Talkin' About Politics: Why I will be voting for the Democratic Party in 2018 and 2020

Three words:  “The Republican Party.”

I’ve been a voter in my home state of Florida since 1984. That’s a 34-year-long span of time that encompasses almost all of my adult life.

Interestingly, even though until recently (last week, as a matter of fact) I was a “No Party Affiliation” voter, I started out as a mostly-Republican voter. I was a “Cold War kid” who was born a few months after the Cuban Missile Crisis. My childhood played out in the shadows of the Vietnam War and the chaos of the era. I hated Soviet-style Communism (still do) and distrusted/feared the Russians (still do). And, because I always wanted to join the armed forces but can’t due to (back then) a physical disability, I was very pro-military.

Soviets. I don't like these guys.  (Photo credit: Getty Images)

Naturally, the party I voted for in the 1984 and 1988 elections (and the 1986 mid-terms) was, mostly, the Republican Party. I wasn’t a die-hard Ronald Reagan fan at the time; I thought that he was a bit too old and too glib to be President, but I was naive enough at the time to buy into the prevailing notion held by conservatives that “liberals” were weak on national defense and were unpatriotic.

As I grew older, though, I started noticing that Republicanism had acquired a dark side, starting in the 1970s during the Nixon years and escalating during the Reagan-Bush years. I was aware, for instance, that the Party of Lincoln, with its roots in the anti-slavery movement and other progressive causes of the pre-Civil War era, had turned its back on African-Americans and other minorties and bowed and scraped to Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, Evangelicals who were against women’s rights to choose, and was allying itself with tax cut fiends who were gutting public school systems, social services for the poor and the disabled, and enriching the coffers of Big Business and Big Banking.

For many years, though, I refused to join either of the Big Two parties, and I have always been leery of the smaller, more leftist parties. I would not have voted for any of the so-called third parties like Jill What’s-Her-Name…a vote for those is usually a wasted vote that usually helps the candidate I want to lose…who is usually now a Republican.

What has pushed me to finally get off the fence and choose a party affiliation after nearly 40 years of being proudly independent?

If only Sarah Palin had been as intelligent as her running mate, maybe I would have voted for them in '08. Photo credit: Politicus.com

• Florida’s closed primary system. Independents can vote in almost all local, statewide, or national elections, except party primaries. I feel that NPA voters are thus disenfranchised when voters are choosing state electors for Presidential candidates. If I leaned Republican rather than Democratic, I’d still feel robbed of a chance to choose.
• The takeover of the GOP by the Newt Gingrich hardliners/Fox News/Christian Evangelicals/former Southern Democrats who started switching parties in 1968 and helped elect Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan to the Presidency. I still like moderate Republicans and will gladly vote for candidates who are willing to work with their opposite numbers on the Democratic side of the aisle. Heck, I almost voted for John S. McCain III in 2008…until he picked Sarah Palin as his running mate.
• The 2016 Presidential Election.

Need I say more?