[Spivak]

> The common person primarily votes based solely on a historical allegiance to a political party (be it individually formed or inherited) with about 75% of America essentially being unmovable D or R safe votes.

This is one of those statements that sounds bad on the surface but is actually totally reasonable and has nothing to do with some trope about the "uninformed masses" or whatever. Locally the individual matters a lot more but at the national level voting histories show that the party dominates.

People have "disqualifying issues." And this is totally rational. Being black and voting R is nuts -- same if you're gay. And if you're pro-life then voting D is unpalatable. These kinds of polarizing issues very nearly define the party line. So yeah, if you go the polls in Nov and don't know if you're voting D or R (nationally) then you're probably crazy uninformed.

The actual decision making happens during the primaries where people suddenly have an entire group of people who aren't immediately disqualified and the internal discussion gets a lot more nuanced.

[rayiner]

> Being black and voting R is nuts -- same if you're gay.

I'm not sure if its objectively "nuts" but almost 25% of LGBT voters supported Romney over Obama. That's accounting for the fact that openly LGBT voters are much younger than other voters: twice as likely to be 18-34 and half as likely to be 55+. Median age is about 35, versus 50 for the overall population. Romney won 37% of folks 18-29 and 51% of folks 45-64. There are too many gay republicans to call them all "nuts."

[kelnos]

Obviously all people have different kinds of policy opinions, and the "R" and "D" buckets are way too coarse to describe everyone. Someone who is gay can just as easily be a fiscal conservative (for example) as someone who is straight.

But what I can't understand is how someone -- even if they agree with most of their chosen party's platform -- could vote for a party whose leadership largely wants to erase them. I just don't understand someone who is gay voting for people who believe that their sexual orientation is a "choice", many also believing that it's a "sin" that should be forcibly "re-educated" out.

Certainly calling them "nuts" is dismissive, disrespectful, and doesn't help us understand what's going on, but... really, I do not at all understand what's going on.

[munk-a]

As someone on the D side of things I'm generally in the same camp as you opinion-wise but not all republicans are pray-away-the-gay crazy - that may be Pence's particular brand but Romney ended up legalizing civil unions while governor of MA. Partisan politics like to paint things as black and white but they're a lot more grey than that.

Similarly R-side folks might believe that all D-folks are Trotskyists while that's a rather rare stance to have - certainly the D-side is more towards interventionalism - but nobody with serious power on the D end of things (not even bernie) is advocating for a planned economy.

I feel very strongly about moving towards proportional representation for the house over FPTP slotting. I think the extremism in the current political climate is largely fueled by this us vs. them choice - get us better representation so we can all see that Trotskyists pull one or two house reps nation-wide and slice off of the Dems at large... And watch the white-supremists and westboro baptist church folks get kicked out of the GOP at large and end up with a seat or two themselves. These are fringe groups[1]...

Our current voting system allows negative campaign ads to be just as effective as positive ones - knocking your opponent down 3 pts is the same as raising yourself 3 pts... but it's far easier to craft negative campaign ads so the electorate is constantly submerged in hateful vitriol. We need election reform so we can stop viewing each other as the enemy.

1. Please note, the current administration has actually started embracing these groups more, but this is a new development and should be a clear signal that the country is in trouble.

[xyzzyz]

I think your image of Republican Party messaging is wildly out of sync with how Republican voters see it. It’s closer to where religious faction of the party has been in early 2000s, but it hardly resembles their position today. I do not find it particularly surprising, given that one simply cannot get an accurate view of it without explicitly looking for it: you won’t get it in CNN or MSNBC, and most non-Republicans would never stoop so low to actually watch the “partisan hacks” on Fox.

[rayiner]

I’m not gay, so I’ll offer an analogy. I’m a brown guy with a beard from a Muslim country and with a Muslim last name. I found my friends’ (sincere) concern about Trump’s campaign rhetoric to be odd, because I didn’t find it alarming myself. (Apparently 30% of Muslims polled did not.) I thought it was distasteful and counterproductive—pissing away a demographic George W. Bush won in 2000–but I felt all the rhetoric on the left about concentration camps was way overblown. I didn’t support Trump for other reasons, but the mere presence of some xenophobes in the party wouldn’t keep me out of it. I care about my safety, but I don’t really care if other people think we should have fewer Muslim immigrants. (Also, being from a Muslim country I know that the security issues aren’t totally manufactured.)

