I live in the High Desert area of Southern California. Aptly named due to the fact that it is very high (approx. 4,000ft above sea level and fairly northward for a desert) and very very dry. To give you an idea of where this is, I live in San Bernardino County. It is the largest county in the Continental United States, squeezed right in between the borders of Nevada and Arizona. Totally land locked and about as far away from the coast as you can get while still in California.
From where I live it's about a 3 hour drive to Las Vegas.
I live in the 41st Congressional District soon to be the newly reformed 8th District. As you may know Nancy Pelosi is currently the Representative for the 8th District. But California is stupid and the new district lines for this year have changed everything around. As a result starting next year Majority Leader (fingers crossed) Pelosi will suddenly be representing the 12th district despite the fact that it's roughly the same patch of real estate she's always represented.
They're just renaming everything and expanding the districts in ways that group lots of like minded people together.
You see the new 8th District is a freshly formed mishmash of cities and empty space that stretches along California's eastern border. Basically the new District 8 goes from the Southern Desert city of Needles up to about 50 Miles south of Lake Tahoe. That's as specific as I can get because there are literally NO CITIES anywhere near the edge of this District. There is a lake called Topaz Lake, there appears to be some farm land. But virtually nobody lives there. The districts boundaries pull a little west the further South you go but never gets anywhere near the coast.
Here is a picture.
Currently District 41 encompasses the bulge of this area. But does not stretch North.
Redistricting isn't my dilemma. To be honest I always had trouble remembering what number my District was. I just knew that my Congressmen was Republican Jerry Lewis, but next January it will be someone else. Someone new!
That's where my dilemma comes in. With the redistricting came the new Open Primary rules.
If you know anything about the new 8th District from reading DailyKos it is probably the fact that the Open Primary rules have royally screwed Democrats here! The Open Primary rules in California make it so the top two vote getters in the Primaries move on to the general election regardless of party affiliation!
Which resulted in Democrats getting edged out altogether in my little part of the world. This area is so rural (my city is the second largest in the district with a population of 150,000) that it's basically a SOLID RED STATE within the Solid Blue State of California. Just how Conservative is it? Well they haven't voted for a Democratic Representative since 1973. A full 63% of voters are Registered Republican.
They voted for John McCain in 2008 (54.27%), and for Bush in 2004 (61.8%)
So it's incredibly RED territory but not so decisively Red that Democrats have no clout at all. Barack Obama got 43.7% of the vote after all, that's almost half. Certainly not as dismal a performance as the 12.4% John McCain got in Nancy Pelosi's Congressional District. In a district like that it makes no sense to have a choice between a Democrat and a Republican who stands no chance at all.
But roughly 45% of the vote is pretty relevant and the area is getting more and more liberal as people flood in from more expensive parts of the state. Under the old system a Democrat might actually have a chance to win in a few years. It used to be that the parties had to nominate somewhat Moderate politicians or risk losing votes to the other guy. Now we have a system that makes them immune to this threat by denying a true alternative.
The GOP can nominate any batshit insane nutjobs they want and voters like me have no recourse.
Both of these Republicans are super conservative assholes.
So that's my dilemma. There is no lesser of two evils. It's like the mob letting me choose which leg I want them to break. Sure I could just leave that part of my ballot blank and skip the race. But I don't think Democrats should have to be silenced. I want us to be heard even if it's in the form of a protest vote. That Write In section is calling my name.
But what do I write to make sure it has some weight?
I Googled everything I could think of hoping to find some sort of grass roots campaign to get every Democrat in the new 8th District to write in some Democrats name, or something so that when the ballots are counted a good portion of the votes will be counted toward someone or something else. But there apparently is no such campaign and I have no means of starting one.
So What should I write?
Jackie Conaway was the top vote getting Dem in the Primaries. You'd think she would be running a write in campaign to take advantage of the 45% of voters who have no one to vote for. But she never had much in the way of organization or ground game, so that's not gonna happen.
Should I still write her name? Or is there something else, something more meaningful I should write in? I wish I knew what other Democrats in the District were going to do. I have a feeling they will skip the race and I really wish that wasn't the case. A 45% decrease in participation for this race does not have the same weight to it as a clear protest vote.
Any suggestions?
9:08 PM PT: I got my actual absentee ballot in the mail today (the photo in the diary is just from my booklet) and believe it or not there is no "Write In" section for the house race. None.
So if you are a Democrat in the soon to be 8th District, you're screwed. You can vote for which GOP Candidate you want to screw you, but you cannot vote against being screwed.