who consciously voted for right-wing extremist corporate shills, I would be happy to do so. I am positive though that they have already punished themselves – along with the rest of us, how unfair is that. They voted for an even longer and deeper recession, even more economic insecurity and in general for the further political and economic decline of the empire. Congrats.

But “liberals” who are disgruntled about almost exactly the same issues are exhorted to work harder or work smarter or somesuch.
So what?

As to Nader in Florida, I remember Michael Moore writing that he had concerns himself and when campaigning for Nader in Florida he actually told the audience that voting for Nader might not be the best option. However he also gave a ton of good reasons why at the time many progressives felt the Democrats needed a kick in the butt from the left. Those reasons may be forgotten by now but remember those were happier times. Things have gotten so bad that we have pretty much given up believing in the possibility of progress.

Tom M, you’re getting cause and effect reversed here. He got so few Democratic votes because he supported the Republican agenda so well, not the reverse.

PTS, that’s really well said.

I find this claim utterly bizarre. A cursory look at their agendas, history of public service, debate performances, and the like shows that Gore would have been immensely superior to Bush if he had been elected. On climate change and the surplus alone….

But even if you don’t buy that, surely there is an important reason why the “no difference” crowd turned out to be completely wrong: temperament and competence matter. Even if you grant that there the policy differences were minor, nobody with eyes in their head could fail to see that one person was a complete buffoon surrounded by knaves who whispered in his ear while the other was a fairly curious and intelligent, if admittedly moderate, public servant.

Oh, I completely agree, but you’re leaving out one very important caveat: nobody with eyes in their head who bothered to look could fail to see that one person was a complete buffoon. Big difference. And that, sadly, describes those middle-of-the-road voters I keep referring to.

So when you talk about what was obvious and what was not, you’re preaching to a very small and select choir and not the much larger congregation. When Piglet said of the unwashed moderate masses: “They are not reading this thread so what’s the point of trying to give them advice?” he’s actually making a very good point. Just not the one he thought he was making. The self-declared “liberals” really are a rather small tail trying to wag the dog, even if most people mostly agree with them on a range of issues.

LP@44: Fair enough, and I appreciate your response.

Perhaps simply because I suffer from “the modern cynical disillusionment of the left,” as sg would diagnose it, I happen to believe that opting out of voting can often be a not unreasonable alternative to voting for the Democratic candidate as the lesser evil.

(They say I have no viable alternative. I say I do, since I can stay home. They say I’d better take whatever “I” can get. I say I’d rather they work harder to secure my vote. They say no can do but tell me to pursue lefty ideals on my own time. They say I’d better vote for them if I’m not an implacable enemy of the less evil. I shrug and show them the door.)

I also recognize, however, that almost always voting for the Democratic candidate as the lesser evil is not unreasonable. Just because I couldn’t bring myself to vote for Gore/Lieberman (or Nader) and (almost certainly) Obama ’12 doesn’t mean there are no plausible arguments for doing otherwise.

Party-liners, of course, couldn’t possibly adopt a similar point of view.

SoV: What is it that centrists were promised in 08 and then “Democrats very consciously went back on their word”? I don’t know what you are alluding to.

Maybe piglet, but do you seriously believe for a moment that the Tories would have behaved differently when Bush came knocking?

The difference is that with Blair you got an improvement in the NHS and a couple of years of growth, and it doesn’t appear that Blair gutted social housing.

It’s not an argument against rebuilding the broad structures of leftist politics which broaden and deepen our leftwing politics. But if you don’t vote for the least worst guy, satan gets in, and then you get to discover just how profoundly wrong your predictive model of similarity between the parties really was.

SoV, the paradox is that the right-wingers campaigned on the premise that Obama had done too much of these. They (cf. Santelli) complained that under-water homeowners were getting too much government help, they complained that government had gone too far in regulating the banks and the health insurance industry, and they complained that the stimulus prevented too many teachers and bus drivers from being fired. They complained about the extension of unemployment benefits about Obama’s crazy idea to slightly increase the tax rates on the superrich. They said it was unfair to require health insurance companies to insure everybody (and voters in states with the highest number of uninsured were most angry about health care reform) and they condemned efforts to slow down Medicare spending. They even ran an executive of a health care company that had been fined for defrauding Medicare for governor of Florida. Many Rep candidates ran on platforms of privatizing Social Security and what not. And they won, on that platform. That’s what baffles me. You make it sound like they may have voted against the Dems somewhat for the right reasons – because the Dems didn’t deliver the goods – but I can’t find any evidence for that hypothesis. Btw they also complained about all those tax increases that Obama pushed through. In one poll, 52% of voters claimed their taxes had gone up under Obama. Of course the opposite is true. This of course is foremost a failure of communication on the part of Obama.

My Democratic congressman (Arcuri) voted against Health Care Reform, before voting for amended HCR. His campaign included the claim that government spending should be cut, except for defense spending. He was defeated by an intelligent, but extremely conservative, Republican. The next district north had a special election last year after Obama appointed their Republican congressman to the executive branch. The Republican dropped out, throwing her support to the Democrat instead of the conservative independent who was beating her in the polls. Her view on some social issues was liberal.

I don’t say there is or isn’t no difference between the two parties. I’m just supplying some data. I tend not to vote on the party line for the Democrats.

Those who want to pull the Republicans further right, as I understand it, are responsible for lost elections for their party for some Senate seats (e.g., Deleware and Nevada). Are they succeeding in getting the party to move the party even further right? If you want to pull the Democrats left, must you not be willing to lose some seats in the short-term, whether by voting for a third party or by having somebody unelectable nominated. If this strategy works for the right, why doesn’t it work for the left?

Robert (#97) – at least in the other thread on this a lot of people who support voting for the Dem in the main elections pretty much any time proposed going through the primaries. I think putting up left-wing challengers – even if you may end up losing – is a very effective strategy – someone graphed, e.g. Specter’s voting record pre and post the Sestak primary candidacy and the change was quite drastic.

There is still some question as to how you do that strategically: Do you support a left-wing primary candidate against any “centrist” Democrat, or do you only support challengers to people who are not as far to the left as the district would allow? In purely strategic terms the latter is probably better, but I think the former might still be preferable for other reasons.

