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Democrats Crowdsourcing To Vote Palin In Primaries

SharpieMarker writes "In what could be the most extreme and influential crowdsourcing project ever, Democrats are beginning to organize to purposely vote for Palin in the 2012 Republican primaries. Their theory is by having Palin as an opponent, Obama will have the best odds at winning reelection. Recent polls have shown that Obama comfortably leads Palin by 10-20 points, but Obama is statistically tied with Romney and barely ahead of Huckabee. They even have a state-by-state primary voting guide to help Democrats navigate various states' rules for voting Palin in Republican primaries."

22 of 1,128 comments (clear)

  1. As a voter who normally leans Democrat... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm not sure if I can support this. I think it perverts the process.

    1. Re:As a voter who normally leans Democrat... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The process doesn't matter when the system is already f-ed up.

    2. Re:As a voter who normally leans Democrat... by SerpentMage · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Its already been subverted, explain gerrymandering.

      --

      "You can't make a race horse of a pig"
      "No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
    3. Re:As a voter who normally leans Democrat... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yea let's have a 1 party dictatorship instead.

      Some say it's already one party -- the Corporate party.

    4. Re:As a voter who normally leans Democrat... by peragrin · · Score: 5, Funny

      Palin Zealots aren't allowed to ride on dinosaurs as dinosaurs where put there by god to test man's ability to deceive itself into believe the earth is only 6000 years old and one of the first ones born lived to be 900 of those years.

      However i do agree with every else you said.

      --
      i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
    5. Re:As a voter who normally leans Democrat... by Marcika · · Score: 5, Informative

      As it is, she's a drop-out governor and media pundit... no better than Obama - a community organizer.

      Malicious cheap shot at Barry O. She dropped out of 5 different undergrad party schools, he graduated HLS with highest honors and as editor of the Harvard Law review. She still has her "own" books ghostwritten, he wrote a best-selling non-fiction book way before he was ever elected into any public office. She speaks as a "pundit" on issues she doesn't understand, he has had a 12-year-tenure as a lecturer on constitutional law at UChicago.

    6. Re:As a voter who normally leans Democrat... by DavidShor · · Score: 5, Interesting
      http://stochasticdemocracy.blogspot.com/2009/11/gerrymandering-compactness-and-toblers.html

      The situation is more complicated then you think. A "fair" system will, on average, give Republicans 58% of the seats with 50% of the votes due to the presence of lopsided Democratic urban districts and a lack of correspondingly lopsided Republican ones. You need weird looking districts that start in the city and tendril out to the suburbs if you want a representative legislature.

  2. WCPGW by Nerdfest · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What could possibly go wrong?

  3. Why give them the publicity by DocSavage64109 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I thought it was rather embarrassing for the republicans when they tried these tactics against Obama. It saddens me that apparently some democrats are sinking to their level. Really, I can't imagine this being successful anyway.

    1. Re:Why give them the publicity by peragrin · · Score: 5, Insightful

      They are all politicians. They all play the same stupid game. The real question is why would anyone want to be president. you get all the blame none of the glory, and if someone 20 layers of management under you screws up you still get blamed.

      Being president is worthless. Everyone knows the only winning move is to not to play.

      --
      i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
    2. Re:Why give them the publicity by BobMcD · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I thought it was rather embarrassing for the republicans when they tried these tactics against Obama. It saddens me that apparently some democrats are sinking to their level. Really, I can't imagine this being successful anyway.

      Have you considered that it might not really be democrats behind it? If Palin runs, the republican primaries are going to be vicious.
      One of the other republican contenders could easily be behind this knowing full well it probably won't help palin but news of it may mobilize the saner parts of the republican party.

      What's really going to blow your mind later is - what if Palin's camp did it? I mean there have been accusations in the past of this type of genuinely un-american behavior, but was there a website? Was there actual PROOF that it happened, or just speculation? Because here we have those vile evil Democrats trying to bring Sarah down. But what if her supporters are only strengthened by the thought that their enemy would sink so low? I mean, so early in the race, they must be really worried to pull a stunt like this, right?

      Anyway, who ever is behind it, it is obviously a sham. There's zero participation on the site. Maybe, MAYBE one comment per blog item. It's been up since '17 Nov 2010'. Not much traffic for something that just got posted to slashdot. Google right now is showing 'About 435 results'. I can get more than that out of 'fat kid loves to exercise'.

      If you really wanted to get to the bottom of it, identify SharpieMarker. From what I can see they're the only human alive who knew the site existed until it got slashvertised. The user account here is brand-new, too. Nothing but this one submission. And yet it got posted so quickly? Eeeeenteresting...

  4. Re:Doesn't this violate the spirit of the Primarie by clone52431 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Next thing you'll know, Republicans and Democrats will just appoint our "choices" for us.

    Um, I have bad news for you...

