catapult magazine

Wisconsin is voting for a governor today, as are quite a few other states. Just out of curiosity, what do you guys see as major issues for you, personally. I’m assuming I’ll see quite a bit of pro-life, anti-death penalty stuff, but then again, maybe I won’t.
Personally death penalty (Wisconsin doesn’t have it…yay), and environmental issues tend to be what I focus on, though I do find myself looking more and more at tax issues as I get older. How about specific parties. Again, I would assume to see plenty of Independents. I’m thinking that I may vote Green for the first time in my life.
I’ll try one of those on-line poll things with this. Hope it works.

Where do you see yourself politically?

did anyone else find it difficult to get reliable information about local candidates? i could only find information about senate, house and governor races. sometimes i could find stuff for other high-up state positions, but i could hardly find anything about county candidates. it was really annoying.

does anyone know where you can get objective information about local candidates during an election season?

No idea Rob. The first time I voted I was amazed at how many races I had never heard of. For the last couple years I’ve been trying to find out more about the positions and the candidates, but when it comes down to city assembly and county clerk, find resources is kinda’ difficult.

I didn’t vote. I would have liked to, but I felt that I was so uniformed about so many of the races that it would have been irresponsible to do so. I did try to learn about some of the candidates, but…yeah…so many people and so few trustworthy resources. And I am so undecided about so many of the big issues—such complexity to everything!

(And they spelled my name wrong on my voter’s registration card, so I probably would have been turned away, anyway.)

About issues: I feel that abortion should not be a political issue. Though I do oppose abortion morally, I would not allow that issue to be a deciding factor in whom I support. I grew up in an area where abortion is practically the ONLY issue anyone cares about. (That and taxes, of course—people do love their money.) It is, in my opinion, unfortunate that abortion has become such a divisive issue—that Christians feel pressured to support candidates who may be irresponsible in other areas (socially, economically, etc.) simply because they will ban abortion.

I’m not yet sure what I look for in candidates. I guess I haven’t lived on my own long enough to know what is most important. At this point, issues aside, I just want to see honest, good people of almost any party take office—people who are truly interested in putting money and power and publicity aside and working to make a difference. (Kind of idealistic, I know.)

Hi everyone,

well, this was my first time voting in an American election, so I spent most of my time trying to understand who I was voting into where—“So, a senator does what, and how is that different from a representative, and is this a state senator or federal, or what?” . I must say that I enjoy Canadian politics more than American, even though both systems have inherent problems.
In Oregon the major issues this election were taxes, education and the environment. Oregon is the only state with our a sales tax, and I don’t think one will every successfully be imposed, though it is desperately needed.

I voted basically straight Democrat, though I don’t particully feel a strong tie to that party. I just wanted to make sure that the Democratic Governor candidate made it in because I think the Republican in our state is a nut ball. I would probably vote Green party on most issues, but we didn’t have a lot of options where we live. Anyhow, those are just some comments.

yeah, i found that there didn’t seem to be much choice here, either. you basically had to pick between a republican and a democrat for every race. i was a little disappointed with my options, to say the least.

At the same time, here in Minnesota we almost had too many choices. Don’t get me wrong, I love having choices, and living in a state that has 4 parties that are officially considered “major parties” (eligible for state campaign funds, etc) is a source of pride for me. I just wish that there was a way that these choices could make a difference. The way that our whole government and election system is set up right now is designed specifically for a 2 party race. If you don’t feel that you’re adequately represented by one of the two major parties you have two basic choices: 1) ‘waste’ your vote (in the short term — in the long term, it may not be a wasted vote), or 2) vote for the lesser evil. I think we need to fundamentally change the way that we do elections if we want to break the democrat / republican stranglehold on our government. The Green party candidate for governor here really pushed the idea of “instant run-off voting” where you would actually rank the candidates instead of voting for just one. Apparently this is already done in San Fransisco and a couple of other places, but I find it to be an excellent idea. it works like this: if nobody reaches a majority (50%+), then the candidate with the least number of first-place votes is eliminated and those second-place rankings get distributed among the remaining candidates. This continues until somebody reaches 50%. This way, we encourage people to actually vote for the candidate that they like while also assuring that the winning candidate is the choice of the majority of the electorate. I’d love to see this instituted, but i imagine it’s going to be a steep uphill battle. But here in minnesota it’s becoming a pretty significant concern as our last couple of governors have been elected with high 30% or low 40% of the votes.

another thing. I’ve noticed that the majority of people who have voted have said that they’re “vehemently independant”. Do most people here view that as a good thing or a bad thing? I go both ways. In some ways, there’s nothing worse than partisanship for the sake of partisanship, but if you don’t work within a party structure, what effect can you have on the electoral process. You’re excluded from some of the most important parts, specifically picking the good candidates to represent the party in the primaries. I think this is probably one of the reasons that many people don’t feel that the parties don’t represent them anymore — more people don’t get involved in political parties, so only the die-hards from each party get involved and the parties end up becoming more polarized, and it tends to have a snowball effect.

I admit, at times I feel that my lack of party affiliation is sort of a badge of honor, but I don’t know if it’s necessarily a good thing. Note that I’m not recommending that anybody vote straight democratic or republican or green or whatever, only that perhaps we should rethink whether abandoning the parties to the die-hards is a good thing.

Maybe it’s just the overactive English teacher in me, but does anybody see any correlations between what Jonner is saying and Christian denominations (some more than others). I had never thought of it before, but it just kind of slapped me in the face now. This would tie in to the religion thread about politics of the church too.

laurencer, don’t forget about the strong libertarian showing on our ballots…

is it better to vote uninformed or to not vote at all? i just ended up voting straight ticket because i did not have time to educate myself on all of the candidates. my question is, who does?

i saw one person with a Right-to-Life set of recommendations, another with a punch-out-bring-along-card with all of the Republican candidates’ names on it…

all of the parties and special interest groups seem to depend on the American public being too busy to be properly informed, thereby voting according to a single issue or a single party. i voted and i really didn’t even care who won. i just had some vague sense of duty.

when did we become so disengaged from our local politics? when did voting stop being exciting, something to fight to the death for and become a boring obligation in the middle of our schedules, our TV shows and our newspapers? is it just my own stinking fault?

i guess a part of the problem is the fact that there’s so much information to wade through that most of us don’t even understand. why did politics become a profession in itself, leading to a whole specialized body of language and knowledge and alienating the general public? and if it’s inevitably going to be that way in such a complex system, is there a better way of discovering candidates we trust to make decisions on issues we don’t really understand? maybe that’s why so many people depend on single issue voting. “if he doesn’t want to kill unborn babies, he must be a good guy…”

okay. that’s all. thanks.

A few things spinning off on Jonner’s comments. First of all, I’m considering moving to Minnesota because it always has great political battles going on and a lot of extreme characters. Second, I voted Green across the board this election for two reasons a) I would like other parties in Iowa to be considered “major” and b) the Green platform (at least the one I read. I guess Minnesota may be different) supports proportional gov’t in which you vote for a party instead just one candidate and the percentage of votes it receives determines the percentage of seats it holds in the house or senate or so forth. Like that will ever happen, but oh well.