Specter is an interesting case that nicely demonstrates the benefits of working through one of the existing political parties.

Sestak moved Specter to the left and ran a credible race in a situation where Specter himself probably would likely have also lost. Net gain of some votes for liberals, net loss of probably nothing.

Toomey pushed Specter out of the party, and ultimately claimed his seat. Net gain for conservatives.

You want to influence policy, you gotta keep your eyes on the prize, and the prize is elected office. If your actions are geared toward non-majoritarian politics, you’re necessarily going to be shunned by people who are looking to assemble a majority.

There’s a complexity to US politics that sg is missing here. In the UK, there is basically one branch which has all the power, so getting the least bad people to win power makes a lot of sense. In the US there are three branches, none of which has a lot of power, and who wins one branch affects what happens in the other branches fairly soon after. I think, and thought, Bush was worse than Gore (but not, I’d add, that Bush senior was worse than Clinton). I also thought that it was predictable that a Gore victory would lead to large Dem losses in the mid-term and a Bush victory vice-versa. Like EVERYBODY ELSE IN THE WORLD I failed to predict 9/11. If I had predicted it, I like to think that I’d have predicted the inability of the Dems to repsond in a way that would lead them to win hearts and minds. But I didn’t and thought, entirely reasonably, that a Bush presidency would lead to large Dem gains in the mid-terms. I also confess that I didn’t predict, though I should have, that the Dems would manage to install a 2004 Pres candidate who was dreadful. Most Dems didn’t predict that either, and seemed at the time not even to notice the bleeding obvious when it was smashing them over the head. (It was the first debate, which I watched with a bunch of liberal professors who were cheering Kerry along when he was so stupidly condescending and rude to the girl who asked the abortion question, that gave the game away to me). Obama’s victory (and I did support Obama) made this midterm disaster highly likely — governing austerity is not something that makes you popular, and it becomes impossible to blame it on the people who are really responsible unless you are actually a left-winger backed by a working class movement, and Obama has never been either (did anyone actually ever think he was?). Anyway, the calculations are more complex here.

SoV, the paradox is that the right-wingers campaigned on the premise that Obama had done too much of these.

I don’t understand why you’re bringing this up. Weren’t we talking about those voters in the middle who were unhappy that the Democrats didn’t keep their promises? And as a result stayed home rather than voted?

There is still some question as to how you do that strategically: Do you support a left-wing primary candidate against any “centrist” Democrat, or do you only support challengers to people who are not as far to the left as the district would allow? In purely strategic terms the latter is probably better, but I think the former might still be preferable for other reasons.

Does it matter what “liberals” support? At least, those of the sort who would read this blog?

I would like for sg and SoV and the others who hound those who didn’t have their marvelous and remarkable foresight of what apparently should have been obvious to anyone who’s not a dolt or self-blinding, etc, etc, to make some concrete predictions about 2011-2020, please.

Share with us your wisdom and foresight about what’s going to happen, instead of beating us over the head with what we didn’t see, please. Oh, and please state what you know is not going to happen as well.

All the other details (democratic cock ups, condescending leaders) are secondary to the core fact: Republicans are evil.

Then how is it that Obama has been horrifically bad on foreign policy and surveillance and ‘national security’ issues?^1^ Sorry, I don’t buy the implicit corollary that “Democrats are not evil.” In terms of moral judgment, Obama seems to be just as evil as Bush is, or at least very nearly so, as a glance at his abuse of executive privilege confirms; he’s just much more conscientious and circumspect about it, which results in less evil being done. And I’m not even completely convinced of that, given where we are as a country right now: I see him pretending to draw down the Iraq war while beefing up private security forces there, who are less accountable. I don’t see him making any motion or even any noise about leaving Afghanistan. I do see him creating and beefing up an unaccountable security apparatus in Bagram and elsewhere that dwarfs Guantanamo Bay. I see him continuing the process of extrajudicial rendition. I see him continuing the policy of allowing torture, so long as it’s done by Xe rather than the CIA. I see him endorse the policy of indefinite detention and sham military tribunals. This is what I voted for? THIS is what I voted for? THIS IS WHAT I, WITH MY VOTE, HAVE ENDORSED? I have lost my credibility as a voter and as a principled citizen.

Seeing how Obama has prosecuted his agenda in Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, and Afghanistan makes me feel less and less confident that the Democrats are significantly less bloodthirsty or warmongery than the Republicans. The Democrats are just more careful and discrete in how they go about their killing, which yes, results in less killing, which yes, is less evil.

And yes. I’ve learned, as my blog post will tell you. I will endorse, with my vote, the Democrats’ official policy of approving and executing torture, murder, indefinite detention at home and abroad, assassination of political and anti-corporate targets,^2^ surveillance, and terrorism. I will do this because I don’t want it to get any worse and under Republicans, it will. I know the difference between 10,000 illegally killed each year and 800,000 illegally killed each year.

And so I will support and endorse the extrajudicial murder of tens of thousands of people, as you have asked me to do.

But don’t talk to me of good and evil.

Don’t talk to me of evil, implying that there exists a ‘good’ alternative.

The truth is emphatically NOT that Republicans are evil. The truth is that Republicans are a greater and worsening evil, and the Democrats are a status quo evil. And so I apply D^2^’s principle that the status quo is not any worse than the status quo, and happens to be considerably better than the only other viable alternative.

If I ought to be grimly realistic, in voting for the lesser evil between two deeply evil options, then the least you can do is keep silence about the alleged merits of the better option. You can acknowledge the lesser evil is evil, please. I don’t expect to hear it in the run-up to the election, of course. And I don’t expect to hear it spoken overwhelmingly, to a general audience who will find lesser-evilism uncompelling. And I certainly don’t expect you to acknowledge or talk about just how sick, disgusting, and horrific Obama has proved himself to be, behind the facade. (Which saddens me, because if I judged him on that facade: how he conducts himself publicly rather than on the policies he has continued or implemented abroad: I’d strongly support him, and if I judged him solely on domestic policy, I’d at least accept him as a reasonable and principled conservative with whom I could negotiate.)

