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The Hidden Swing State?
rwiedower writes "What if all the Nader voters lived in a single state? Kerry would have to court them and their electoral votes just like he pursues union workers in Ohio and senior citizens in Florida. Now, in the two weeks before the election, Nader's 1% might well be a deciding factor. And Nader voters, sick of being told that a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush, have formed a loose coalition demanding to be treated for what they are--a swing state."
What about the libertarians? They're not claiming to be akin to a swing state, they're basically trying to CREATE a swing state!
Experience is a wonderful thing. It allows you to recoginize a mistake when you make it again.
or another way of looking at it is:
A vote for Nader is the triumph of hope over experience.
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
Nice comeback dumbass. You're so full of thought and reason.
I agree, but I don't think Nader is playing the game any differently than Bush or Kerry. He's running on "party" not on "issues." That's a problem for him, but not for them, because Bush and Kerry can get to the final stage of the election process riding on party loyalties and then start differentiating themselves on issues.
If a third party candidate with moderate charisma ran under a specific set of issues, he or she could generate a lot of steam [1]. The reason why Clinton was such a vote-getter was that he ran on a specific platorm, including making the radical promise that he would reform health care in his first 100 days in office. If someone picked up that same banner and run under it this election, third party or not, they'd get a hell of a lot of attention because the problem is much more pronounced now.
[1] Perot was probably the best example of this in recent times. But also, in Minnesota, pro wrestler Jesse "The Body" Ventura got himself a governorship as an independent because he ran on an issue. What was his issue? He didn't like being harshly taxed on his recreational vehicles. Just goes to show you it doesn't matter what it is, just have an issue.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
First, voting for a Republican or Democrat candidate when you're not in a swing state is really a wasted vote, because your vote won't change anything. Any Texan who votes for Bush or Kerry won't make any difference in the world, because Bush will carry Texas. There just aren't enough Democrats in Texas to make a difference.
However, a vote for a third-party candidate in Texas (or any state) will increase the visibility of that candidate.
Second, third-party candidates that are tied to one of the two major parties can affect things. Let's take Nader. His point has been that the Democrat party isn't liberal enough, so his presence will force the Democrat party to really evaluate their positions. If there are enough liberals who don't think the Democrat party isn't liberal enough, they will vote for Nader, possibly forcing the Democrats to lose. That's what happened in Florida in 2000. In theory, the Democrats will then be forced to become more liberal, i.e., "truer" to their party platform.
The question is, have the Democrats learned their lesson? Have they realized that if they don't really cater to their liberal elements, they will lose swing states to Nader again? I believe the answer is no.
For the record, I'm in Texas and I'm voting Libertarian. The Libertarian party is to the Republican party what Nader is to the Democrat party. In theory, the Libertarian party could swing Texas to Kerry. Imagine if the Libertarian party got 15% of the vote. If that happened, then it's unlikely that the Republicans will get more than 40%. That would leave 45% of the vote for the Democrats. If the Republicans lost Texas because of the Libertarians, then it would send a message to the Republican party that need to pay less attention to their Jesus-freak constituents and more attention to their supposed support for personal responsibility.
A Libertarian candidate may never become president in my lifetime, but if he scares the crap out of the Republicans, then he will still make a real difference.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
For starters, he's a traitor to those POWs who endured years of torture to get them to say they committed war crimes even if they didn't.
I went to the "slacker uprising" rally at the Univeristy of Minnesota during the 2nd presidential debate. Slacker Uprising is a publicity tour of Michael Moore nominally to increase voter turnout by offering a pair of underwear if you register to vote (Yes I registered, no I didn't grab the undies).
After the debate, and Moore's appearance on HBO, he began his "speech." I use quotation marks because most of the content was culled from other writers and speakers. The one salient point I thought he did have concerned Nader and the temptation to vote for him. As you can imagine there were quite a few Nader supporters in the crowd that were wavering between supporting Kerry and supporting Nader. There were others that were plain pricks about it, calling Moore a traitor and such.
Moore expressed the opinion that, because of Nader, the democrats have been pulled much further to the left than they were in 2000. If you compare Kerry to Gore in 2000, the rhetoric has become much harsher and emphises the differences instead of their cheery agreements. The two candidates today have very different proposed solutions to the same problems, and no one thinks for a minute that Kerry and Bush are equally evil (I haven't heard anyone use the tweedledee and tweedledum analogy this time around).
