“Vote third party? Not in November — not anymore!”
Conservative activist and blogger Stephen Frank laments how Proposition 14 made the political climate one sided in many races this year. I can agree that one sided races do make partisans on both parties left out of the race with Democrats in congressional districts 8 and 31 and Republicans in district 35 rather bored.
I can agree that Proposition 14 leads to Soviet-styled elections, we have no choice. For Democrats in district 31, Incumbent Congressman Gary Miller and State Senator Bob Dutton will want to repeal Obama’s health care bill, they could care less that lesbians, undocumented women, transgendered women and Native American women are being neglected in the house version of the violence against women act. Congressman Joe Baca and Senator Gloria Negrette McLeod in district 35 could care less about cutting our budgets so we can have manageable budget deficits. Either way voters are at a loss.
Charles Munger Jr, investor and chairman of the Santa Clara County Republican Party decided to throw this new Top 2 system on the voters since the Republican Party base failed to nominate many of the choices the business faction wanted such as Abel Maldonado’s run for State Controller and Keith Richman’s run for State Treasurer in 2006. And thanks to the conservatives in the social conservative faction we still have Barbara Boxer as our US Senator for the fourth term now. Because of the National Organization for Marriage they sunk Tom Campbell when he was the frontrunner in the beginning.
The Republican establishment should get the message by now. Our reliance on bashing gays, worshiping the unborn while neglecting the born, treating the immigrants (legal and illegal) as pariahs and the worshiping of guns may not get the bay area Republicans and Los Angeles metropolitan Republicans excited. but we need to have a platform and candidates that can speak for the state not just a faction. There is a reason why Democrats win often in our state.
I resent Munger’s approach where we have no way to dissent against the two choices. We need a none of the above choice. We have no way to dissent such as me voting for the Libertarian Party in 2010, many of us resented how Steve Cooley was a hypocrite where he would of not defend Proposition 19, but he would still choose to defend Proposition 8 and we sunk him by denying his promotion to statewide office. None of the above would be a non-binding choice that expresses voter disgust of the choice of candidates as how they do it in Nevada. Unfortunately this was recently overturned by a federal judge as being found as unconstitutional because political candidates want us to be forced into the two party system. The establishment particularly the Republicans do not want us to stray off the reservation and want us to be spoon fed the unworthy candidates they been feeding us.
I may agree with Munger on the social issues, but there should be a way to help make electable candidates happen such as instant runoff voting without killing off voter choice. People can rank their choices and candidates would be eliminated one by one until we get a majority choice. People said candidates would build collations, but Joe Baca, Gloria Negrette Mcleod, Gary Miller and Bob Dutton do not really care about the issues from the opposition it will only just be an extended party primary. I agree it is tempting to sit out these elections that provide no choice, but we deserve a say to find out the best political candidate that gives us the least headaches.
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