Voting in elections is often NOT the place to express support for the candidate you think has the best policies. Witness those who supported the Green Party in 2000. They liked Nader much better than Gore but by supporting Nader they gave the world Bush.
The basic question that all of us face in the primaries is: which candidate should we support with our vote and effort? This is a much more complicated question than many appreciate. More complicated than figuring out how to vote in the general election. It requires us not only to assess the ultimate benefit that accrue if the candidate becomes President, it also requires TWO levels of strategic analysis. The first level involves assessing the electability of each candidate in a head to head match up against Bush. The second level involves assessing the competitiveness of each candidate within the primaries themselves. The point of this post is to flesh out this complexity.
Let's work backward to appreciate the differences between voting in a general election and voting in the primaries.
In order to figure out who to support we must first answer the question: what are the consequences of electing each candidate on both sides?
Notice that this is NOT simply figuring out which policies each candidate advocates. It is an assessment of how each candidate, if elected, will change the political landscape in Washington. Let's flesh this out. What kinds of judges will the candidate SUCCEED in appointing? What kinds of budget priorities will the candidate actually be able to implement? Answering these questions are difficult because there are so many variables involved. We could use more discussion on the blog about how each candidate will change policy outcomes.
The second question to answer is what is the consequence of voting for each of the candidates in the general election? If the election is between two candidates then the answer follows pretty directly from a comparative assessment of each candidate. In short, vote for the candidate you think will produce the best outcomes if elected. But, what if there are more than two candidates as happened in 2000? In that case voters must make an additional determination. They must determine which pair of candidates are most likely to be competing to actually win the election. In 2000 the race was between Gore and Bush. Nader was not viable. It follows that a vote for Nader is equivalent to an abstention.
The bottomline in the general election is to vote for your most preferred candidate among the two candidates most likely to have a chance to win the election.
The third question is who to support in the primaries. This is an even more complicated question than figuring out who to support in the general election (when there are more than two candidates). The first part of the answer is to support the candidate who best balances the need to win the election against the relative benefit of electing that candidate versus electing Bush. To answer this question we have to assess the probability that each candidate in the primaries can beat Bush as well as the actual policy benefits that accrue from electing the candidate. But, there is a further complicating factor. The primaries are themselves a multicandidate election. Ultimately the primaries are going to come down to a competition between two candidates. As in the general election where a vote for Nader was essentially an abstention, in the primaries a vote for a candidate who has no chance of winning the nomination counts as an abstention too. Primary voters need to figure out which are the two most viable candidates and support the one in that pair they think is best.