State of the Union

Another Conservative for Johnson

Breaking Down the TAC Vote

By Jordan Bloom • October 31, 2012, 12:24 PM

Here’s a rough count of who’s getting TAC’s votes, based on the symposium that went online last night. I’ve listed names so you can check my work, and haven’t counted folks who are leaning one way or the other in the final tally.

Johnson — 6 (Bandow, Brimelow, Galupo, Giraldi, Goldman, Kauffman, Larison if he could, Bovard if he doesn’t write in Ron Paul)

Romney — 4 (Coombs, Pinkerton, Tippins, Zmirak, Antle and Birzer leaning)

Obama — 4 (Bacevich, Hadar, McConnell, Millman, Giraldi in a pinch)

Goode — 1 (Scallon, Brimelow and Gottfried would if they could)

Rand Paul — 1 (McCarthy)

Hapsburg Monarch — 1 (Lind)

Not voting/ambivalent/unclear — 7 (Dreher, Dougherty, Gordon, Murphy, Raimondo [rooting for Obama], Richman, Russello, Beer, Sailer)

Jesse Walker’s take on TAC’s spread here.

Posted in Election, Uncategorized. Tagged Barack Obama, Gary Johnson, Jesse Walker, Mitt Romney, TAC.

12 Responses to Breaking Down the TAC Vote

steve in ohio says:

October 31, 2012 at 1:13 pm

I don’t agree with the Obama votes, but respect those 4 or 5 as I do all your writers. You guys make me think and aren’t predictable like every other conservative site.
Scott McConnell says:

October 31, 2012 at 1:16 pm

I would count Justin and Phil Giraldi as Obama votes. And how can there be a vote for the Hapsburg Emperor and it not be Zmirak?
Justin Raimondo says:

October 31, 2012 at 1:23 pm

Obama! Obama! Obama!
Bob Jones says:

October 31, 2012 at 1:55 pm

Lind’s call for a Hapsburg should have called for a Hapsburg Empress. Where is Maria Theresa when you need her.
Daniel McCarthy says:

October 31, 2012 at 2:50 pm

I like the fact that our symposium, much like a real election, includes many “spoiled” or ambiguous ballots. You could do a recount and come up with practically anyone as the winner.
Clint says:

October 31, 2012 at 3:38 pm

Some thought for a “None Of The Above” formally registered line on ballots.
Siarlys Jenkins says:

October 31, 2012 at 4:38 pm

If I voted for Gary Johnson, or a green candidate, and Romney won, would that be an outcome as acceptable as Barack Obama being re-elected? No, it would not. Therefore, I have to vote for Obama. In fact, I already have.
William Dalton says:

October 31, 2012 at 8:13 pm

Siarlys, I hear you and I appreciate you. But I know that if I voted for Obama and he got elected, I’d spend the next four years regretting it. By voting for Gary Johnson I get my vote for reason registered (it wouldn’t be if I wrote in Ron Paul), and no matter who is elected President I won’t have to regret anything I did. If Johnson’s polling is substantial and Obama wins it will be a powerful message to the Republican Party as to how they must reorganize if they hope to win in 2016. And preparing the ground for 2016 is really the only realistic objective left open to us.
Harrison H.M. Elfrink says:

October 31, 2012 at 8:39 pm

I’m not voting for the clowns, I shall be working in the polls this Tuesday. Time to buy some Mega Monster energy drinks…
Siarlys Jenkins says:

October 31, 2012 at 9:41 pm

Good points Dalton. Politics is a bubbling cauldron to which we each make our own contribution, and the result is often something none of us could have forseen.

On the opportunistic side, if votes for Johnson cost the Republican ticket, the immediate result is something I can live with.

Back to your point, I dread what’s next on the Democratic ticket, because nothing much good is on the horizon. I’d like to see a Republican worth voting for in 2016, but I’m not holding my breath. Maybe you can make it happen.

The thing I appreciate least about Obama is he didn’t shake up the Dems, he accepted them as they were… and they’re still a pack of spineless cowards afraid of their own shadow who scream about the right wing hordes rather than advancing a more audacious program of their own.
Red Phillips says:

October 31, 2012 at 10:22 pm

Any dissident conservative (although not all the endorsers here are identifiably conservative) who endorses Obama IMO loses all credibility with the conservatives he presumably wants to influence. All someone has to say is X voted for Obama, and anything else he says will be dismissed by the conservatives he wants to convert to a more authentic version of conservatism. I assume the eventual point of a project like TAC is to influence the debate in the right direction and not just hector movement conservatives. This may be unfortunate, but it is true. Voting third party or writing-in a protest vote does not sacrifice your credibility. In fact, it burnishes it. The fact that I voted for Chuck Baldwin in 2008 enhances my conservative credentials, it doesn’t tarnish them. If for no other reason, this is why a vote for Obama is foolish, although I think a vote for Obama is foolish on many grounds.
TomB says:

November 2, 2012 at 12:02 pm

Red Phillips wrote:

” The fact that I voted for Chuck Baldwin in 2008 enhances my conservative credentials, it doesn’t tarnish them. If for no other reason, this is why a vote for Obama is foolish, although I think a vote for Obama is foolish on many grounds.”

Once again this ignores Siarlys Jenkins point that in some places a vote for anyone other than Obama means a vote for Romney. I suppose that in such circumstances voting for, say, Ron Paul or etc. would still “enhance” one’s conventionally conceived conservative credentials, but it really “conservative?”

On the face of it I guess that would seem so too, but then getting down to the guts of it and ignoring convention what really is the basis for believing that Romney will be more conservative than Obama?

Of course that sounds odd or maybe even stupid, but except for his health-care program and otherwise pretty much on the margins Obama has done so little really—and nothing so different than any Republican would do such as trying to stimulate the economy—that it’s hard to say that Obama has acted in any highly anti-conservative fashion.

And even as to his health-care program, it’s not any government takeover of the system by any long shot, and leaves all the private parties in that market in place if not makes room for even more, and distinctly tries to rely on “the market” to keep prices in check.

Plus of course when Governor Romney didn’t seem to mind any of that.

The “big” fact seems to be that there’s only two big issues out there that are *clearly* going to have major effects on the great mass of American lives and those are (A) foreign policy vis a vis the Mideast, and (B) the economy.

In this light it seems to me inarguable that Obama is preferable to Romney: As to (B) Romney has said nothing that I’ve seen as regards the economy that clearly distinguishes him from Obama, and it’s beyond imagination that he or anyone indeed would take the opposite of Obama’s basic tack of trying to stimulate things. The overwhelming consensus just simply is that doing so would be the height of stupidity in the deflationary Depression we are in.

As to (A), need it really be said again that it’s hardly conservative to go adventuring around the globe as Romney talks about particularly as regards Iran? And all his other full-throated talk in support of what is effectively George Bush’s foreign policy?

George Bush was clearly more conservative than either Al Gore or John Kerry. Yet 9/11 happened on Bush’s watch, and his reaction to it has been nothing short of a disaster for this country, not excluding the financial aspects of that reaction.

The housing bubble and the parlous state of our banking system also happened on Bush’s watch, and indeed it was his very conservatism that seemed to make him oblivious to it, and utterly ignorant of what its sudden bursting would mean.

And yet despite Bush’s clear superior “conservatism” over Gore and Kerry, it seems to me as quite likely that under either of the latter we’d at least be better off than we are today.

One hates to say it, and it may have been impossible to imagine it beforehand, but it sure does seem easy to do so now.

(And that’s not our fault, so making one’s faith in conservatism the problem. The fault clearly lies with today’s “conservatives,” period.)