When discussion is slow on DU... Why

[frazzled]

6. People should rarely vote their conscience

They should vote their head. Voting is always strategic, and if voting your own conscience means the possibility of handing the seat to someone worse, then you really have no conscience anyway.

You don't vote your own conscience because you must vote for the general common good (and that includes considering a range of issues—social, economic, judicial, foreign policy—not just one pet issue). That is a basic view of American liberal thought. It's never about you, it's about the greatest good, overall, for the society in which you live.

And as an aside, I find these threads you object to far less annoying than the ones that begin "Senator so-and-so says Donald Trump is ignorant" or "unfit for office" or other platitudes of that order, as if it's "news." Like it's something we all haven't known definitively and in a thousand ways for the past two years. They're a waste of time, and just sad attempts at advertising their favorite senator.