Have you changed your vote?
 

As far as I can tell, there are an enormous number of people -in pretty much every country- who decide that their loyalty belongs to one partiicular party and they vote that way from the get=go until death. And they just don't bother with the actual ins and outs of politics, it's a done deal.

That means that the real outcome relies on the voters who actually listen to the speaches and read the flyers etc.... and are prepared to change their mind

and in my experience, these are the same people who like to debate politics on the internet. But the people I have debated politics with always claim to never have been persuaded to shange their vote. yet some must

so be honest (it's a strength not a weakness to see and admit the error of your ways...), have you changed your vote (party-wise) since you first started voting?

The independents have much power.

Certainly. I tend slightly to the right on money issues and slightly to the left on social issues. Who I end up voting for depends on who the parties put up for election and what the current major issues are.

When I was young, I was indoctrinated into the idea that Republicans are just evil.

Then, I heard that a bunch of people thought the same thing about Democrats, and had equally convincing reasons.

And eventually I became convinced. That BOTH of them were right.

So, yes, I've changed how I vote. I changed from believing the bullshit that 50% of people believe, to not believing 100% of the bullshit that anybody believes.

I do not vote Republican OR Democrat anymore. The two-party system is broken.

Both parties are running on "change" in this election. Do you really think you'll get "change" by ping-ponging back and forth between two fixed positions that are gridlocked?

I don't vote party lines. I'm an independent. I vote for R's or D's as I feel appropriate in important races, I vote for third parties in all other races. yeah, kind of disjointed but it's a start.

I'm a swing voter in a swing state - I'm the most powerful person in the country.

Ahhh, preferential voting.

I'm not happy that it is compulsory to exhaust my preferences. But it's better than an all-or-nothing, waste-my-vote one shot system.

I'm not loyal to the democratic party; i'm loyal to progressive social and economic principles.

I've always been on the left. Initially because the answers the right offered seemed cold and lacking in compassion. Then I discovered marxism and took on an ideological form of politics.

My movement has been from the far-left, fringe, revolutionary side of politics towards mainstream parliamentary politics. I have very much changed my views as I have learned more about the world and heard different views expressed. In some things my views have remained as they've ever been, in other things my views have undergone a paradigm shift.

I don't think my views have really been altered at any point by a single speech or debate...but such debates have at times laid the groundwork for a change in view.

That said, I have never voted for any other party than the Labour Party, except in cases of a strategic vote.

Do you have preferential voting over there Dana?

On Euro elections we have proportional representation. In Parliamentary and Council elections it's first past the post.

That's a different question I think.

Lets check we're on the same wavelength here.

First past the post means each electorate returns one member, being whoever got the most votes in that electorate.
Proportional representation means each (larger) electorate returns several members, being the several most-voted-for. Hence one could come third or so and still get a seat.

Preferential voting is where the elector marks all the boxes on the ballot paper with numbers beginning from one up to the end, and their vote is first given to the "1" candidate, but if in the first round of counting there is no candidate with more than 50% of the votes, the candidates with the fewest votes are eliminated and their votes are transferred to the "2" candidate, and the process repeats until someone gets over 50%.

Is this how you understand the terms?

It is possible to have combinations of both systems.
Down Under, we have preferential first-past-the-post for the lower house, and preferential proportional representation for the upper house (which is a little more complicated but I won't go into it).

Hey I need to change my vote! In THIS poll :lol:

I thought it was about, have you changed your vote in the US elections, and so I voted that I'm not allowed to vote (pretty silly in retrospect!).

Ahem.

Yes, I have changed my vote. I've swung between Labour, Greens, and Australian Democrats (now defunct centre-left social reformists).

That about sums it up for me.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. :D

I was an Independent for a long time, but I got tired of not being able to vote in primaries, so switched to the Dems. I have voted for Republican candidates on occasion. I would not dream of voting Republican in this election, however, in part because the thought of Palin as potential president terrifies me.

So he swings both ways...

Yes, after actually being a member of the Dem party, working on local elections, national elections, and being part of the process; I have actually developed a terrible distaste for them. I am over it! I switched to unaffiliated.

sorry monster. I voted in your poll "no", then read your post. I answered a question you didn't ask: "have I changed my (inclination to) vote in this (general election)? Ahem... you didn't ask that question.

To answer your question... every vote I've ever cast was made with the earnest intention of voting for the candidate I thought would do the best job in the office being sought. Depending on where and when I was voting, I might be restricted in my choices of who I could select. In fact, only this year in Washington have voters been able to cross party lines in the primary ballot--a substantial improvement to the previous closed party line system.

