Voting in the Other Party’s Primary

Voting in the other party’s Primary

Tuesday I am going to do something I never thought I would do. I am going to vote in the Republican Party Primary. Janet, my wife (editor), has done it before.  I have always scorned such behavior, but I have come over to her way of thinking and perhaps moved beyond it. Her motive, as before is to try to do something meaningful about a menace, in this instance our current representative, MTJ, and all the other Trump clones on the ballot. I could not agree with her more.  We also agree that the only chance Democrats in the Fourteenth District have is if enough Trump-clones are defeated in the Primary to cause the Trumpites in the district to stay home on election day. It is a pretty slim chance, but it is the only chance.  It also might help with state-wide races for the same reason.  After all, if Kemp and Raffensperger are on the ballot and not Purdue and Hice, will not the losers and their supporters claim election fraud? And maybe, just maybe, that will persuade lots of people to skip this “rigged” election like they skipped the last one.

You may think that we have no business voting in the other guy’s primary.  It’s an invasion of privacy or crashing a party to which you were not invited. That would be true were it not for the fact that our party’s primary is virtually meaningless because the district has been rigged to guarantee that only Republicans win. So why shouldn’t we have a voice in how the representation for our district is decided. They will not be Democrats in any case. When the party in power resorts to gerrymandering in order to stay in power it leaves members of the opposing parties with no reasonable choice but to vote in the Primary of the majority party of their district.  In Georgia that happens to be the Republican Party for now.  In the past, incidentally, Republicans were known to vote in the Democratic Primary for the same reason.

I said perhaps I moved on beyond Janet’s position and I might add the position of a number of Democrats across the state who have and will be voting in the Republican Primary this time. By that I mean that I am thinking about this as an issue of gerrymandering, broader than simply this election. Defeating MJT and her crowd is important, but it is a bigger problem than just this election. Indeed, I am thinking that so long as the state is gerrymandered, Democrats and Independents alike should vote in the Republican Primary as a matter of course.  Their candidates would come to realize that they cannot win the primary by appealing to the “base” alone. There would be too many Democrat and Independent voters to be ignored and that would change their campaigns and even their political behavior. But that is a matter for another blog.

Don’t forget election day Tuesday, and if you are a Democrat in the Fourteenth District, I hope you will seriously consider voting in the Republican Primary and voting against everyone whom Trump supports! It could really make a difference.