In 2004, 2006, 2008, I couldn’t for the life of me understand how right-of-center folks were blind to the egregious abuses of power that Bush was undertaking. Seeing the behavior and modes of argument of the establishment left-of-center folks in 2008-2010 has clarified for me just how easily one can not only forgive the sins^1^ of one’s preferred candidate, but also fail to perceive them.

^1^For details, I defer to e.g. Glenn Greenwald.

^2^I suppose the fact that civilian targets of drone attacks match up remarkably well with individuals who have been vocal and politically active critics of crude pipelines in Waziristan is completely coincidental, and I’m tentatively willing to accept that. But it doesn’t change the fact that those critics happen to be among the human beings who are dying as the result of illegal drone attacks on Pakistani civilians.

As a Florida Democrat, I’m annoyed at how badly people outside the state misunderstood the situation here and made it worse. Rubio won easily, and was always going to win easily since Charlie Crist is an opportunistic dope. I don’t like the idea of Senator Rubio, but he’s a career Republican politician who is certainly not a true believer, and anyway will just be 1 of 100 votes.

The real problem here is that we elected an anti-government lunatic as our governor, who is going to very quickly dismantle every level of the state beginning with education. Scott won the governor’s race by less than 1% of the vote. Do you think that national democrats running down the democratic senate candidate, spreading rumors that he was dropping out, endorsing a non-democrat candidate, and generally showing absolutely no support for the democrat in the senate race _didn’t_ discourage a large number of democrats from going to vote? If national democrats had thrown any resources at all behind Meek, he still would have lost but there’s no doubt that Sink would have gotten the very small number of votes she needed to win. Thanks for the help!

Understand, I’m being told that the Iraq War was a guarantee under Bush, and I’m being told that’s not because of some weird idiosyncrasy of Bush but merely because he is a Republican. So I want to know which wars are a guarantee under the next Republican President.

Salient: the Iraq War was obvious enough in advance to the writers of the Onion.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/bush-our-long-national-nightmare-of-peace-and-pros,464/

Mere days from assuming the presidency and closing the door on eight years of Bill Clinton, president-elect George W. Bush assured the nation in a televised address Tuesday that “our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over.”

During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years.

“You better believe we’re going to mix it up with somebody at some point during my administration,” said Bush, who plans a 250 percent boost in military spending. “Unlike my predecessor, I am fully committed to putting soldiers in battle situations. Otherwise, what is the point of even having a military?”

…”We as a people must stand united, banding together to tear this nation in two,” Bush said. “Much work lies ahead of us: The gap between the rich and the poor may be wide, be there’s much more widening left to do. We must squander our nation’s hard-won budget surplus on tax breaks for the wealthiest 15 percent. And, on the foreign front, we must find an enemy and defeat it.”

Would Gore have repealed NAFTA? Would he have nationalized utilities, banks, and public transportation services? Would he have restored tax rates to at least progressive Eisenhower-era levels? Would he have established a basic universal income? Would he have brought the U.S. out of the WTO, or into the ICC? Would he even have nixed the cap on Social Security taxation? Would he have withheld funding for Israeli military assistance until appropriate conditions for social justice were met? Would he even have pursued a single-payer Medicare-for-all system? Would he even have restored the welfare system that Clinton dismantled? Would we even have a ban on exporting dirty coal-powered energy infrastructure?

The problem is that you are comparing a real-world Gore with an idealized Nader.

Supposing that Nader had been elected, he wouldn’ have done any of those things either, save trying and failing to get single-payer.[1] In the first place, a president doesn’t have the power to do any of those things by decree. Nor is there any reason to think that Nader, who in fact is quite comfortable a lot of corporate interests and income inequality, despite many folks fantasies to the contrary, would even have pursued most of them. On at least three issues, it is clear that Nader would have been far worse than Gore in equal circumstances, and possibly worse than Bush. First, the union-busting Nader would have been far worse for labor. Second, the anti-nuclear, small-car hating Nader would have been worse on climate change. Third, the I-don’t-do’identity-potitics Nader would have been far worse on civil rights for gays and other minorities.

[1] I can’t begin to say how bizarre it is to use single-payer as a test of liberal purity. After all, what is single-payer but a massive compromise with corporate interests? A truly nationalized system, like the VA, is both cheaper and better.

It’s pretty straightforward: Outcomes will be better if Democrats are elected over Republicans, and if liberal Democrats are elected over conservative ones. Sure, the details are unclear, but this doesn’t lessen our responsibility to work for better outcomes.

Wow. I’m not willing to endorse torture, rendition, and illegal warfare on the generic mantle of “better outcomes.” I refuse to endorse mass murder so that a few more homeowners are able to hang on to their property. That kind of argument wasn’t good enough in 2000, and won’t be good enough now.

The reason I regret not having supported Gore in 2000 is, roughly speaking, that Bush went to war in Iraq, and committed unprecedented atrocities in the broad light of day. Apparently I should have foreseen, not just less-good outcomes, but the prosecution of illegal warfare and all the horror that came with it. So I want to know what’s coming that is so ungodly much worse than anything I can even envision, that I am motivated to endorse murder and torture and detention and a global-reach police state in order to prevent it. That’s a high bar to clear.

Having said that, my question is not rhetorical, as Barry points out:

Iran, for starters.

…yeah. This is believable to me now, where in 2000 I could laugh off the Onion’s obvious facetiousness as obvious facetiousness. (Satire has since died. Those of you who say the Onion article was obviously literal really ought to make more concrete predictions than generic ‘worse outcomes’ this go-around.)

War in Iran is the kind of thing I can give up my principles for, in order to help prevent. And oh god, does reading that Onion article again ever sting…

Fair enough response to what I said, but that’s not what I meant; I meant, clarify for me what specific catastrophes I am preventing by selling out to the establishment Democrats and endorsing them. (Which Barry, for example, admittedly did clarify rather adroitly.)

Wow. I’m not willing to endorse torture, rendition, and illegal warfare on the generic mantle of “better outcomes.” I refuse to endorse mass murder so that a few more homeowners are able to hang on to their property. That kind of argument wasn’t good enough in 2000, and won’t be good enough now.

