Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Will Ron Paul Supporters Vote for Mitt Romney?

Eric Wen at The New Republic asked Ron Paul supporters just this question. The answer he got doesn't surprise:
[W]hen I asked Paul supporters whether they would be voting for Romney this year, every single one of them said definitely not, and they insisted other Paul supporters they know wouldn’t either. “I think it would be very difficult for Ron Paul supporters to sleep at night and support someone that represents a lot of the principles that they disagree with,” said Tyler Koteskey, who called Romney a “liberal in conservative sheepskin.” Indeed, for some, the very suggestion that they might vote for Romney was an insult. “Personally, I would not vote for Romney,” said Mike Pinter of UC Davis. “I have conservative principles that can, under no circumstances, rationalize a vote for Romney.”
The question now becomes, will Ron Paul supporters stay home during the general election or vote for Ron Paul lite?

46 comments:

  1. The general consensus among RP supporters if RP is not on the ballot is Write him in, Gary Johnson, or stay home... I'm encouraging #2, #1 won't even count in many states from what I know.

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  2. Romney losing to Obama because the RP supporters stayed home will be a lesson to the Republican party. Only then will there be a housecleaning to prepare for 2016. Giving them enough rope to hang themselves is more efficient than hanging them yourself.

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    1. The thing is the establishment own both puppets. So whether Obama or Romney, they win. It's Paul or no one at all.

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  3. This is another attempt to co-opt RP. Settling for less is exactly that. If they know that, you will always settle for less unless you never settle for less.

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  4. While I don't vote, I have convinced many people to support Paul and his efforts. Now that his campaign is over, most of those who I've convinced have chosen to not vote at all. Unfortunately, some have even decided to go with the reactionary vote and cast their ballot for Obama.

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    1. Ron Paul's campaign isn't over, he's just chosen not to waste money on the Primaries, when it's been proven time and time again that the GOP will cheat to make it look like Romney wins. Instead, the Ron Paul campaign has chosen to spend their money on the delegate races, where he's won at least a dozen states now. In fact Ron Paul just had a money bomb to help fund the delegate races last week! Ron Paul has *definitely* not decided not to campaign anymore - you can still help by making sure you attend your local caucus and vote for the delegates that support Ron Paul!

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    2. @ Joseph, why don't you vote?

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  5. Obama(to put this financial collapse at his feet) or Johnson(to show the libertarian movement is growing)

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  6. A Scam Street Neocon RINO—I doubt it!

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  7. I would never, ever vote for Romney.

    I wrote Ron Paul in in '08, and will do so again in '12, if he is not the Republican nominee.

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  8. Most of the Ron Paul supporters I know aren't really worried about having to vote for Romney. At the rate Ron Paul has been winning delegate nominations, he's going to end up winning the nomination anyway. What nobody in the media is talking about, and the Associated Press delegate counts doesn't reflect at all, is that every delegate that Ron Paul wins is a delegate that comes out of the number of delegates that Mitt Romney was arbitrarily given after the beauty-contest straw polls that are the primaries. The real delegate counts today are more like Romney 450, Ron Paul 200, but you won't see that anywhere in the mainstream media. People who really follow the delegate races know, though, that Mitt Romney is getting further and further away from the nomination every week!

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  9. Just to ask the question is to exhibit incredible ignorance. But then again, he DID have the decency to admit that the response was unanimous!

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  10. I would die in exchange for RP as prez. Ain't gunna happen though, so I'm voting for mittens.
    4 more years of obamommy ain't worth it.
    I'll vote romney just to see the cry baby 'newsspeak' tools lose it.
    Really people, give it to obamommy again and it will only further institutionalize the sickness.
    Let's f**k with the republitard party with little mittens as prez?

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    1. To me, your comments indicate you either don't really support Ron Paul, or you don't really get the R3voLution.

      Electing "mittens" is like getting 8 more years of "obamommy." It would be an even bigger disaster than electing the latter.

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    2. Yep. Write in Ron Paul. Don't burn your vote and give it to one of the chosen "Red or Blue" puppets. (It kills me listening to Obama talk about Wall Street and Main Street, when he has so many Wall Street appointees.)

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    3. The word is, RoBama.

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    4. I'm considering voting for Obama so that the "coup de grace" comes sooner to the country and we can move on to some other form of tyranny.

