If you register a protest vote and help the Democrats get elected, the entire conservative slate of issues will go underwater and exist in committee and sub-committee purgatory until another change of power occurs.

I’m not in the conservative lobbyist business anymore, but I sure don’t wish that frustration on the guys and gals that are.  So, I’ll just keep pulling the lever for the Elephants. ~Hunter Baker, AmSpec Blog

It may end up being frustrating for conservative lobbyists under a Dem majority, but I find it hard to believe that it could be more frustrating than having your “own” party, which is allegedly on your “side” doing next to nothing to advance the “conservative slate of issues” that you care about and in many cases pursuing policies that directly contradict things on that slate.  Forget protest votes.  I will be voting to oust the incumbents. 

For the life of me, I have never really understood the phenomenon of party loyalty.  I understand the need to build coalitions and have allies, but to attach yourself to a party as an entity almost for its own sake, or out of the misguided impression that they are actually on your side, strikes me as very odd.  There are permanent interests, and the permanent interest of political factions is to hold and wield power; the permanent interests of conservatives do not include tolerating any one faction’s possession of power for the sake of keeping that power.  It is in order to repudiate this idea, almost as much as for any other specific reason for dissatisfaction with GOP government, that conservatives ought to want to see the GOP defeated.  They do not own us; we do not have to serve them when they fail us.  Indeed, we don’t ever have to serve them unless it works to our advantage.  It would be one thing if we at least viewed elections as the hideous choices between Scylla and Charybdis that they are, but every cycle we are treated to pleasant stories about how the GOP stands for what we believe in and fights on our behalf.  Except that they don’t fight and they haven’t actually stood up for any of those things in recent years (the House bill on immigration is truly just about the sole exception). 

Of all the kinds of loyalty that exist, party loyalty has always struck me as the most forced, artificial and dangerous to a person’s integrity because it is a kind of loyalty inextricably bound up with the pursuit of power to a degree that most other forms of loyalty are not.  It is therefore more likely than any other kind of attachment to yield corruption and betrayal of principle.  

One of my teachers in high school, an extremely smart woman, told us without any embarrassment that she simply punched the straight party line button for the Democrats at every election.  What a terrible waste, I thought.  This wasn’t just because I was already very down on the major parties by that time, but because it seemed to me that this put the absolute minimum amount of thought and time into making your selections.  There almost had to be races where the better candidates came from a different party.  To keep the Democrats in power in the Roundhouse struck me then as just as wrong as it would be to keep the GOP in power in the Capitol today.  The shame of it was that very intelligent, informed voters would talk themselves into supporting an establishment that was sclerotic and flawed in so many ways because they had convinced themselves that their opponents were far worse, when it would almost be impossible for the incoming party to do worse than the incumbents.         

Update: Keeping hope alive, Quin Hillyer offers this bold counterintuitive prediction:

I’ll probably elaborate on this in my column here next week, but for now, let me just note again that I expect Republican fortunes to surge between now and election day.

Presumably this is based on the insight that they have nowhere to go but up?