Okay. I’m just saying that this was the argument in 2000, and it was right, and not just because of a few homeowners. The fact that it was right wasn’t some kind of weird coincidence; it didn’t rely on hindsight, and it still applies today – again, not just because of a few homeowners.

I think the root of your problem is this idea that you have to “endorse” every single thing a politician does in order to vote for him or her.

I want to comment on something SoV mentioned upthread which I think is actually true. The conversation we are having here is not between political centrists and disaffected leftists. At this particular website, we are having a conversation between people who are generally left of the US democratic mainstream. Some of them have no trouble voting for Democrats. Some do. It’s not necessarily the most important thing to convince more of the latter group to vote D, but it seems to have mattered at least once (Bush v Gore), though I think that was somewhat unlikely and will be unlikely in the future because we are talking about a small group of voters here.

I think we have reached some agreement that we should look at voting as an outcome oriented process. My general problem with those who do not appreciate the Democratic party’s apparent feeling of ‘ownership’ of left political votes is that they are really looking at it the wrong way. Strategic voting is perfectly reasonable. It’s just that in this political sphere, it’s hard to see the strategic benefit of not voting for Democrats in your standard races where 90%+ of the vote is going to the two main parties. There are specific cases like the Rubio/Crist/Meeks Florida vote where the correct strategic vote is very confusing, but those are a minority of cases and the simple logic on how to vote in standard two party races is really silent on what do in that kind of situation. It specifically races questions that don’t normally exist in the US political sphere and if they frequently did would have a huge impact on strategic voting principles. Given that even Democratic politicians apparently supported voting for Crist, I think it demonstrates that it is not an ‘ownership of vote’ kind of principle, but just a ‘this is how you should vote in a two party system’ principle.

I’m not so sure why you are so sure that Gore wouldn’t have gone to war in Iraq. Did you read the analysis D^2 linked in the last post?

But quite a few people, in criticizing the Nader voters, are projecting knowledge about 9/11 back into the 2000 election.

But speaking of that, ” because he’s a Republican you could guarantee that Bush would use 9/11 as an excuse for war and a security state” this isn’t very useful if you want to use it as a distinction between Republicans and Democrats. The Homeland Security Act was passed in the house by 295 to 132 at a time when Republicans only had a small majority. The Senate passed it by 90 to 9 at a time when the Senate was functionally 50-50. Obama’s administration has publicly, and in court, defended extensions of the security state that even Bush’s administration did not defend–targeted assassination of American citizens without trial, away from the field of battle, with no court review at any time. Unless I’ve completely missed something, Gitmo is still open two years later. Extraordinary rendition (outsourcing torture to other countries) began under Clinton(D).

If the Democrats are ‘on average’ better at defending against the encroaching security state, it is an awfully thin difference, with weight of the average coming from a very few anti-security-state Democrats, not the general Democratic Congressman or general Democratic Administration appointee.

If you want to argue that they are better on other issues, that is fine. But the idea that Democrats are better at protecting against the security state, needs a lot more defending that just an assertion. Using it as an obvious reason to vote for Democrats doesn’t look great.

I feel weird for agreeing so thoroughly with Sebastian, but that’s how these things call sometimes.

Apologies for saying ‘little incremental stuff’ dismissively. Didn’t mean to. Writing in haste. Correction/amendment: This incremental stuff matters. And it matters to me. It just doesn’t matter to me enough to let me say, “okay, I’ll endorse torture and indefinite detention as well as all the other stuff I passionately hate, e.g. NAFTA and the revocation of welfare, if it means I get a better EPA and OSHA.”

And yes, a vote for Gore was a vote that said, “I endorse what this guy’s boss did and want him to continue to do it.” Cf. Brazil recently.

It would be a bad idea to put a five-year-old in charge of a moving tanker truck.

I’d say you misread me but actually, bad choice of words on me, really. I accepted Barry’s answer as “there’s no evidence against, and strong intuitive arguments for, the idea that a Repubican president would start even more wars in the Middle East.” That’s not a specific prediction, so bad on me for saying ‘specific,’ but it’s the kind of thing that I can find enough motivation in where ‘a more lackadaisical EPA’ doesn’t cut it for me.

Oooh, boy.

I suppose it’s a word that shouldn’t be thrown around lightly, but insofar as those atrocities had precedent under Clinton and before Clinton, doesn’t it strike you as supporting the idea that one could expect similar behavior from Gore and Bush? I thought acknowledging these things as unprecedented was generous of me, because for one thing, it’s saying that I don’t think Gore would have prosecuted wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in his first term. (I can’t fully convince myself of that, but I’m willing to pretend as if I do.)

Or were you suggesting that someone like Kennedy or Obama would not commit or authorize atrocities, whereas Republicans would?

“Florida is what Florida has always been, an amalgam of real-estate grifters, self-interested retirees and low information voters who drifted southward from the former Confederacy. Putting a criminal in the governor’s mansion is probably the most intellectually honest thing the residents of that hellhole have ever done.”

Wow. A bunch of condescending Wisconsonites? How inviting. I’ll go crawl back into my hole.

Anderson:

“So, Dubya could’ve named Roberts and Alito to the Supreme Court, made a joke of EPA and MMS and every other regulatory agency, run the deficit up cutting taxes for the rich … … and all that was cool with y’all Proud Leftists so long as he didn’t start a war or authorize torture? So, no reason to expect Gore to be materially better.

You are missing the elephant in the room: none of this could have been accomplished without the Democrats going along with Bush.

And to those who say without Bush no Iraq war, neither could it have been without Blair. And arguably, not without Clinton either because Clinton kept a low-intensity war against Iraq alive for that whole period. As appealing as your theory of good and bad in politics is, foreign policy is not a good example for it. How do you explain away Vietnam? By decreeing that according to axiom 1 a Republican president would have done the same and worse, qed? Not convincing. American foreign policy blunders are consistently bipartisan. I want to believe that Obama isn’t going to attack Iran or do something else more stupid than what he’s already doing (remember those drones in Pakistan) but there’s no guarantee for it.

SoV 105: “Weren’t we talking about those voters in the middle who were unhappy that the Democrats didn’t keep their promises? And as a result stayed home rather than voted?”

