Disenchanted with President Barack Obama for delaying executive action on reforming the nation’s deportation system, apathetic about Democratic candidates that for the most part haven’t made a direct appeal to Hispanics and without a galvanizing bogeyman on the right to vote against like Mitt Romney in 2012, Hispanic voters are poised to let Democrats lose Senate races and state houses they could otherwise win, key Hispanic advocates said Monday during a briefing at the National Council of La Raza.
The preemptive blame-shifting comes as Democrats across the spectrum – from Mr. Obama on down – fear diminished turnout from the base in November’s midterm elections. Gary Segura, a Stanford University professor who is co-founder of the polling firm Latino Decisions, said Latino voters would show their influence by letting some Democrats, like Sen. Kay Hagan of North Carolina, be thrown out of office.
In any instance where a Latino-preferred candidate loses and that Latino community turned out in smaller numbers because of the disillusionment, Latinos did make a difference. The decision not to vote is still a political decision and is not necessarily irrational,” Mr. Segura said. “If you’re a Latino in North Carolina and the president delayed his decision to help Kay Hagan in her election, why would you go vote for Kay Hagan? … Latinos can have influence by letting people lose, just as they can have influence by helping people win.”
If this sounds familiar, it's the same tactic far left liberals have been using for years. To which I will say this: abdication of voting is cowardice, plain and simple. If you make the political decision to stay home and not vote in order to punish politicians, you are a coward, and you deserve no voice at all in our political process.
Too many people have fought and died for women, African-Americans, Hispanic and Latino, Asian, and other minorities to be able to vote. Walking away from that is not only irrational, despite what Gary Segura says, but suicidal. If you feel that you are voiceless, why make yourself voiceless by not voting?
I can respect voting for the other candidate in order to punish the one you're angry with. That's at least still exercising the right people bled for. But to stay home and do nothing? Insanity. You only assure that you will not be taken seriously in the future and that your concerns will be ignored.
Why should politicians care about those who do not vote at all?
"Microsoft has unveiled Windows 10, slated for release in mid-2015 as the company attempts to boost flagging sales with an OS that combines Windows 8.1 with the features Windows 7 users want. "
ReplyDeleteWhen has Microsoft ever given users features they want?
I've been saying that for a long time now, only to get smacked around by "liberals" and "progressives" who act just as irrational and single-minded as the wingnuts they so often decry. It's difficult to reason with extremists whose mindsets are buried deep in their own ideology, no matter which end of the political spectrum they're on, only in the case of the ones on the left, their strategy to winning a gunfight is to put a weapon to their own heads and pull the trigger.
ReplyDeleteAs you know, I have been flogging this particular horse for some time: if you make a big stink about throwing the election to the Republicans in order to spite your allies the Democrats, then you forfeit any claim on the spoils of victory should the Democrats win anyway. In addition, the ill will generated by electoral sabotage can dog you for a generation: just look at how well the Greens have been doing in the decade and a half since they ran that spoiler campaign with Nader and cursed the world with eight years of misrule by Bush and Cheney.
ReplyDeleteThe purity trolls freak out when you remind them of cold hard facts like these, squealing that we are trying to scare them with the Republican bogeyman. I am not trying to scare them, although they should be scared by the idea of returning Republicans to power, and the Republicans are not a bogeyman: Rubio and Cruz and Bachmann are all too terrifyingly real.
So if the hispanics join the purity trolls in throwing the elections, then I guess we'll just have to find another place to look for voters. If that means the party drags farther to the right, the exact contrary of their intentions, then I will just remind people of what I have been saying year after year after year: when the Democrats win they shift left, when the Democrats lose they shift right. The choice is yours, people.
F*cking weird, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteI prefer the term purity trolls when speaking of these idiots, because liberal and progressive are words that have specific meanings and neither one is really appropriate to these mental midgets who swarm the intertubez. It appears that they really should be calling themselves leftists, based on their projected self image, except that they are too stupid to know what a leftist might be and they wouldn't know a leftist idea if one slithered out of a book and stung them. Perhaps radical would flatter their self images as well, except that there is nothing radical about lazy clictivism.
Exactly. And if anyone believes that progressive legislation will happen under the current GOP, they need their head examined.
ReplyDelete