After all the losses on the Right in Dallas County, I hear a lot of Republican bemoan the fact that more people didn’t vote straight ticket R. While I think that is extremely important to vote the entire way down the ballot, the endless mantra of “Vote Straight ticket!” isn’t going to foster more votes. If anything its going to tick off some Republicans.
I spent time volunteering and being paid to phonebank for the Dallas County Republican Party this past election. I spent a lot of my time calling during early voting, where the party pushed a “get-out-the-vote” effort. One of the questions we asked identified Republicans was “Do you plan to vote straight ticket?” Over half the respondents I spoke with said no. They said they planned to support most of the Republicans, except for Perry, or Sessions or Tammy Barnes. They planned to vote the entire ballot, but not blindly vote R.
Republicans don’t like being told how to vote. We want to make decisions. We want to be informed about our candidates and then make choices that we think best support our views and values. This is not a downside. Mindless voters are not what we need. I believe whole-heartedly that straight-ticket voting breeds stupid voters. Even many Republicans prefer to check each candidate’s name instead of pulling the “R” lever because it makes each decision more valuable.
We can encourage people to vote all the way down the ballot, but that’s what we need to call it: voting all the way down. This is a messaging issue. Our constituents are turned off by the term straight-ticket. So we need to use language they will more readily accept. Vote all the way down. Vote for your local government. Straight ticket is nonsense, and its a prop we’re using to make ourselves feel better in Dallas County about how bitterly we lost.
You are right about Republicans not being willing to “vote straight ticket” just because they are told to.
The problem is that they dont educate themselves on the Candidates ahead of time (at least the ones on the bottom of the ballot) so they leave them blank and in essence vote for the Democrat!
It appears that some of our Republican Candidates would have won if all Republicans would have voted straight ticket. Some would have still lost.
We should not just say “Vote Straight Ticket”. We should explain why we HAVE to vote to the bottom.
2006, if 16000 +Republicans who voted for Kay Bailey would have voted straight ticket, then we would have held on to 47 Republican seats. Some of those races we would have won by 10000 votes.
My guess is when you did the phone bank for GOP, they did not make sure that you had this knowledge to explain to people. HELLO GOP, this is not hard stuff.
So Republicans who want to continue to have their County under the leadership of Domingo’s (oops I mean Elba Garcia’s) rule and Craig Watkins should continue not to pull the R lever.
Now the County Commissioners will be doing the Redistricting so forget ever getting the County back. But I understand that asking a Republican to pull the ‘R’ lever is too much to ask.
Wake up!!!! This stuff is not Rocket Science.