I have in different elections voted for candidates from different parties, Reagan and Clinton, for example. And I voted for a republican Attorney General and a democratic Governor. I do split my ticket, according to what I think is best, given my possible choices.

I have voted for both Republickins and Demoncrats in every election cycle, as well as independents. This is going to be the first time I vote and will not vote for a major party for president since I started voting.

Here's the presidential elections I've voted in:

1972 - Nixon vs. McGovern
1976 - Carter vs. Ford
1980 - Reagan vs. Carter
1984 - Reagan vs. Mondale
1988 - Bush Sr. vs. Dukakis
1992 - Clinton vs. Bush Sr.
1996 - Clinton vs. Dole
2000 - Bush Jr. vs. Gore
2004 - Bush Jr. vs. Kerry

Out the the nine votes, I went Democratic twice and Republican seven times.

Just some trivia you didn't need to know. But it was kind of fun looking them all up.

This should be a thread of its own -

3 Rep, 2 Dem and 1 "other"

1972 - Nixon (R) vs. McGovern (D)
1976 - Carter (D) vs. Ford (R)
1980 - Reagan (R) vs. Carter (D)
1984 - Reagan (R) vs. Mondale (D)
1988 - Bush Sr. (R) vs. Dukakis (D) (can't remember! I'm pretty sure I voted)
1992 - Clinton (D) vs. Bush Sr. (R)
1996 - Clinton (D) vs. Dole (R)
2000 - Bush Jr. (R) vs. Gore (D)
2004 - Bush Jr. (R)vs. Kerry (D)

Bold==my vote
First candidate==winner

In every presidential election (since the first Bush) I've voted for Democrats.

At the local level, I've often voted for Democrats but have sometimes voted for independents and 3rd parties. Never for a Republican.

If you’re 20 and not a Liberal, you have no heart. If you’re 40 and not a Conservative, you have no brain.
— Sir Winston Churchill

I'm 40.
---Juniper

It's important to use your heart and brain. I'm 32.;)

I'm trying to use both and I'm getting killed for it. :smashfrea

My vote will go to the first person who stands up and, in response to some insipid story of heartbreak and loss, says, "I'm sorry for your situation, but solving that problem is not the job of government."

:::applause:::

Not exactly the same thing, smooth. But at some point in Obama's nomination speech he does say that there are some problems the government is not intended to solve.

... and yet every speech since then has laid out the ways in which he thinks government SHOULD solve all of your problems. Doesn't count.

From here:
If you withhold your vote until that condition is met, sm, you'll never vote. I appreciate the spirit, though.

I think in every case I've seen like the one you describe, the individuals are relating personal stories, and the candidate replies to the larger public, transforming the question (and the corresponding answer) to the closest match to some public policy he espouses. Each candidate is in the business of saying yes. Even when it is pronounced "no" they're implicitly saying yes, I'll do that for you.

Saying, "that sucks, but it's not the government's job to fix that problem" is not going to happen. People want government to fix stuff, by action or restraint. You might well see that arrangement of slyly edited out of context quotes assembled into a self incriminating mashup by each worthy opponent. But neither one will tell any voter "Grow up, I'm not your mommy or daddy."

I believe that a society should provide a safety net for those who fall through the cracks. What about the elderly who cannot afford healthcare...should they just go off into the woods and die? What about single mothers rasing their children on minimum wage? Should their children be deprived of adequate nutrition and healthcare...because government should not have to solve that problem?

The trouble is, these politicians SAY this is the way things should be, then go and do the opposite. Doh.

That's because the truth is always unpalatable to some (regardless whch camp you're in) and because the soundbite media culture trims down anything any politician says into a devastating body blow to their campaign. They have to paint a picture that fits within fairly narrow confines.

Fundamental problems require fundamental solutions, big ideas. Unfortunately big ideas are about as dangerous a thing for a politician to express as one can possibly imagine. If what you have to say is logical and sensible, it matters not one jot. By the time the media have finished with the words that came out of your mouth, they've turned you into a dangerous communist, or a self-serving oligarch.

Individual people are pretty damn smart. Taken as a body, they make up the public and the public isn't smart, it's easily manipulated. It's easily manipulated, because it exists (by its nature) in the public sphere, and the public sphere is the media's demesne. The 24 hour news channel is King, in the realm where public opinion is formed. And the political world defers to it absolutely. It has to, It's not about the ideas, now. It's about navigating the path to the White house, trying to simultaneously inspire with change whilst reassuring with continuity.

