Thursday, February 27, 2020

YMMV

Texas has had “open” primaries as long as we’ve had primaries. Probably a holdover from being a one-party state since the Civil War, but voter registration has never included registering by party. The crossover factor has never been large, either.  It's a very cynical concept, when you get down to it, because if you want to support nominees in one party, you chuck all that to vote against one nominee in another party, by voting for them.  But you can't vote for anyone else, unless you think your vote is going to promote the worst candidates on the entire ballot for that party.  And there you have to be careful what you ask for.

I did it one year, to vote against Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick by voting for his opponent in the GOP primary. But I couldn't vote for any Democrats, and I didn't vote for many Republicans.  My effort, part of what was as organized a campaign as anything Trump is doing now, failed.  And, as I say, I couldn't vote for any Democrats.  Granted some voters just want to vote for Trump and go home; but most primary voters actually care about down-ballot races, and giving that up to vote a "chaos vote" that may not produce any chaos at all, isn't nearly as attractive as pundits and on-lookers think it is.

I think going on Russian TV as the wife of a political candidate is about as smart as going in North Korean TV, but that’s another matter.

1 comment:

  1. As it points out in the Bernie Bot complaints at Twitter, this is an old video with the late Ed Schultz, though that doesn't make the point against Jane Sanders any less obvious, nor her appearing on Putin crime syndicate TV.

    The Democratic Party needs to totally take over the nominations process from the state legislatures to ban Republican and other interference in what is rightly purely a matter for committed Democrats to decide. That Jane Sanders wants to ratfuck the system is not a surprise, he hubby has been bragging about doing that for more than three decades. She is a grifter as is Jeff Weaver. Sanders is an egomaniac and a carpetbagger.

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