Strategic Party Affiliation

[Klaus Hergersheimer]

I was specifically speaking about ethics. Having a system easily abusable doesn't change the fact that it's deliberate manipulation.

Yes it is manipulation, and nothing much can be done about it unless you change the primary procedure, but nobody ever wants to risk limiting voter turnout in the US. That's just the mentality you're up against.

Personally I would go the route that Arwon says happens in Australia where, if you want to be a party member and vote in their elections, you just pay money. That will create some incentive for honesty at least. That is how a party would police its members. Because the government won't do it.
After all, you don't have an inherent right to be a member of a political party...

 

[Arwon]

but nobody ever wants to risk limiting voter turnout in the US.

Uh this is borderline standard policy by one of the two governing US parties and the other one is mostly apathetic about it lol

 

[Crezth]

Poll tax? Great idea. We got the best out here defending democracy lmao

 

[Joij21]

prairie landowners and yeomen.

Yeomen went extinct as a class the moment farms became more hyper efficient due to industrialization and concentrated their existence in the Midwest via large corporatist entities sprayed with petroleum derived pesticides & nitrogen fertilizer that forgoes the crop rotation of more colonial times (thus allowing even further consolidation, cause obviously without crop rotation you no longer have to keep some of the fields fallow and therefore can produce more food with less land thereby = less farmers employable). Plus the railroads of course (owned by robber barons) who facilitated this ability for the food to come from further away and be no longer locally produced.

Prairie landlords used to be the old slave owning plantationist class before the slaves were freed. After that they moved west to ranch cattle (hence prairie landlords). Then once cattle became cheaper because of hyper efficiency (again mostly because of railroads) they started drilling for oil on their ranches. Thus they became the oil tycoon class, which now finances big tech to move on over to Texas so they can move on over and graduate to being a robo-slave class the moment oil no longer is profitable (because of climate change regulations).

In other words the prairie landlords still exist, but the yeoman who founded this country no longer do. The southerners beat the northerners.

 

[Hygro]

One might hope Sneeches is the prophetic end result of all this.

 

[Crezth]

But who weeps for the yeomen?

 

[Farm Boy]

They do fine picking strawberries and packing meat, I'm sure. They might even be on to fix your car, just not live in your kid's school district. Not sure why!

Don't forget shearing the endless grass non-crop, tending the sprawling corporate decorative shrubs, and shoving parking lot snow.

 

[Joij21]

But who weeps for the yeomen?

Most yeomen were smallhold farmers.

At the time America was mostly agrarian, meaning most of the population owned land of some sort before industrialization started pushing more and more people into the cities. Then only the most ruthless yeomen survived and bought out the land of the struggling ones via industrialization making produce too cheap for those with less productive land to compete as farmers.

So I lied, the yeomen just turned into big agro. A.k.a. General Mills and Monsanto board of directors.

 

[Farm Boy]

It's Bayer now, if you want the pop culture punching block corporation that serves the badmen.

 

[Sommerswerd]

The question then is, should I change my party affiliation to Republican to vote against Trump in the primary?

These types of shenanigans rarely if ever work. Every election, much ado is made about people potentially changing their party affiliation to impact the primary of the other party, but it never happens in significant enough numbers to change the winner, either of the state's individual primary, or the primary as a whole. Numerous Democrats supposedly voted for Nikki Haley in the NH primary along with lots of independents/unaffiliated voters, which the analysts are claiming is a big part of why she got such a substantial share of the primary vote in that state. However, the end result was the same, Trump won with a majority of the vote and its highly unlikely that people switching party affiliation will prevent Trump from ultimately winning the Republican primary.