This is the price of mass engagement in the public sphere. Big ideas get spun out into the media, where heavily biased news shows use them to create moral panic at the prospect of the other side's candidate winning. With each campaign team complicit in creating this destructive environment by throwing as much dirt as they can dig on the other (overtly or covertly taking said dirt to the public), they have effectively trapped themselves in very narrow pass. Too many concepts have become politically suicidal even to contemplate.

People don't want big ideas. We might think we do. We might even crave them. We want leaders who are capable of solving our most pressing national problems and leading us into stability and prosperity. The trouble is that requires big ideas. It requires political bravery. We don't like big ideas, we fight them. We don't like brave politicians, we don't elect them.

Unsurprisingly we (on both sides of the pond) have elected more and more craven and self-serving politicians and fewer and fewer brave politicians (or maybe I am being unfair) to high offices.

Why are single women who make minimum wage having children? And why does it become the government's responsibility?

How do you propose stopping these women from having children?

I was grabbing for any examples.

In a smaller community people can easily band together to provide assistance for those among them in need. But in our larger society that is much harder to do...so what happens to those still in need?

Single shot to the back of the head?

Sorry P&ME, I was just giving you a hard time.

(My mom was single with three kids under the age of 5 and no real job skills.)

The problem comes in when being needy becomes a lifestyle. The difficult issue is how to help those in temporary need without helping those who could be helping themselves.

Then there are some people who can never help themselves -- the severely retarded, the insane, the crippled. How do you help them without providing dole for the guy who has a 'bad back'.

And how do you fairly help the single mother who lost a husband, or he up and left, or he just never cared to be in the picture, without aiding the professional child-bearers? You can't. So, in helping those truly in need you will always have the system players. No one with any heart at all wants to see a kid suffer because their parents are numnuts. For some, the children are a pawn in the game to get more for themselves.

I think we can do a lot better than we've been doing.

Limit support to two children born during or after receiving ADC.
Limit support to five years. (If you can't get a GED and a job after five years, then there are other issues).

This is off-the-cuff. But I think this or something similar would greatly reduce the pcbs.

This is a really important point. Whilst you can write the rules and forge the system in such a way as to minimise the risk of freeloaders taking what is meant as a safety net, there is no way to stop it entirely. I think that's something you need to decide, as a society, if you are prepared to accept or not. The price of helping those who need it, is that you will almost certainly end up helping those who don't.

We've ploughed money and resources into the system to try and stop benefit fraud. We've made it harder and harder to access help and brought in more and more processes by which recipients prove themselves to be in need and doing everything they're supposed to do. The end result of that is we spend more on fighing fraud than we lose to that fraud in the first place. Meanwhile the genuine claimants have been stigmatised and humiliated by our attempts to root out the freeloaders.

We consistently choose short term populism over effective management of the system to the detriment of all. It is unpopular to tell people that freeloaders are an inherent part of the benefits system and that by far the most sensible strategy is to put in place enough scrutiny to prevent mass abuse, but not to waste public money trying to make it watertight. It is right and sensible to investigate and prosecute the woman who's lied and said she lives alone, claiming help with rent and living expenses whilst her partner runs his own business and earns thousands a month. It is not right and sensible (in my mind) to spend public money every November, chasing down some single mum who's got herself a cash in hand part-time Christmas job to pay for presents for her kids.

Personally, I'd really rather take the risk that someone is taking the piss and working on a building site whilst pretending he's not working, than make some guy who's had a nervous breakdown and isn't coping jump through hoop after hoop and go through processes and schemes which seem designed to humiliate and accuse.

People in desperate and unhappy cirumstances are likely to find it more difficult to make good/useful decisions about their lives. The reason people become 'comfortable' with unemployment, is not because being unemployed is comfortable. It's the exact opposite. If people are engaged in a permanently adversarial relationship with the state (interviews where people feel accused and humiliated and have to justify themselves to 'trainers' who talk to them like they're 5; compulsory courses that are badly run and make no real attempt to help people; 'community service' that is actually working a job for the pittance the state gives them; forced into jobs that they aren't suited to), it promotes a kind of siege mentality, a cutting off from the working world. That can very quickly become generational if an area suddenly loses its main industry in a time of high unemployment overall.

Once that adversarial relationship is setup it becomes very difficult for the state to help that person. They meanwhile become less able to help themselves, by making useful decisions the more desperately poor they become. If you feel like your life is closing in, it's very tempting to just shut down the outside and shrink your horizons to fit the room. Shut down your horizons to fit your little community of equally poor friends. Within your horizon you may be comfortable. If you feel like there isn't really a way in to that other, wider world for you (for whatever reason), then you will seek to be comfortable and 'successful' within the confines of your world. Shrink that world further and you just shrink those horizons further. Demonise those who live in that world, and that cannot help but feed into their sense of self, making them even less likely to break out.