Ok it wasn’t clear to me that you were referring to people who didn’t vote at all. Now I’m not sure and haven’t seen the evidence about that but my impression was that lots of liberals stayed home but those in the middle, so-called independents or moderates or whatever, rather enthusiastically supported the Republicans.

mpowell @ 123: The conversation we are having here is not between political centrists and disaffected leftists.

Maybe true in the utopian world of the Internet, but on occasion I’ve witnessed a version of this conversation where it was about ensuring it would not be between political centrists and disaffected leftists, by identifying positions considered not to be on the left, and people considered to hold such positions.

Moreover, it’s hard to deny the evidence that there are a good number of libertarians and others (commenting and also presumably lurking) who don’t much like liberals or leftists because they think they are uniformly silly in their thinking (and are viewing this largely as support for their preconceptions, or else proof they’re not wrong to think liberals want to exclude them), so it isn’t really possible to describe this discussion as an internal discussion among leftists.

I find it very difficult to believe what christian_h @ 74 says is true in any real sense, though I’ve heard that a lot.

Oops:

Ok it wasn’t clear to me that you were referring to people who didn’t vote at all. Now I’m not sure and haven’t seen the evidence about that but my impression was that lots of liberals stayed home but those in the middle, so-called independents or moderates or whatever, rather enthusiastically supported the Republicans.

Well, it’s certainly possible that these moderates voted for Republicans this time instead of Democrats as well. But the more difficult fact to assess is who really counts as “liberal” and who counts as “moderate”. Me, I go with an issues-based approach and say that if you go along with the majority on any particular issue then you’re a moderate with respect to that particular issue, and if this is true for a majority of the issues of the day, you’re ipso facto a moderate, whatever you feel comfortable calling yourself. But that’s just me.

In any event, about 29 million voters who voted for Obama were absent this time around. I suppose you could posit that these were mainly disaffected “liberals”. But that large a number sounds fishy to me.

And to those who say without Bush no Iraq war, neither could it have been without Blair.

Highly debatable. US wars tend to go ahead even in the absence of British support.

@135, incidentally, I remember a race for the governor in MA (92 I think it was) in which the D candidate (John Silber) sounded like a real nutcase, while his R opponent (Bill Weld) appeared to be much more reasonable and liberal. Go figure.

Henri V, it was 1990. John Silber was a philosophy professor, but I’m sure that has nothing to do with it. :)

I think University President Krupp in Neal Stephenson’s (first) novel, The Big U, is based on Silber. And IIRC he made a beloved female news anchor cry on television. Whereas Weld, the story goes, was so much a social liberal and civil libertarian that people believed he was only masquerading as a Republican and were SHOCKED when he supported tax cuts and budget cuts.

To slightly change the topic, there were some positive outcomes in state referenda. California massively rejected the anti-environment proposition 23 and Colorado rejected the anti-health care reform measure 63. Arizona had some pretty bad outcomes though and marijuana legalization in California failed with 46% (quite respectable I think). Oregon rejected medical marijuana!?

Salient and others fudge the issue by conflating Congressional Democrats (Democratus invertebratus) with a Democrat in the White House.

None of which however makes it any more sensible not to vote for the nominated Democrat in a presidential election, particularly in a purple state.

I am not subtle enough to continue the debate. To my limited intellect, it was stupid not to vote for Gore, like it’s stupid not to look both ways before crossing a highway, and arguments about well you had no way to know what traffic was coming, other people don’t look either, etc., are never going to be persuasive.

bianca @135: I wonder what geo thinks, doesn’t he live in the state?

This year I had committed myself to vote for the Democrat in exchange for John Q’s excellent previous posts on electoral reform. Looking to the future, however, I support the formation of Crooked Timber state and local caucuses to discuss this very question.

The passage of California prop 25—allowing budgets to pass by majority vote—is also very good news.

Holy Moishe, I had missed that one. Given how much devastation has been wreaked with the previous supermajority requirement, this will be genuinely helpful for Governor Moonbeam in cleaning up some of the mess.

On the other hand, I heard that a proposition stripping congressional redistricting from the legislature also passed, which, while admirable in abstract, manages to be an own goal given how many state governments the GOP seized control of Tuesday. Few of them have any compunction about draconian redistricting next year. Does anyone remember when Texas and Pennsylvania conducted off-year Republican-friendly redistricting, and the response of the Illinois legislature was that they wouldn’t stoop so low (about that, anyway)?

An interesting question would be how many Obama voters voted Rep, and what were their motivations.

There’s a summary of CNN polling at the Great Orange Satan which notes that 13% of Obama voters went Republican, while 9% of McCain voters went Democratic:

So you have a situation where (a) Obama voters were less likely to show up than McCain voters; (b) Obama voters were more likely to flip to the GOP than McCain voters were to flip Democratic; and (c) voters who didn’t vote for either McCain or Obama in 2008 voted Republican.

Disgust or apathy from the base and leftwards easily accounts for (a). (b) and (c) are trickier, and the current summary doesn’t get to the motivation question.

The passage of California prop 25—allowing budgets to pass by majority vote—is also very good news.

Holy Moishe, I had missed that one. Given how much devastation has been wreaked with the previous supermajority requirement, this will be genuinely helpful for Governor Moonbeam in cleaning up some of the mess.

Unfortunately, the requirement of a 2/3 majority to raise taxes is still in place. Which is probably why Prop 25 was allowed to pass.

I get it – voters were concerned about the economy. But that doesn’t explain why they would vote for candidates who propose privatizing SS, or who want the US to become more like China. Possible they just don’t pay attention to that kind of stuff.

Very possibly. But whatever the Republicans may or may not have said, these sorts of voters do know that the Democrats didn’t do a whole lot for them.

But I’d say that anyone claiming low “liberal” turnout is what killed the Democrats would be facing an uphill battle.

I thought your point was that independents who voted for Obama were staying home. Now it seems that they did indeed vote, as I suspected.

