I should start this off with the disclaimer that this may well be premature -- barely 15% of the delegates are allocated, so we should have no idea who the nominee is going to be. But for the sake of argument, I'm going to assume that it will be Kerry.
That means a fair portion of Democrats -- and seemingly a large majority around here -- are going to be disappointed with the nominee. But that's OK; we'd be naive if we expected perfection in our nominee. And my perception of this population is that the very vast majority would prefer any one of the four remaining viable candidates to Bush. (This assumption will be addressed shortly.)
But there also seem to be a lot of people who are saying that if their guy doesn't win, they won't donate to Kerry, or another nominee, or whatever. And my question is: why?
I went through a phase like that myself. I'm an Edwards man, and I'm slowly coming to grips with the fact that his narrow opening seems to be closing rapidly. When Kerry made that crack last week about Edwards not even being able to win his own state, I flew into a mini-rage and made noises about how I wouldn't be caught dead donating to his campaign, at any point. I can't really explain it, but something about Kerry kicking Edwards when he was down (in the polls) really made me mad. And I'm not sure it was any judgment on Kerry; I think I just hated to see Edwards get beat up on.
But that passed and at this point, I'm pretty comfortable with the idea of sending Kerry $100 or $200 if he's the nominee. It's not easy for me to afford that -- it's equivalent to 12-24 working hours for me, although it's less than I've given to Edwards -- but it strikes me as a small price to pay to help defeat Bush, and perhaps marginally more useful than my vote alone. Granted, I'm not excited by Kerry, not in the slightest, but the donating of money is a pretty dispassionate exercise for me. It'll be a lot easier for me to give up a few meals out than it will to volunteer for the guy.
So why would someone not donate to him? I've come up with the following reasons:
- Sour grapes: This actually doesn't seem to be that prevalent of a reason. In any case, I think the number of people for whom this would be their primary reason not to donate would be neglible.
- Inability to afford: If I had donated with the gusto of many, many Dean supporters, I'd probably be in fairly dire financial straits at this point and quite possibly unable to spend any more money on a "non-essential" expenditure like this.
- Disgust with Kerry's campaign tactics
- Disinterest in "politics as usual"
- Kerry/Bush lesser evil threshold: By this I mean that for someone who performs their civic duty on election day, they could perhaps bring themselves to pull the lever for Kerry rather than vote for Bush or a third party, but they simply cannot bring themselves to do any more than that. These are people that would not particularly, or only marginally, prefer John Kerry to George Bush.
Most of those are perfectly valid, understandable, reasonable, intelligent reasons not to donate to the Kerry campaign. But there is still something that doesn't quite click when I try to understand someone who wants to see Bush gone, who will support the nominee in the voting booth, but can't quite bring themselves to give him money.
I'm trying to understand, though. So please explain your motivations in more detail. I'm not trying to pass judgment -- not in the slightest, as I've been there myself, and will no doubt wince as I send my money to the Kerry campaign -- but simply trying to gauge this dynamic as we approach the selection of a nominee.