Now, what do you mean by “erase?” Republicans don’t want to put gay people in concentration camps and forcibly re-educate them. But it has taken them longer to come around to accepting gay people than Democrats for predictable reasons that gay Republicans are presumably willing to put up with. Conservatism by its nature values the traditional family because they believe it is beneficial for society. The long-standing belief that being gay was a “lifestyle” along with 1970s rhetoric about disrupting the traditional family was predictably alarming. For liberals who had already abandoned the idea that society as a whole should pressure people to get married and have 2.1 kids, acceptance of same-sex relationships that wouldn’t necessarily follow the traditional path came much more easily. But attitudes towards same-sex relationships and marriage have evolved rapidly even among conservatives. In 1978, few people accepted that being gay was genetic. Today, 50% believe that. Acceptance of gay marriage very closely tracks rising understanding that being gay is innate. (Republicans aren’t as far along as Democrats in internalizing that. But even among Democrats only 61% believe that being gay is fully innate, so it’s not like gay Democrats can get totally away from such beliefs either: https://news.gallup.com/poll/234941/say-nature-nurture-expla....) Moreover, in this past decade studies have revealed that huge percentages of gay couples are already raising kids together. In the last decade, an image of gay people as being born that way, and being in committed relationships and raising kids no different than anyone else, has appeared. And it has enabled the reconciliation of conservatism and same-sex relationships to the point that half of Republicans already support same-sex marriage.

Gay Republicans presumably understand this thought process and are willing to work through it and let the process play out. Many, even agree with the general principle of social conservatism, even if they disagree about the specific case. It’s worth noting that gay conservatives played an important role in Obergefell. See: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/06/gay-marriage-vot...

> In 1989, most Americans had never even heard of gay marriage, and certainly couldn’t conceive that it would one day be legalized by popular vote. That year, Andrew Sullivan wrote a landmark essay for the New Republic, “Here Comes the Groom: A (Conservative) Case for Gay Marriage.” Sullivan’s essay is one of the most important magazine articles of recent decades. His argument, which he went on to elaborate in his books Virtually Normal and Same-Sex Marriage and in later essays, is that marriage for gays would “foster social cohesion, emotional security, and economic prudence.” Sullivan’s conservative case would eventually become the intellectual and moral foundation of the campaigns to legalize gay marriage. Sullivan gave Slate permission to reprint his New Republic essay in full.

[jamespo]

This Andrew Sullivan? "In 2003, he wrote he was no longer able to support the American conservative movement, as he was disaffected with the Republican Party's continued rightward shift on social issues during the George W. Bush era"

[rayiner]

Sullivan identifies as a conservative and sometimes a Republican: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/books/review/Brooks.t.htm...

> “The conservatism I grew up around” Sullivan writes on the second page of the book, “was a combination of lower taxes, less government spending, freer trade, freer markets, individual liberty, personal responsibility and a strong anti-Communist foreign policy.” His heroes were Thatcher, Reagan, Solzhenitsyn, Havel, Hayek and Orwell.

Sullivan is ideologically similar to, and a fan of, Anthony Kennedy, who was a life-long Republican: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/06/anthony-kennedy-and-... (noting Kennedy’s “pragmatic libertarianism — his belief in limited government, pluralism, moderation, and social cohesion”).

It’s not really as simple as “Republicans moved too far to the right and he’s a liberal now.” For example, Sullivan is a devout Catholic who thinks Roe was wrong to take the decision on how to regulate abortion out of the hands of voters: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/andrew-sullian-a-way.... (He thinks voters would converge on laws like in France or Germany, allowing abortion up to 12 weeks with limited exemptions after that.)