No. My point is that all this discussion about what sort of voting strategy “liberals” or those “on the left” should use doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, given that it’s the voters in the middle that usually carry the day – and they have a decidedly different strategy – the quid pro quo. When I say they won’t vote for the Democratic ticket, that means that either they stayed home or they voted for a candidate from a different party. Uh, that’s comment number 136 the way they are presently enumerated:

Well, it’s certainly possible that these moderates voted for Republicans this time instead of Democrats as well.

In any event, there it stands; it seems to me that the ABC analysis does indeed indicate the events fell out as I predicted back in January or earlier.

I hesitate to wade into this, but since some commenters seem to be working on a Naderite version of no-one-could-have-predicted, I’ll pile on to what sg, The Onion et al have already said:

Yes, there were lots and lots of people well to the left of Gore who — without hesitati0n and at the time of the election — thought voting for Nader was narcissistic madness. As I recall, it was a frequent, anguished topic of conversation amongst my friends, since we all knew lots of Nader voters and we all thought — fuck it, knew we were watching a car accident in slow motion.

Everything horrible about Bush — the warmongering, the economic royalism, the incompetence — was on the table from the start for anyone willing to look. And to imagine that Gore, for all his shortcomings, was the same, was pretty crazy. At the time.

I’ve made some terrible political calls myself — of course — but I try to own up to them and avoid rationalizing.

I’ve made some terrible political calls myself—of course—but I try to own up to them and avoid rationalizing.

Last time I’m saying this. It’s not my fault if you don’t go read my blog. You want mea culpa, it’s there, not here.

“Very possibly. But whatever the Republicans may or may not have said, these sorts of voters do know that the Democrats didn’t do a whole lot for them.”

Well, they “know” that Obama raised their taxes for one thing. I’m just wondering how you know what “these sorts of voters” are thinking.

I recall being quite dubious about Gore in 2000 because he had pretty loyally served the basically useless (though psychologically fascinating) Great Triangulator for eight years.

And I also had noted the G H W Bush had been improvement over Reagan in some ways.

But I was completely certain that G W Bush was no G H W Bush — his lack of seriousness, his snotty entitlement, his sneering moral shallowness were completely apparent. And the polls were (correctly) extremely close.

My point? Beats me.

If someone tells me the reason I got bad service in his establishment is because there’s a Democrat in the White House (either because he makes the workers slack off or because he’s not going to start trying until he likes the President or for whatever other reason pops into his head), is that supposed to be a reason for me to vote Republicans into office from here on out? I don’t see a lot of difference between that and believing in nonexistent tax increases because “they have been told, and readily believe,” that’s the case.

Everything horrible about Bush—the warmongering, the economic royalism, the incompetence—was on the table from the start for anyone willing to look.

I’ve kind of given up on addressing this, but… let me try one more time, since it sure sounds like bh was addressing me, among others. EDIT: My reply went a bit long, so I’m posting it over here so as to eat up less threadspace here.

Shorter tl;dr version: Everything horrible about Gore—the warmongering, the economic royalism, the surveillance-state enthusiasm, and the technocratic competence to make it all look good at a first glance—was on the table from the start for anyone willing to look.

We’re having a discussion here about strategic voting in the context of a post discussing the pointlessness (or otherwise) of voting on purely ideological grounds. So doesn’t this mean that the Democrats’ votes when in opposition need to be assessed on their strategic /tactical merits rather than as a representation of their ideology? e.g. Maybe the Dems voted for a security state knowing it would happen anyway, to minimize the political damage?

It seems silly to say that *my* vote can be dispensed strategically to take into account factors other than my ideology (in, say, a narrow race, or where an establishment rethug is better than a tea party maniac, or whatever) but then to assess the Dems’ votes in the house on purely ideological grounds.

Also, as others have observed, I don’t have to predict particular catastrophes. I just have to say: if a catastrophe comes up, the Republicans will handle it worse than the Dems.

Maybe the Dems voted for a security state knowing it would happen anyway, to minimize the political damage?

It seems silly to say that my vote can be dispensed strategically to take into account factors other than my ideology (in, say, a narrow race, or where an establishment rethug is better than a tea party maniac, or whatever) but then to assess the Dems’ votes in the house on purely ideological grounds.

Sure, you can that at any time you want and as often as you please. But unless you offer up specific examples along with some sort of evidence, all you’re doing is the old Megan McArdle routine where she asks us how do we know that making pharmaceutical forgo some of their profits won’t result in the lack of a medical breakthrough ten or fifty years from now that increases human life expectancy by 80 years.

I’m not saying that what you posit doesn’t happen, of course. For example, I find it quite possible that some Democrats voted for AUMF because they knew it was going to pass with or without their vote and they didn’t want to have this become red meat issue with mid-terms so close. But note that I’m being specific, not going with an airy “How do you know that X wasn’t a factor” sort of critique.

ScentOfViolets, I’m offering this explanation in response to people (Sebastian?) pointing out that the Dems voted for a security state. That is a specific example. In opposition, parties can vote with bloody-minded political objectives in mind (or even, multiple objectives) that aren’t a reflection of the policies they would introduce themselves if in office.

I feel like what ScentofViolets is saying is that a number of kinda apolitical people who were enthusiastic enough to turn out in 2008 and vote for someone who sounded inspiring and helpful and genuinely interested in their welfare, then lived through two grinding years of not receiving much in the way of visible obvious support, and decided to shrug off the next election. ScentofViolets is also suggesting that these people have passively absorbed the zeitgeist that includes a lot of misinformation, as well as the general fact that their lives and the lives in their communities seem to have gotten worse, rather than better. Possibly, ScentofViolets is also suggesting that some of these voters are easily led about one way and another, and may have gotten swept up into the Tea Party vortex because it was the next movement to carry a lot of emotive force, or voted for a Tea Party candidate for much the same reason. But a lot of them simply didn’t show.

I don’t see anything in there that I disagree with particularly strongly, though I may be misunderstanding the back-and-forth.

I should add, that analysis applies to dems in opposition, mostly, though there may be some elements of the same when they’re in parliament (e.g. presenting partially effective legislation because htey think the community doesn’t support the full version).

