Thread by @JuliusGoat

If you don’t vote for the candidates who support the issues that matter to you, then they effectively aren’t the issues that matter to you.

That’s how it works.

I’m not saying you don’t care about those issues.

I’m not judging.

Hear me. I’m saying something very specific and practical.

Here it is:

If you care about an issue, the way you make it known to people who represent you in government is by voting for candidates running on that issue.

If you don’t, effectively your interest in that issue doesn’t register.

That’s how it works.

Sometimes you have to pick one or another. I’ve had to do that before, pretty much every time.

But hear me: the one I didn’t pick each time? No matter how much I thought in my brain “this is important, too” it didn’t register.

My secret intentions didn’t register. Just my vote.

If you care about something, and a candidate comes along who runs on that thing, and you don’t vote for the candidate, then effectively, you didn’t support it. You may still very much think it’s important. But if you didn’t vote for, you didn’t support it.

That’s how it works.

That’s why I have so frequently advise people to vote based on what they think is important, not based on what they think other people will vote.

When you do that, you’re giving a hypothetical person your vote.

You’re giving your vote to them.

And that’s what will count.

You can argue against me if you want. You can take this as an arguement for or against one candidate or another.

But guess what? I didn’t mention any candidates.

I’m just telling you how the system works.

And it is how it works.

Now: maybe you think that your candidate, who is running on the things that you care about, won’t possibly win.

That’s possible! The things you care about might not matter to others enough.

In which case the other person will win without your support.

That’s also how it works.

I’m very deliberately not advocating for or against anybody here, because I really want you to think about the way voting works, and what it means in a representative democracy.

I’m not impugning anyone’s more motivations.

i’m just telling you very practically how this works.

I think we’ve become a bit infected by this understandable desire to know what is going to happen, which leads to people speculating on what is going to happen, which leads to people acting based on the speculations.

But speculations are usually wrong.

They aren’t how it works.

You have your vote, and nobody else has it. It’s yours.

Each candidate is going to stand for certain things that you find important, and other things that you find unimportant, and other things that you think are wrong or bad.

You have to choose.

But make it YOUR choice.

The things you vote for are incrementally more likely to happen, and, if they don’t happen, to attract more candidates who run on those things again.

The things you don’t, incrementally less likely.

No bonus points exist for picking the winner.

Make your vote your own.

/end

I’m getting a lot of responses that sound (and I could be wrong here) defensive. I’m really not trying to put anyone on the defensive. It’s understood we all have our practical calculations to make with our vote. I’m trying to bring us back to a remembrance of how this works.

If you voted “strategically,” ok! The issues you voted on were the ones that, practically speaking, counted.

The other issues, practically speaking, no matter how much you care about them, did not. They were not counted.

That really is how this works.

A vote is based on a calculus, and that calculus stuck in the mind many factors, and those factors were... your issues.

EVERY vote is a strategic vote.

That’s what a vote is.

If that calculus was based on how you thought other people would vote, you gave your vote to that construct.

No judgment on that. But that is how it works.

If you’re at peace with giving your vote to the issues belonging to that construct, then be at peace.

I will say, some of the responses I am receiving lead me to the regrettable conclusion that some people are not at peace with the choice they’ve made.

Bumping this thread this morning because I think it's important.

Two quick(ish) additional points I'll make:

1) I'm not trying to tell you how to vote or making a moral judgment about anybody's choice here or suggesting people don't care about x or y or z. This isn't about caring. It's about practical support.

I'm simply saying that when you vote for a candidate, you are supporting the policy positions of the candidate you're voting for, and not supporting the policy positions of the other candidate. I think that's pretty simply true.

If you disagree...well, then we disagree. It's OK.

And to this I want to stress, by way of stressing I'm not impugning people's character: *I too* will have to make that calculation. *I too* will have to choose which policies I support, and some that I don't.

As such I hope to choose a candidate whose positions most match mine.

2) This is mostly advice against a tendency I perceive to base votes overly on intangibles or (especially) speculative issues. Votes don't really read intent, and speculations, especially lately, go wrong.

Now intangible and speculations are issues, too. It's just that...

... intangibles are subjective. Policies are quantifiable, and they are what is most effectively tracked by voting.

I too have made my vote based on intangibles such as (say) character, but the differences in character must be stark before they trump (pun intended) policy;

And I've made my decision based on an intangible such as (say) my perception of a candidate's ability to implement their agenda—but for this to be a useful differentiator, the candidates must be close in policy. I don't want someone who can effectively implement policy I oppose.

Or I might even make my vote on speculation: a candidate more likely to win than another. But for that to override the uncertain nature of speculation, the beneficiary would have to be so much better a campaigner, w/such a commanding lead, be so clearly more effective/popular.

Generally speaking, my speculations have mostly gone wrong.

Generally speaking, I've noticed that people who pay to speculate on such matters are no better than me about this.

After 2016, I just no longer have confidence in speculation or prognostications from myself or others.

And even then, if that other candidate is so much more effective, such a lock to win, so inevitably the safe candidate, I would probably calculate that these factors actually *free* me to vote the policy I prefer.

The inevitable candidate won't need me. So much for speculation.

Ok, now I'm done. I won't be arguing in the mentions. I'm not interested in arguing with people who want the same basic thing I want in November, whose motives I believe in. I just wanted to say what I said and no more.

Your vote is your own.

So: vote.

/end for real