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?

Yeah, proportional government would be nice in some ways, although I’m sure it introduces it’s own problems as well. But proportional government is really the only way to deal with a multi-party system, as far as I know. If the system doesn’t change at all, I have a hard time imagining that 3rd parties are going to be able to make any difference at all.

I don’t know that the green party in Minnesota stressed proportional government much, I didn’t hear much about it anyway. Perhaps they just wanted to start out with something a little bit more acheiveable (instant runoff voting). I’m not sure if the greens got enough votes in this election to maintain their major party status this time around though. Which would be a shame. The field was just too crowded, especially for governor. The green candidate for governor was an excellent candidate, but there were 3 other candidates that all received fairly large percentages of the vote, so he was left with about 2.5%.

And dave, we’d love to have you up in minnesota. One thing’s for sure, politics isn’t boring up here. Then again, i’m a bit of a political junkie.

Norb, I think you’re right about the correlation between political parties and church denominations. It’s an interesting thing to think about, and there’s pretty powerful pro and con arguments for either position.