That was a rhetorical “if I can,” salient. It’s meant to mean, “apply the same analysis to democrat representatives’ votes as we do to our own.” The OP provides an argument for ideologically-based voting as an alternative to the standard method of strategic voting, and I’m saying that well, if we accept that it’s okay for individuals to vote strategically, i.e. occasionally an individual’s vote doesn’t match their real ideology, surely we can say the same for democrats in a tight position in the house, too?

Voting in a large election is endorsement. Nothing more, and nothing less.

The only rational reason to vote is to provide your personal endorsement, to be able to credibly say, “I was one of the individuals who endorsed this person as my representative in government.” The corresponding consequence is that you are unable to say, “I was not one of the individuals who endorsed this person as my representative in government.”

This is literally the only rational reason to vote in a secret ballot election in which more than say 50,000 or so people participate. Period. Those 50,000 plus people, enough to reduct your individual vote into margin-of-counting-error territory, are (mostly) already there for the reason I said above: in some way shape or form, they actively want to endorse a particular person as their representative in government. This endorsement is of course an expression of preference among finite choices, notice I didn’t try to suggest voting expresses “this person is the best out of all human beings alive” — endorsement is weaker than that, and voting for a person indicates nothing more than preferential endorsement.

A person could assert they feel more strongly than that, and speak up to endorse a candidate as the best human evar for their representative, if they wanted. But their vote and their vote alone does nothing more than assert a preferential endorsement.

When the ballot is a secret ballot, the choice to say “none of the above” is always present. Participation is voluntary and it’s possible to write in “none of the above” or cast a blank vote instead of casting a vote, even if participation is mandatory. [Theoretical note: I suppose someone could design a mandatory secret ballot that won’t let you leave the booth until you vote for A or B, but that’s not currently how it works.] So voting does imply endorsement, precisely because credible strategic action is impossible.

Since your vote literally cannot influence an election, and since the secret ballot prevents voting by collective action, your vote does not have any impact whatsoever other than endorsing the candidate, thereby authorizing you (in a moral sense) to credibly state that you endorsed that candidate, and did not endorse any of the other candidates.

I suppose there’s a hypothetical case in which so few people show up to endorse their candidate that strategic voting suddenly becomes possible, if you can convince sufficiently many people to vote as a bloc with you and trust them to commit to it. In local races, perhaps — and apparently also in delegations. (!) But that case just doesn’t exist in elections like 2000 or 2010, where sufficiently many people do turn out to endorse their candidate of choice.

So, yeah, voting in a large election is endorsement. When the tally comes back 117,806 R to 114,325 D, with 15,401 G votes, and you voted, depending on your vote you can say, “I was one of those 117,806 who endorsed R,” or you can say, “I was one of those 114,325 who endorsed D,” or you can say, “I was one of those 15,401 who endorsed G.” I guess there’s no way to prove you voted a certain way, but insofar as there exists an objective truth, voting allows you to align reality so that your claim that you endorsed a candidate has objective factual backing.

However, you cannot rationally say, those 15,401 threw the election, because under a secret ballot it is impossible to vote collectively. They didn’t act as a block of 15,401. They couldn’t credibly act as a block of 15,401. They acted individually, and performed an act of endorsement.

Representatives in government can vote strategically, because their vote is not (usually) secret, ergo they can credibly vote as a bloc. So in a way, sg’s conclusion seems correct to me: we can’t automatically interpret a Congress person’s vote as an indication of their ideology.

ScentOfViolets, you can’t even if you look at individual tallies, because whether voting was tactical or ideological depends on their perception of their own benefits, not ours.

I’m just suggesting that it’s naive(?) to portray democrat votes for policies we don’t like as necessarily evidence that they are the same as the rethugs, because their votes on those issues may be dependent on issues other than ideology. The prime and obvious example is neutralizing claims of being “objectively pro-fascist” in a subsequent election campaign, when they knew the war was going to happen regardless.

I don’t disagree with the possibility. But you seem to be suggesting that it is for all intents and purposes untestable. Which really sticks in my craw. Not you or this particular proposition, just the general idea. That’s what leads to nonsense like the pro-Obama apologetics about how “the votes just weren’t there” when defending the lack of action on the public option, then when it turns out that this was instead because of a backroom deal, the same people saying the existence of such a deal is proof that the votes just weren’t there!

It makes me feel dirty to think this way too, but if I can dispose of my vote tactically rather than ideologically, surely so too can my representatives?

Oh, doubtless, doubtless. But without any evidence one way or the other, this theory is on a par with the notion that we’re living in some sort of simulation rather then the “real” reality in terms of utility. Interesting as philosophical point, but not enough meat there to base any action on.

“But you seem to be suggesting that it is for all intents and purposes untestable.”

I have no idea where you get that from. Anyway I suggest we drop this.

I suppose there’s a hypothetical case in which so few people show up to endorse their candidate that strategic voting suddenly becomes possible, if you can convince sufficiently many people to vote as a bloc with you and trust them to commit to it. In local races, perhaps—and apparently also in delegations. (!) But that case just doesn’t exist in elections like 2000 or 2010, where sufficiently many people do turn out to endorse their candidate of choice.

I think this can work better nationally than you imagine. Say you form a national organization to pool votes, select a candidate, and run that candidate with an eye toward gaining an electoral majority.

Of course, it’s hard to say if this would work. Given the ideological diversity of the country and the need for a majority, voters would have to accept the idea of voting for someone whose views on crucial matters are different from theirs.

But if it worked – if people actually accepted that they had to band together to form a majority – then the sort of “endorsement” voting that you advocate would become functionally equivalent to nonvoting, and the views of those “endorsement” voters would, axiomatically, not be represented in the government (except to the extent that “coalition” voters agreed with those views).

If only there were some kind of national organization devoted to candidate selection and election …

SoV, say whatever you like but don’t impute “ideas” to me that I haven’t expressed.

Is there something going on that I don’t know about? I’m quoting and responding to sg. Go back and look if you don’t believe me.

Are you saying you can’t keep track of your own words? Or are sg and piglet two names for the same person?

Uh, piglet? You’re not making any sense. I only quoted you on your “suggestion”; the italicized part is someone else. I did not say anything about any particular ideas of yours, nor can I find anything anywhere where, in your words:

SoV, say whatever you like but don’t impute “ideas” to me that I haven’t expressed.

