A Good Thing, Or A Bad Thing, For Hillary To Not Have An ACTUAL Challenger In The Primaries...

[SheilaT]

62. It is my opinion that a lot of the support

for Hillary comes from those who are not very politically savvy. I know that statement will probably incite a huge number of posts flaming me for it, but I still stand by it.

Just as a lot of not very politically savvy people in the past thought that John McCain was a liberal, and harbored fantasies that he'd switch parties and perhaps run for President as a Democrat. Or that Chelsea Clinton will run for office, of that Malia and Sasha will someday. Or that Condeleezza Rice would run for President. That one was being bruited about sometime back, and I mainly heard it from young women who only saw that she was a female, and also African American, and hadn't a clue that she, number one, had never run for office before and wouldn't survive a week in the rough and tumble of real electoral politics, and number two was tightly allied to George Bush and his gang of terrible people.

Although your point about voting for a third party candidate really cuts to the heart of being politically naive. The third party candidate invariably draws votes from the candidate he is most like, and if enough voters go for that candidate, it will throw the election to the one we most don't want. I know that people here have said that since they live in a very blue state, they feel free to vote for a third party candidate, because the Democrat will win anyway. I have mixed feelings about that. I've actually at times thought of not bothering to vote at all when I lived in the red state of Kansas, because my vote didn't count. I really do wish we'd go to a direct election of President and get rid of the Electoral College for once and for all. If every vote really did count you'd see candidates and their surrogates campaigning in many more places than they do.