I voted early today and for the very first time in my life, I voted straight ticket, (Democratic, of course), despite swearing to myself that I would never do that.
Let me give you a bit of background. I have been allowed to vote since 1978 and I have almost never missed exercising that responsibility. I was a military brat more or less and grew up in a very conservative home, though my mother was an extremely tolerant person. My parents almost never demagogued me about their specific ideology, other than their religion but I was very much encouraged to look at things and educate myself and make up my own mind.
After such an upbringing and a hitch in the navy, I guess it's no wonder that I take the responsibility seriously. Throughout my voting career, I've looked closely at issues and listened to the candidates and voted as an independent, (which is still how I'm registered), selecting both Democrats and Republicans, along with several minor party candidates, depending on my analysis of the current issues. Because I do take it so seriously, I've always thought of straight party voting to be a cop-out, a lazy person's way of going through the motions. I still believe that's often the case but follow me below the orange, (insert clever metaphor here), if you want to learn why I made an exception to that rule today.
The short answer is that the entire Republican Party is bat-shit crazy! That's no hyperbole either! Politicians and pundits are saying and doing things that would have gotten them reviled in the media, scoffed at, and probably arrested, a couple of decades ago. These things and uncounted others are empirically so over the edge of sanity that it's absurd to consider voting for any of them.
Because I pay attention, I have watched, (and lamented), the Republican party's slide into Wingnutistan. My first hint that they had openly embraced insanity is when I heard a late night radio interview with Newt Gingrich in 1996. That same year I voted for Kay Bailey Hutchison and she turned out to be the last Republican I have voted for to date.
Though I haven't selected any Republicans in 18 years, I have stubbornly clung to my practice of carefully reading the ballot and making individual selections. But that changed today. For the first time, I selected straight Democratic and then I scrolled through the ballot to make sure my selections were correct. I ended up voting for the entire slate of Democrats, plus three Green Party judicial candidates in races that had no Democratic representation.
Look, I know better than most that the Democratic Party is deeply flawed. My rep is Pete Gallego and blue dog through and through but he's orders of magnitude better than the alternative, (Hurd), or any Republican they might have run. We must never lose our focus or our attention to the issues but in this modern world, one of our major parties would rather destroy the nation than to surrender to the inevitable demographic shift. Instead of adapting to the new reality, they would burn it all down. Now is not the time to be squeamish and puritanical. Now is the time to elect more Dems. Then we can elect better ones!
5:31 PM PT: By way of update, I forgot to mention that I asked a poll worker and she assured me they had been very busy and were seeing an unusually heavy turnout. Cross your fingers for Davis and Van de Putte!