We built the dependency culture in the UK, not by being too generous, but by being too cruel. We stripped away benefits just as people most needed them (during the recession and massive unemployment). We brutalised an entire generation of (particularly northern) youngsters in areas where there really was nothing for them. We lived by the motto "there is no such thing as society" for 13 years and whilst that built us a huge and really quite prosperous middle class, it also created an underclass. We have systematically failed to understand the driving forces which maintain that underclass in those areas where it remains entrenched.

More carrot, less stick and a dignified starting point. That's how people start making better decisions for themselves.



Logic dictates that faced with such a situation people should try and find a job and get out of it. Psychology and logic aren't always aligned, however, and when dealing with people it's probably worth playing to psychology rather more than to logic.

I would think that private charities, run by real people with real common sense, would do a better job than impersonal government workers whos hands are tied by red tape.

If the state did a better job at all the private shit it involves itself in it would make sense to leave it up to them... but really, look around...

I absolutely agree with you Jinx. Private organizations can tell free loaders "no. now fuck off and get a job". Government can't because everytime we have a guideline to take care of some issue, we have a lobbyist and a politician using anecdotal evidence to stretch the boundaries to cover THEIR idea. Then another lobbyist and pol using...

I bow to the Jinx - she is right on. Get the feds outta this!

Good point.

Except that government workers aren't robots, they too are real people with real common sense, but they are, as you say, tied up in red tape and there isn't a damn thing they can do about it.

I like the idea of a private agency being able to say "yeah, you've blown it...no more free ride for you" but then you get into personalities, it becomes subjective.

A federal (so I'm sure is true for other govt agencies) regulation states that we are not allowed to treat any student any differently than any other...so if I LIKE someone I can't push them to the front of the "line" and if I don't like someone I can't push them to the back. It's the ONLY way to assure that it's fair and unbiased.

Though it hardly ever seems fair. :headshake I've seen too much and have become quite jaded.

I just had this image of Shawnee tied up in red tape.

Can you use that bubble gum tape stuff? Then I can chew my way out.

Edible Bondage!

1972 - Nixon (R) vs. McGovern (D)
1976 - Carter (D) vs. Ford (R)
1980 - Reagan (R) vs. Carter (D)
1984 - Reagan (R) vs. Mondale (D)
1988 - Bush Sr. (R) vs. Dukakis (D)
1992 - Clinton (D) vs. Bush Sr. (R)
1996 - Clinton (D) vs. Dole (R)
2000 - Bush Jr. (R) vs. Gore (D)
2004 - Bush Jr. (R) vs. Kerry (D)

Bold==my vote
First candidate==winner

I thought Bush Sr. did an ok job. What made you decide to vote for Clinton?

TheMercenary only votes for winners.

I bet it was 6 words. "Read my lips. No new taxes."

Most of my votes have been anti votes, well except for Regan. I just thought the other guy sucked more. The first time I voted for Clinton I just wanted something different, change. But that was almost 20 yrs ago. Since I was on AD at the time it was not until I voted for him the second time that I realized I had made a huge mistake because he really desimated and demoralized the military.

1984 - Reagan (R) vs. Mondale (D)
1988 - Bush Sr. (R) vs. Dukakis (D) vs. Paul (L)
1992 - Clinton (D) vs. Bush Sr. (R) vs. Marrou (L)
1996 - Clinton (D) vs. Dole (R) vs. Browne (L)
2000 - Bush Jr. (R) vs. Gore (D)
2004 - Bush Jr. (R) vs. Kerry (D)

Bold==my vote
First candidate==winner

1984 - Reagan (R) vs. Mondale (D)
1988 - Bush Sr. (R) vs. Dukakis (D)
1992 - Clinton (D) vs. Bush Sr. (R)
1996 - Clinton (D) vs. Dole (R)
2000 - Bush Jr. (R) vs. Gore (D)
2004 - Bush Jr. (R) vs. Kerry (D)

Bold==my vote
First candidate==winner

Agreed. In their much much smaller sphere of influence. Why? For a couple reasons, at least. The distance between delivering the assistance and receiving the resources to provide that support is much shorter. The lets the feedback loop (hey, weren't you here last week?) be shorter and more viable. Also, the smaller system is likely to have someone delivering the assistance who has more authority to use their judgment to act in the best interest of the charity and the individual. Governments are notoriously hierarchical and notoriously allergic to pushing authority down the chain.

Just because in some circumstances private charities can do better that the government doesn't mean that government shouldn't do charitable-like work.

But do you have a brain? :lol:

US politics in general is so far the the right of UK politics, I'm not sure you can really apply Winston's quote here