This seems to be just plain weird.

This is literally the only rational reason to vote in a secret ballot election in which more than say 50,000 or so people participate. Period.

I usually agree with Salient, but this is just silly.

Imagine a large population divided into a group of individualists who think the way Salient describes, only ever seeing the consequence of their actions as individuals, and a group of collectivists who are also capable of of considering the consequences of their actions as representative of the group. The first group can only think “How should I vote?”; the second can also think, “How should we vote?”

Come election day, the individualists all stay home, since their individual votes are meaningless and there are lots of more satisfying ways of expressing themselves. The collectivists all vote for the candidate who best serves their interests (which are not necessarily the same, of course; part of being a collectivist is deciding what collective identity is most salient at the moment). The result is that in any conflict between individualists and collectivists, the collectivists get what they want. (Similarly, the collectivists are able to see all the little acts of cooperation that make a mass society workable as *rational*, and not as costly acts of individual virtue.) So Salient is saying that it’s rational to hold beliefs that make you strictly worse off, which can’t be right.

I usually agree with Salient, but this is just silly.

Well, crap. I thought you would. I don’t agree with your subsequent description of what I said, so I suspect I didn’t speak coherently in my comment.

I think this can work better nationally than you imagine.

The facetiousness was cute, and endearing, but almost worked out against you — for a moment, I thought you were actually referring to the Democratic and Republican parties, which would be silly and stupid (and I think much much more of you than that, politicalfootball, so I reread your comment a few times and pondered it).

Just to be clear for those casually following along, I think it would be silly and stupid because (among other reasons) the U.S. does not have a parliamentary system in which candidates are mere executors of a stated agenda, chosen for their fealty to that party agenda,^1^ and therefore (I’m not going to waste time going through the implication’s details unless someone asks me to), the vast majority of individual voters who would participate pseudo-collectively in the existing party framework, acting as politicalfootball suggests as Democrats or Republicans, would get literally nothing in concession from their representative in each cycle. In terms of getting what you want, you might as well vote for Brick Wall, because your vote would be totally disconnected from any credible and genuinely threatening threat of exit.

You could try to form a smaller bloc, outside the traditional party structure, with a coherent parliamentary-style agenda, and credible threat of exit: we all won’t vote Democratic, for example, unless the following concessions are expressed by the candidate and recorded to our satisfaction; we will withdraw our support when re-election rolls around unless x% of our demands have been met in the interim. The whole point I was making was that people have to be able to vote together as a bloc, and make demands for concessions in exchange for their vote, and have enough votes as a bloc to make a candidate listen because threat of exit would doom that candidate otherwise.

The Dem and Repub machinery does not provide any mechanism for this sort of hostage-taking and negotiation, and of course not; they’re interested in getting lots and lots free votes in exchange for no concessions. They benefit from the existing two-party system, in which blocs of voters do not have the support infrastructure that would be necessary in order for them to convene and make demands on the party backed by credible threat of exit. The individuals comprising such a bloc can’t credibly commit to it, because they vote in private secrecy.

Note that I’m assuming a given voter is not actually at all satisfied with what the Democratic or Republican candidates are doing or promising to do, and feels disaffected. Basically I am assuming this because it’s the interesting case to explore. If a voter is well-satisfied with one or the other, then, uhh, their mind is made up as an individualist to vote for that candidate, so there’s no use analyzing how they should vote. They should vote their conscience, and thus vote Democrat or Republican, because that’s what their conscience tells them to do. My own conscience has, since 2003 or so, swung in that direction, leading to a lot of inner conflict and etc and blah blah.

This sort of individual rather than collective decision to support a major party is in fact what most voters do, as individualists who choose a party affiliation to guide their individual endorsements, or who choose to endorse candidates regardless of party. But that voter is not voting collectively, because they still have complete control over their own vote: once in the privacy of the ballot box, they are free to vote as they choose. That is the kind of vote I am identifying as individual, not collective. That’s why I said strategic collective voting is impossible. The point of such a collective would be to wring concessions from one of the major parties’ candidates, under threat of exit of a bloc of voters that the candidate needs in order to safely win (re-)election. You don’t obtain credible threat of exit by promising to always vote D over R, for example.

For a moment, politicalfootball (can I call you pf for short?), I was worried that you hadn’t picked up on any of this orientation, and thus were trying to suggest that the Democrats and Republicans are themselves collectives.

BUT then I remembered what Lemuel said (I think) about the formation of minor parties in New York, like the Working Families Party, who are allowed to endorse anyone. With the right organization and structure, minor-party membership might bypass the collective action / Prisoner’s Dilemma problem. “We are the WFP, 15,000 strong (or whatever it is) as our party voting record from previous cycles indicates, and we will support you with all of our votes if and only if you pledge to do X, Y, Z; conversely, we will all choose an alternative and all refuse to vote for you, dooming you to a probable loss, unless you act to fulfill at least x% of your pledge while governing.

See, this can work despite the privacy of a secret ballot! If you claim to have 15,000 members, and actually revoke your bloc , and those members actually do vote for the alternative candidate, then the numbers will show up and the threat of exit will be seen as credible. Each individual voter might defect, but if they don’t deviate from the collective decision, for several cycles, then the bloc’s threat is credible, and the candidate will be forced to listen and negotiate.

But you can’t vote ‘collectively’ unless you belong to a bloc with enough people in it that has credible threat of exit: such a bloc needs to be able to state, believably, that it really truly will actually refuse to vote for the lesser evil, unless a reasonable amount of their concessions are obtained: then and only then is collective parliamentary-style collective action possible among the voting public.

I’m kind of excited to have realized this. Thanks LP and pf for engaging with me! Perhaps you were right to call me silly. I somewhat hope so; cynicism doesn’t suit me too well.

^1^Not to say all or even most parliaments are of this form. I am thinking (fondly) of the sort of system that abb1 / Henri Vieuxtemps would prefer existed.

A few questions for Lemuel Pitkin (@196):

part of being a collectivist is deciding what collective identity is most salient at the moment
1. How do collectivists know that?
2. How does that knowledge transmit itself through the group?
3. Who decides what is right in this group?