Pragmatic Registration

Your Vote Is Making Little Or No Difference, But You Can Change That

Would you register as a republican, if it meant your vote would have ten times the impact on global warming legislation?

On a woman’s right to choose?

On gun legislation?

On voters’ rights legislation and protecting democracy from those who would destroy it?

What if the impact was only five times? Or twice the impact?

What if you discovered that your vote had almost no value, because of how you are registered?

It turns out that choosing your political party based on one’s affinity for the party - this is disenfranchising Americans and leading to a polarization of the nation. You need to choose your political party pragmatically, strategically, or our nation will continue to falter.

The Truth About Our Political System

……There are a many safe GOP congressional districts. In those districts, republican representatives cater to their far right voters, because those voters vote in the primaries.

The below graph is of the congressional districts in Texas. It shows that in most districts, the democrat leaning voters outnumber the voters who vote in the GOP primaries (a.k.a. the only election that matters in the district).

The state’s districts have been heavily gerrymandered. And there are 4.9 million democrat leaning voters assigned by the GOP to the state’s gerrymandered 36 districts. The vast majority of these voters believe that climate change is real and that we need to do something about it immediately. But their votes don’t matter, because they are not registered as republicans and can’t vote in the GOP primary. They wait to vote in the election that has already been decided by gerrymandering.

But they could change politics as we know it, if their votes were cast in the GOP primaries.

The same is true across the country. Voters are stuck in safe districts and the districts’ representatives can only win the district if they appeal to the far right voters who vote in the primaries.

In the graph however, you can see that in many districts, the voters who voted democrat in the general election far outnumber the republican primary voters who are choosing their district’s representatives. If those democrat leaning voters truly wanted a moderate to represent them in congress, they would be registered as republicans and vote for a moderate in the primaries - where their elect representative is actually chosen. They are simply voting in the wrong elections.

Meanwhile, the GOP is happy that those voters haven’t figured out that the state’s general election outcome has already been decided, and that they are wasting their vote’s power.

The Reality

Districts that were gerrymandered for a GOP win will be represented by a GOP representative and districts that are gerrymandered for a democrat win will be represented by a democrat. And while the state is a 55%/45% republican/democrat state, the GOP is guaranteed to win 61% of the congressional seats, thanks to their gerrymandering. The same is true of districts that are geographically suited to the GOP.

The same dynamics are true across the country in both gerrymandered districts and those districts where geography lends itself to GOP representatives. But in many districts we can replace the right wing GOP politicians with moderates who believe in climate change.

All voters need to do is register pragmatically.