953
Has anyone noted the pre-election uptick? (europe.pub)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/politicalmemes@lemmy.world
600 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 46 points 1 week ago (5 children)

I live in a state with partially open primaries that goes red 90% of the time. In order to maximize the effectiveness of my vote and thereby maximize my voice, I registered as an independent and generally request a Republican primary ballot.

I then have to sift through each list of candidates looking for someone who doesn't mention Trump and has a stated policy goal that isn't evil. There's usually one candidate who mentions their focus as being healthcare or education. This is a fairly laborious process and there are plenty of races where the least-worst option is still a horrible person. However, given the winner of the Republican primary has a 90% chance of winning the general AND voter turnout for the primary is generally under 10%, I know that this is effective.

Anyway, doing all this because it is the most logical course of action where I live and then seeing people cry about only agreeing with 87% of one candidate's policy goals always annoys the hell out of me.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 5 child comments
    •
  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago

    i live in california. back when we had limited/closed primaries (before the joke that's the top two runoff now) everyone would register democrat because republicans didn't have a chance in hell, and they wanted a say in which democrat got in elected.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    I've done similar in the past. In my instance, this doesn't necessarily work:

    1. All of the R candidates mentioned Trump, directly. However, one of them mentioned Trump's name in the context of opposing some of the more extreme and unpopular Trumpnanigans.

    2. The ones who have a focus on healthcare and education have VERY different ideas on what it means to support those. Nearly universally they mean pushing healthcare even further into the private sector, allowing scam plans that cover practically nothing and are "insurance" in name only, or things like that. The ones talking about education want to privatize that that, switch to voucher systems that people can use in private schools, and other nefarious things like forcing Christianity into the schools.

    But either way, these folks aren't the ones who ultimately get chosen in the primary because they're never extreme enough.

    The crazy part about living in a rural, red district is that even the majority of Democrats on the primary are basically Republican-lite and often "former" Republicans. Go figure.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago

    But either way, these folks aren’t the ones who ultimately get chosen in the primary because they’re never extreme enough.

    I think this is primarily due to the fact that the practice hasn't caught on or been promoted effectively in deep red states. If you had a movement to get people voting in the only election that matters in their state to the point where moderates started winning, you'd permanently start to shift the policy positions of candidates. Nikki Haley didn't win the primary but she was only able to hang on as long as she did due to this strategy.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent