{"id":7025,"date":"2014-11-08T22:39:04","date_gmt":"2014-11-08T22:39:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=7025"},"modified":"2014-11-08T22:39:04","modified_gmt":"2014-11-08T22:39:04","slug":"voting-for-the-party-not-the-candidate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=7025","title":{"rendered":"Voting for the party, not the candidate"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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We’ve all said at one time or another: I vote for the candidate, not the party.<\/p>\n

This item in today’s Daily Oklahoman caught my eye. It’s on the editorial page and, of course, it gigs Democratic-leaning voters for making some, um, strange polling-place choices on Election Day. I get it, given the paper’s conservative tilt editorially. No problem with that.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/newsok.com\/scissortales-an-unusual-distinction-for-oklahoma-governor\/article\/5364590<\/p>\n

An editorial brief in the Oklahoman\u00a0refers to a Democratic candidate for Congress who received 35,006 votes on Tuesday — even though he died in a car accident several days before the election. Then it refers to a Cleveland County commissioner candidate, another Democrat, who received 38 percent of the vote despite having been arrested three times for drunken driving.<\/p>\n

The paper wonders whether party label mattered over candidate qualifications.<\/p>\n

Good point.<\/p>\n

But here’s another example of the point the Oklahoman was making.<\/p>\n

Over here, in Potter County, a Republican candidate for justice of peace actually defeated<\/em> a long-time Democratic incumbent even though the GOP challenger had been arrested multiple times in recent years on felony charges involving domestic disputes.<\/p>\n

Does party affiliation matter more in this instance than a candidate’s actual qualifications?<\/p>\n

I will\u00a0say, with considerable emphasis, “yes.”<\/p>\n\n

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We’ve all said at one time or another: I vote for the candidate, not the party. This item in today’s Daily Oklahoman caught my eye. It’s on the editorial page and, of course, it gigs Democratic-leaning voters for making some, um, strange polling-place choices on Election Day. I get it, given the paper’s conservative tilt … Continue reading Voting for the party, not the candidate<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,14],"tags":[1236,2618,3506,3677,4432],"class_list":["post-7025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","category-political-news","tag-daily-oklahoman","tag-justice-of-the-peace","tag-partisan-labels","tag-potter-county","tag-straight-ticket-voting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7025\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}