Back in 2008 Rush Limbaugh was famously calling for something he dubbed "Operation Chaos", whereby he was encouraging Republicans to change party affiliation and vote in the Democratic primaries for Hillary, in order to drag them out all the way to the convention by preventing Obama from winning outright. The goal was to make the primary as bitter and contentious as possible between Hillary and Obama supporters so that there could be no possibility of reconciliation and party unity at the end of the process. IIRC, there was also a secondary goal of forcing the winner to be picked by the Democrats' "superdelagates", privileged party leaders and insiders that get extra, more powerful votes than the voters-at-large in the primary process. The idea was that would also serve to infuriate the supporters of the losing candidate and cause the Democrats support to implode.

In any case, Operation Chaos didn't work. Obama won the primary and went on to win the election in a landslide.

 

[Samson]

I've only just learned about Nevada. If you haven't heard about it, it will be the next bit of clownishness in the R primary. They're having both a caucus and a primary. Haley is participating in the primary; Trump in the caucus. Only the caucus gives delegates. So Trump is guaranteed to get all the delegates, and yet Haley will also "win" (one of the two contests)!

Oh, and a person can vote in both.

I am just throwing this in here. This is the system "working", and it is immoral for an individual to game it a bit to get a bit more of a say in who runs the country?

 

[Quintillus]

What do you all think? Have any of you ever changed your party affiliation away from the party you prefer just to vote for someone more moderate in the primaries? Do you think it is a good or bad idea to do so? Is it immoral to be affiliated with a party you agree with less just to stop someone you dislike? Let me know, I have until February 9 to make a decision.

I switched from being a Democrat to a Republican in 2012, to vote in the open primaries in Wisconsin. In the Democratic primary, it was Barack Obama against some inmate in West Virginia and the outcome was a foregone conclusion, and there weren't any relevant contests locally either. Whereas in the Republican primary, it was Mitt Romney, who I thought would be a generally competent president, against Rick Santorum, who was my least-favorite of all the candidates from either party.

So I wound up voting for Romney in the spring and Obama in the fall.

Then I moved to Ohio and registered as an independent, and became a Democrat in 2016 when I first voted in primaries in Ohio. Ohio doesn't have an open primary, and my understanding is that from a technical standpoint, you are required to say that you agree with the official party line of the party you are registering with. In 2016, the GOP of Ohio's party line was that they sought to "repeal the failed policies of Barack Obama". I read about some people who switched to the GOP to vote against Trump (and usually for Kasich, being Ohio) and noted that they agreed that the failed policies of Obama should be repealed, even as they supported most of his policies and believed few of them had failed. Whoever wrote the GOP's official party line had missed the grammar lesson on dangling modifiers.

So, personally/morally, I don't see a problem with it, particularly if you have strong feelings about one primary and not the other. And part of my reasoning is because when this does happen, it generally has a moderating effect, whereas most other incentives in the primary/two-party system instead encourage moving away from the center. If we had a multi (more than two) party system and ranked choice voting, I'd probably have a different opinion. But given what we have it is, as you say, one of the few options you have for saying, "I care more about the candidate not being [insert least favorite candidate here] than about it being my favorite candidate."

That said, I can see the argument for it to be justified, there should be at least a chance that you'd vote for the candidate you voted for in the primaries in the general election. In 2012, it was possible that Romney could have persuaded me to vote for him with a different campaign strategy, arguments, and set of promises; I was a split-ballot voter then. Nowadays, I wouldn't touch the lever to vote for a GOP candidate with a ten-foot poll; the taint from being associated with Trump is too strong. Even on the occasions when I believe the candidate themselves is a decent candidate, which Haley more or less is, I just can't do it. Perhaps some day that will change, but it would have to be several years after Trump left the political scene.

 

[stfoskey12]

Well I went ahead and did it. I just filled out the online application to change my party affiliation to Republican. There was nothing in the application to say I agree with the party line of the party I'm affiliated with. We'll see if I actually get my voter card in time for the presidential primary. Then I have to decide if the other primaries are important enough for me to keep it as Republican, or if I'll change it back.

 

[Core Imposter]

I was going to write in Rubio on Tuesday, but it's not allowed.