I’ll fight for what I believe in. But when it comes to casting a vote in an election, I’m not sure that not voting, or voting for the lesser of the two candidates, could ever help me to “fight for what I believe in”.
I believe in a lot of things. If there are two candidates, and one candidate will be on my side for 70% of the things I am fighting for, and the other for about 10% of the things I am fighting for, I’m not sure how logically I should not vote for the 70% candidate, because I AM fighting for a lot of different things.
The only reason I can see to not vote for the 70% candidate is if you have a pretty solid majority of conservatives in a voting area, and know that if you reject the moderate, the next election cycle you can replace the democrat with a conservative.
We did that in 1994, so it isn’t impossible — but the conservatives of 1994 became the moderates of 2000, became the losers of 2006.
We need to win over a majority of the electorate, and I can see that having “republicans” who do the wrong thing makes that harder. So I do understand the desire to get rid of the “bad republicans”. I just don’t see a winning strategy in the current rhetoric that would reject voters who don’t agree with us 100%, and that appear to put us in a permanent minority.
If solidly conservative Americans were 40% of the electorate, I could see us getting there with this strategy. But the number isn’t anywhere near that. And the more we scream about purity for the 20% who are, the easier it is for a liberal media to dismiss any candidate we support as obviously far-right and out-of-the-mainstream.
It doesn’t help that if we have a solidly conservative candidate but he says something that sounds like pandering, we immediately attack and demand they re-take the purity oath. Why would anybody want to run as a conservative if you can’t please the base no matter what you do, and if doing so makes you toxic to the majority of the electorate?
Look at Ric Santorum. He made a serious error, but he was otherwise a strong conservative, and conservatives abandoned him for that one error. There are conservatives abandoning Jim DeMint for the same reason — one “error” in their minds over a political support issue, and he is no longer “conservative enough”.
I’ve seen others reject solid conservatives because they weren’t sufficiently strident on immigration, or because they didn’t support pro-life to the womb, or they said something nice about a democrat once. Rush’s poster-child for conservative, Bobby Jindal, was nearly run out of conservative-town on the rails because of a decision he made at the start of his term as Governor. A couple of the really strident conservatives have even attacked Palin for being insufficiently pure.
Of course, here at FR we regularly go after each other for perceived failings in the purity test.
Governor Jindal claims to have delivered the largest tax cut in LA history. Funny thing is it has yet to take effect and may not do so because of the “recession”.
Did PA conservatives really abandon Santorum in 2006, or was he just another victim of the unpopularity of GWB?