He supported Bush (and thought Gore tried to steal the 2000 election) and the Iraq war initially. He soured on it later and reeled at Bush’s deficits and fiscal excess, and Bush’s support for the federal marriage amendment. He supported Ron Paul for the Republican primary. He hates Hilary Clinton but begrudgingly supported her against Trump. He is very much against the rise of critical theory and wokeness: https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-roots-of-wokeness. On LGBT issues, he thinks “the war has been won” after Gorsuch’s decision in Bostock: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/when-is-it-time-to-c.... In particular, he opposes the Equality Act’s attempts to eliminate religious freedom exemptions.

Circling back to the point: this is why a quarter of gay people identify as Republican (though Trump has been very unpopular). Most people have heterodox political views and don’t fit neatly into any particular camp. And the parties shift over time to capture different blocs so folks who aren’t strong partisans can find themselves shifting around. There’s plenty of people who would support the party of Biden over the party of Trump, but the party of Marco Rubio over the party of Bernie Sanders.

[RonanTheGrey]

Here's the problem:

Those people have a right to be wrong. That's why your vote counts as much as theirs does. The space that that leaves is where leadership is supposed to come in, in order to tilt the balance one way or the other. If a good leader doesn't arise, that's probably the problem you should be trying to solve.

The elitism of "we know better than you" has been used to justify some pretty horrific chapters in human history. Whether you like it or not, it is a much better state of being for the uninformed to vote, than the alternative.

[munk-a]

I think attributing it to "having the right to be wrong" is overly simplistic and you're missing a big chunk of what the core problem is - when you walk into a voting booth you are allowed to[1] check either the D or the R box. If you've followed a few rounds of elections chances are you've held your nose at least one of the times you've voted. Can you be a member of the GOP that is pretty well convinced that while the conservative courts might overturn Roe vs. Wade that gay marriage is essentially set in stone at this point? I think that's reasonable, I actually think that's pretty correct... No matter how extreme of a Mike Pence we get in office gay marriage is here to stay - if you're taking that as a given then maybe you're concerned about gun rights or the economy of one of a plethora of issues.

We're all complicated rainbows of opinions and when voting day comes around we're forced to either be red or blue and that's a problem.

1. Effectively, obviously you can vote third party by FPTP single slot elections make this incredibly ineffective - sorry... I really really wish this weren't the case.

[RonanTheGrey]

100% with you that FPTP was a mistake and should be rectified - I've seen some pretty good proposals of how ranked choice voting could work and would result in much more equitable outcomes.

[Spivak]

I would never say they shouldn’t vote and if I implied that then that was my mistake. My only point is that disparaging people who appear “party loyal” ignores the motivations that underpin that “loyalty”. On average people are pretty smart and I don’t think it’s too difficult to see some of the very real reasons why, at least nationally, people vote against one party or the other.

The joke about minorities begrudgingly huddling around the Democratic Party exists for a reason.

[RonanTheGrey]

Ah, ok. Good points... So, I have been around awhile -- 6 presidential elections and many more smaller ones.. I got to thinking about this and I realized that at some point, the national conversation changed from 'who you vote for and why' to 'who you vote against and what horrible things will happen if they win'.

To be fair that kind of rhetoric has existed since even the earliest days of the US, but I think on the whole voting has historically been seen as something you DO rather than something you use to fight against. The change in balance is... worrying.

[srtjstjsj]

Since 1974 every election's plurality major issue has been abortion or war, exactly "who you vote against and what horrible things will happen if they win"

Abortion will be banned, Bush will start a war, Obama will create the world's first Muslim Socialist state

[munk-a]

This is precisely the effect of having a two party system. Negative campaign ads help you as much as they hurt the other guy - Negative campaign ads are also a more effective way to spend your money. Thus we've seen extreme polarization in politics as parties have stopped needing to say what they'll do - and started fear mongering about what the other guys will do.

It's one reason I've been quite happy to see the green new deal (or Biden's totally not the green new deal but most of it) talked about in debates - it's actually a policy position.

[srtjstjsj]

> On average people are pretty smart

This is a vacuous statement. How smart is pretty smart?

[srtjstjsj]

What if you are Black and pro-Life, high income and live in the suburbs, married to a Palestinian and have a police officer brother married to a Jew?