Lessons from Lisa Murkowski

Voting for write-in, and third-party, candidates elects those we agree with the least. You would think that after the flood of failed attempts at such candidacies, people would learn that lesson. But…

So Murkowski decided to run as a write-in candidate. Whoopee, right? Well sure if you are a Democrat.

Murkowski has no chance of winning as a write-in candidate but she does have a chance of picking off enough Republican votes to give the election to the Democrats. Way to go Lisa. Unfortunately, this is not the first time that some sore loser did such a dumb thing, and it unfortunately won’t be the last.

In fact, if you count third-party candidacies, the pitiful track record of sour losers is a long and ridiculous one.

Recently we’ve seen Charley Crist pull the sore loser card in Florida, running as a Third-party candidate, after promising to remain a Republican. Obviously in Presidential races there are those obligatory third-party names like Pat Buchanan, Ralph Nader, Ross Perot and names even less notable than that (if you can believe it), who run for a myriad of smaller parties which are best known for the money they waste.

These third party candidates rarely win anything, even less so on the national level, but those lonely voters who do vote for them feel good about it. Isn’t that the point of write-in and third-party voting, so those voters feel some sort of moral justification? What else could it be?

Well, while Murkowski will waste plenty of time and money, we in Utah have our own crowd of these candidates who, like Tom Tancredo in Colorado, who marginalize themselves and accomplish little but getting those elected who they agree with the least. In the Governor’s race in Utah, Andrew McCullough has thrown his hat in and in the Senate race, Scott Bradley is running too.

None of those names mentioned above (with the exception of Perot, had he not withdrawn and then reentered the race) have any significant chance of winning. Many of them are fortunate if they draw 1-5% of the electorate, and they run again and again with similar results. What is the measure of insanity again?

I’m sure that they are all nice people but why do they run, when they never win?

Just a couple bits of info for the reader;

In Salt Lake County Barack Obama won by less than 1000 votes, just about the same amount of voters wrote Mitt Romney in for President, even though he had withdrawn from the race (this isn‘t counting the third-party votes cast).

In Minnesota, the rather laughable Senator Al Franken won after a few recalls. In that race the margin was small enough that had one or two of the several third-party candidates’ votes gone to Coleman, the 60th would have never existed for Reid’s Democrats.

After losing in the Utah Republican Convention, Senator Bob Bennett toyed with a write-in candidacy but he did the classy thing and conceded the race. This is the letter that we sent his office the week Bennett was discussing a write-in campaign.

The list goes on, but the point is that if you are unhappy with the direction that the current leadership is taking the country, do the grown up thing and vote for the Republican.