    --
    Distributed Denial of APK: It takes 15 seconds to reply to him anonymously, but wastes tons of his time if we all do it.
  5. What these Democrats don't realize... by dachshund · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... is that elections are largely driven by economic fundamentals and (to some degree) random chance. Meaning, there's a non-trivial probability that Palin might beat Obama. I'm not trying to be an ass about Palin, because I'm sure she's a nice person in the right context, but she has not demonstrated anything close to the knowledge and/or responsibility that I would expect in a Presidential candidate. She doesn't appear to have taken the lessons offered by the '08 election in terms of becoming more informed or dedicated --- all she seems to have learned is that she can get traction by attacking anything remotely related to the left wing. That's great for a pundit, not so great for the President of a large country.

    In the long run a Palin presidency would be a disaster for Democrats and Republicans, not to mention Americans in general. These people shouldn't flirt with disaster.

  6. Been there, done that by nutshell42 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    in 1933 the German Conservatives decided to support Hitler as chancellor to destroy the Nazi movement by confronting its ludicrous proposals with the cold reality of real life government.

    The Nazis decided that if their plans weren't realistic, reality would have to budge.

    Not saying (not even implying, hi there FoxNews) that Palin's a Nazi, will create a totalitarian state of some kind or other. I am saying that candidate Palin could become president Palin and Democrats would have noone but themselves to blame.

    --
    Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
    1. Re:Been there, done that by Marcika · · Score: 5, Informative

      in 1933 the German Conservatives decided to support Hitler as chancellor to destroy the Nazi movement by confronting its ludicrous proposals with the cold reality of real life government.

      To be honest, this story - although apparently often told in classrooms - is somewhat of a canard. The "Germany Conservatives" who supported Hitler and Von Papen in a coalition were the DNVP - a nationalistic, populist and anti-Semitic party with leaders only slightly less crazy than those of the Nazis. The actual conservatives (the fiscally and socially conservative bourgeois KVP, Zentrum and BVP parties) did negotiate with the Nazis but never reached a coalition agreement with them - exactly because the Nazi ideology was so fundamentally different from traditional Christian-conservative ideas of government...

      The only person who might have this idea of marginalizing Hitler by putting him into the spotlight was Von Papen; and while Von Papen was nominally still a member of the Zentrum party when Hindenburg asked him to try and form a government, none of the members of Zentrum were willing to support his 1932 "cabinet of barons". He was pretty much discredited by the centre-right as the "Ephialtes of the Centre Party".

  7. Re:Carter lead Reagan 2 years out too by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    At this stage what we really need is for the Democrats to grow a spine, and tell the Republicans to put up or shut up.

    Democrats have had control of the Presidency, Senate, and House for 2 years now and things have not gotten better at all, some would say worse.

    So tell us again who has to put up or shut up?

  8. Re:Okay, great. by denis-The-menace · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If it truly was a 2 party system then you would not be groped at airports by the government.

    At best you have the Dems afraid of the insane Reps.
    At worst and most likely you have 2 sides of the same coin play fighting as if Washington was the WWE/WWF. and Corps are paying the Critters to "fight".

    It's all bread and circuses. you can try to vote for a 3rd party but you cannot win. Easily-tampered electronic voting machines without a paper trail make sure of that. Then there's Florida...

    --
    Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
  9. NOT AN ARTICLE by EmperorKagato · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Why was this approved for Slashdot? This is not news. This is some lame attempt to drag democrats in the mud when there is clearly no democratic party member that is behind this website.

    This is someone's successful attempt at site promotion. How did the mods sleep on this or should I be expecting more articles on Slashdot that have no references to actual news?

    --
    ----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
  10. Not a good strategy by 7-Vodka · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is a terrible strategy. If they really want to guarantee a win, they should vote for Ron Paul in the republican primaries (or the libertarian type candidate that emerges with his blessing).

    Not only does he have zero chance of winning, he would be blacked out and ignored by the media even if he won the primary, and if he did win your worst side effect would be liberty for all.

    --

    Liberty.

  11. Hold your Horses there SharpieMarker by pfrCalif · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "In what could be the most extreme and influential crowdsourcing project ever ..

    Isn't it a little early to call something like this "the most extreme and influential crowdsourcing"? Not that it's the end-all metric of popularity, but it has 16 follows so far 25 facebook likes for god's sake. Slow down a bit before you hurt yourself.

  12. This phrase is the one that's stuck with me ... by Krishnoid · · Score: 5, Insightful
    "It is better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it." -- Eugene V. Debs

    Not sure who he was, but it's made me recast these kinds of things in a different light.

    1. Re:This phrase is the one that's stuck with me ... by commodore64_love · · Score: 5, Informative

      President Wilson is an asshole for jailing people simply because they used their speech to oppose the war. He even went so far as to jail Alice Paul and the Suffragettes just because they asked for the right to vote. And to segregate the army into black-white where it had previously been integrated.

      What a dick.

      --
      "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall