Campaign slogan: "Fuck the Police".You could have easily looked at a sample ballot prior to the election, and you could have simply looked up the candidates in a search engine. By doing so, you, like the good citizen in Rindge, would probably have been appalled, and probably wouldn't have voted for me. I wouldn't have begrudged you for that. I was, after all, rather upfront about it. [...]
More than 4,000 people went into the voting booth on September 8 this week, and they all filled in the circle by my name despite knowing absolutely nothing about the person they were nominating to the most powerful law enforcement position in the county. That's a level of recklessness of which any decent human being should be ashamed.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
She had me until "Bitcoin".
She lost me at Libertarian, but I can still respect the prank.
Yah, she ran unopposed so she knew she would win. The fact that she's a Libertarian Free Stater means she's a fucking wingnut. I really doubt she'll win in the general.
This is a problem everywhere, not just further down the ticket and not just in the US. In the UK the highest office directly elected by the people is (depending on how you look at it) that of Member of Parliament in the House of Commons. The Prime Minister is effectively whoever the elected MPs collectively decide it should be. And yet, a great many people vote "party line" in elections for MP.
Some of my friends live in Vauxhall in London. For decades the MP for Vauxhall was Kate Hoey. Now, for all that time Kate was a member of the Labour party but while that's true in terms of her personal views they probably didn't align very well with the larger party, and certainly with views of gently liberal Vauxhall. She's pro-hunting, pro-gun, and in many ways fiercely socially conservative while representing an inner city area with a vibrant gay scene. But because a huge proportion of voters don't care about people only parties, there was never any doubt that liberal Vauxhall would vote Labour and Labour meant Hoey.
Unfortunately after 2016 there was a grave problem. Neither major party wanted to admit that Brexit is a terrible idea after it had marginaly won a referrendum, but for many individual MPs this enormous problem rose above party loyalty. These "rebels" had the numbers to keep seizing control of Parliamentary business. So you had the situation where a handful of mostly older Tories who thought this was a bad idea are standing up with Labour MPs to say so, and people like Kate Hoey, even knowing they represent constituents who mostly voted to Remain, insist we must Leave because it suits their personal values.
And so in the 2019 election Hoey had to go. Suddenly, after decades of voting directly against their interests, slightly more of her constituents had finally noticed she hadn't got their interests at heart. And more importantly she'd embarrassed the national party. Hoey declared support for the Unionists (who want Northern Ireland not to be Unified with the Republic of Ireland but instead to remain part of the United Kingdom, the diametric opposite of Hoey's earlier stance as a Labour MP) for the Tories, and for the Brexit Party Ltd (the Brexit Party is a Limited Company wholly controlled by its owners, not a membership organisation, conveniently meaning that "donations" by would be "members" are just revenue to be distributed as the owners see fit).
And yet forced awake, the people I knew there still expressed mostly confusion. How were they supposed to have known? What do you mean you can just look at your MP's stance easily online? Why would I do that when I can just spend five minutes every few years checking "Labour" on a piece of paper and consider I've done my duty? I suggested they look at the slate of people looking to replace Hoey and find out what these actual humans asking to represent them were about before picking one. In the end I'd guess I spent about one hour per woman (all the candidates from parties with any hope at all of success were women) even though I've never lived in Vauxhall, and yet I suspect I still put more effort into researching that race than most people who voted in it. The new Labour candiate won. Of course.
The flip side of this is that MPs know that they won't get elected (and so will lose their frankly comfortable jobs, place in London etc) if they don't belong to one of the two-and-a-bit (perhaps two-and-two-bits in Scotland where the big two are different, not sure about Wales / NI) parties. So if those big parties become willing to simply throw MPs out of the party if they don't toe the line, then the people who remain do toe the line. That seems to be exactly what the tories have become willing to do: if you don't follow the Cummings/Johnson axis, you're gone. So your local tory MP is now almost certainly simply a mouthpiece for the Cummings/Johnson junta, whatever they might really think, because people will do a lot to keep their job.
I think I'd rather have the system that allowed Hoey to exist than one that does not allow dissent at all.
The size of the 'bit' in 'two-and-a-bit parties' has grown a bit larger over my lifetime, and some times other parties can have an outsize influence on Parliament.
Of course, the biggest example of this in recent years was the 2010 election, when neither Labour or the Tories had enough votes to control Parliament, so it all came down to the Liberal Democrats to form a coalition to create a majority.
The thing is, the average LibDem voter was fairly left wing, and most would have voted Labour if they had to pick, but instead the LibDems got into bed with the Conservatives (thereby losing the LibDems pretty much all their votes in the next election), which allowed David Cameron to become prime minister, which lead to him trying to get rid of some minor opposition in his party by allowing them to have a referendum on EU membership, which he thought he'd win easily. (Also, tuition fees, austerity, Libya, the "hostile environment", bailing out the banks etc. etc.)
So in a way, the fucked up position the UK is now, could all be laid at the feet of the Liberal Democrat leader, who decided to join with the party that most of his voters hated.
His name is Nick Clegg, and he's now the head lobbyist for Facebook.
It's all his fucking fault. Fucker.
I could have forgiven Clegg on the grounds that he made a terrible mistake. I could even forgive Cameron for the referendum (not for some other things)which was clearly mostly just a catastrophic error which I am sure he regrets. But taking a position as lobbyist for Facebook? He's not stupid, he knew what they are: there is no forgiveness for that. As you say: fuck him.
I don't really have particular enthusiasm for the Liberal Democrats, but this perpetuates the myth that somehow Lib Dems could have just picked Labour. The numbers do not work.
You need 326 MPs, having 315 and the good wishes of some voters is still 11 too few MPs. So OK could you assemble 326 MPs without a Tory coalition even though they had 306 MPs on their own? It has to be possible right? Not really, no. You can't have Sinn Féin. It would be a huge problem for them symbolically to support any Westminster government, so, that's never going to happen. How about the DUP? They're essentially wedded to the Tories, so no again. The next "big" option is the Scottish Nationals. But they have a very simple requirement from a coalition partner and it is 100% not something Labour can afford to offer them so they're out too. You can't put it together.
The other alternative open to Clegg was not a Labour coalition but to hold out and force fresh elections. And the wisdom at the time was very simple: Voters don't like Tories, or Labour, but they really don't like Elections. If you force them to go back to the polls they will punish you by voting for somebody else.