As someone who voted for Nader in 2000 this argument made a certain degree of sense to me. Is voting for Nader throwing your vote away? I don't think so. In fact I think Nader's support has swung the democrats over enough to my viewpoint that I'm willing to vote for them, hence my decision to vote for Kerry.
A socialist has never been elected preisdent of the United States, but minimum wage and social security would hardly haave had as much support without them. Those who support Nader don't expect to have him become president, they expect to influence policy of those who *are* elected.
I've heard from several sources (one being NPR, though I can't find a URL) that with current immigration rates, that the Latino vote in Texas would essentially serve as a third party and possibly more aligned with Democratic interests than Republican interests. This might mean that in 2008, Texas is a "swing state" and 3rd parties that more closely fit Latino priorities would do very well.
-Geoff
This still falls somewhere short of a coherent answer. It'd be one thing if Kerry lied. But the thing is, Americans did commit crimes in Viet Nam. All he did was tell the truth about what was going wrong in Viet Nam- something that needed to be known. I fail to see how it makes you a traitor to criticize your government. In fact I think the real betrayal lies in supporting your government even when it's doing the wrong thing.
There really isn't a Constitutional right to secede, that is, one specifically enumerated in the Constitution. If there is a right to secede it exists because the Constitution doesn't specifically prohibit it, which is, of course, a constitutionally valid argument.
Of course any discussion of rights where the fatherland, I mean homeland, security department is concerned is probably pointless. Any rights they think you don't have you don't have (at least not until you spend years dragging your case through the courts, and, to paraphase, rights delayed are rights denied.)
If SC had been smart they would have seceded and *not* fired on Fort Sumpter, thus forcing the US to have to play the heavy.
Speaking of statehood, the Constitution says that Congress can vote to make an area a State, but it doesn't say anything about having to get the people who live there to agree. What if we just up and told the people of Cuba that we had just made them the 51st State? I bet Fidel's life would get very interesting very quickly.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Nobody who favors the Digital Millenium Copyright Act gets my vote.
Nobody who favors USA-PATRIOT gets my vote.
Nobody who favors the war on Iraq gets my vote.
Nader not being on my ballot, Cobb gets my vote. Because Democrats denied Nader his spot on the ballot, the Libertarians picked up a few votes form me for offices lower on the ballot, because they're not Democrats.
Ed Craig "Who cares what you think?" George W. Bush, 4th of July 2001
An idiot. Kerry won't do any more to reduce abortion than Bush will.
i sion/, even the original Roe V. Wade ruled that some form(s) of abortion are regulatable.
Legality isn't the only way to attack abortion. It's proveable that Clinton had the lowest number of abortions per year in 24 years, and he was pro-choice.
His hypothetical "make it cost as much as having a baby" in his Health Care reform won't survive the first legal challenge. One thing you have to give the pro-abortion people credit for is understanding the "slippery slope" idea. They oppose EVERYTHING that affects the availability of abortion even the tiniest amount. Because they know that if we reach the point where abortion is illegal in any way, however slight, the line between illegal and legal will continue moving back the other way.
Not entirely true- NARAL has supported legislation that has helped women become mothers in the past, such as the WIC program, pregnancy coverage in Medicare, and so on. You see, that's the problem- the true pro-abortionists don't have much power, and most of the other side is merely pro-choice, and that includes choosing life. Anything that supports a woman's RIGHT TO CHOOSE they'll support- it's just a matter of using the correct terminology.
Fact is, abortion is going to continue exactly as is until a new Supreme Court rules that some form(s) of abortion are regulatable.
Read http://edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/1998/roe.wade/dec
Note, by the way, that my duaghter required my written permission to get her ears pierced. An abortion she could have done without even letting me know she was missing school that day.
That IS regulation- it's a HIPPA issue. And actually, under that relatively new law, if she chooses to disallow you from visiting her in the hospital as a minor when she's undergoing heart surgery, that's her right. (I know- we used HIPPA to keep my father-in-law out of the birthing room during the birth of my son at my wife's request).
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.