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    5. If you would "die in exchange for RP to be president" you would never vote for mittens. Thus, you do not understand the message and concept of our movement.

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  11. Romney will lose to Obama no matter what. Unless Ron Paul goes third party, of course - in that case, Ron Paul will beat both the Obommunists and the Rommunists.

    I wouldn't vote for Romney for any public office, as he is a corrupt sleazebag, a warmongering weathervane politician and an opportunist and a narcissist who just wants to have a lot of power over a lot of people.

    Gary Johnson will not close the foreign U.S. military bases (except for 43% of them), and he will not end the war on all drugs, only marijuana, which he would tax! He is also for a national sales tax which is a violation of contract between traders, and he wants to keep the Federal Reserve. Johnson isn't even "Ron Paul Lite"!

    And also, some people are "concerned" about RAND Paul's "political future." F that, I say. We need Ron Paul to run third party, if our freedom and economic future is to have any chance of survival right now.

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  12. Voting for Ron Paul regardless. If Obama wins, so be it, since Romney is basically the same thing as Obama. Also, if Ron Paul doesn't win, Obama winning would be better than Romney winning, for the sole reason that in 2016 Romney wouldn't be the incumbent in the GOP, and that leaves it open for Rand Paul or another liberty candidate to try and seize the GOP nomination.

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  13. No way! Never under any circumstances could I vote for Romney or Obama. Once you've awoke to the idea of freedom and liberty, there's no going back. And, I'm a Mormon.

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  14. I'd say "write-in" but do all states electronic ballots allow for this? If I'm not sure this will be an option I'd stay home.

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    1. If voting machines in your state don't allow you to write-in Ron Paul, bring a can of red spray paint, to write-in his name on the front of the voting machine.

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  15. I'm voting for Ron Paul no matter what. No more neocons! The only way to change the GOP, is to STOP supporting bad candidates. A vote for Romney says I'll vote for anything other than Obama. Count me out. Ron Paul 2012!

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  16. I'm not voting for Romney.
    sicne the Supremem Court has stated that corporations are people, I am voting for Disney World.

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  17. I will vote FOR a candidate instead of AGAINST one for the first time in my life. That person will be Ron Paul.

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  18. Two choices for those Ron Paul supporters who choose to vote, assuming he doesn't prevail in Tampa:

    1. The :P's Gary Johnson, or

    2. http://tinyurl.com/WriteInRonPaul

    Haven't decided yet.

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  19. I can't see myself voting for anyone but Ron.

    I was talking to my boss this morning and got a rare glimpse into the effectiveness of liberal brainwashing. I said I would never vote for Romney or Obama but I would vote for Ron Paul. To which he responded "The only two people our country is putting up for us to vote for are Romney and Obama. Ron Paul would be a wasted vote." Then he wouldn't even let me have a voice he just kept getting louder and louder shooting down every attempt I made talk to him with some liberally biased line. He couldn't converse he was stuck. I finally just said I believe “if you’re not voting your principles you're wasting your vote anyway.”

    Go back it's a trap! Is too little too late. I felt real pity... not that I am necessarily right or wrong just that the liberal lock was so ingrained he couldn't think out of that frame of reference.

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  20. I'm so proud to be a part of the Liberty Movement and a Ron Paul supporter!

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  21. If I voted for either Obama or Romney, it would mean that I had either bought into a false dichotomy, or that I had bought into a false dichotomy. Either one is consent to fascism.

    Ron Paul almost surely won't win if I have to write him in, and I suspect that my vote or those of other people who do the same won't even be counted with any kind of accuracy. It's still not a wasted vote. It's called not being part of the problem.

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    1. The false dichotomy is really a divide and conquer strategy because either way you have legitimized the election and the current political process unless ou it it out. The lower the percentage of voters the less legitimate the regime becomes. Is your vote contributing to the perpetuation of evil. The lesser of two evils is still evil.

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  22. The moral thing to do is write in Ron Paul or don't vote. Actually if you have liberty candidates running in your district you should vote for them.

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  23. A vote for Romney is a message to the Republican wing of the One Party that, yes, they certainly can field a candidate as disgustingly unprincipled as this slimeball is and get away with it.

    A vote against Romney (assuming Paul doesn't achieve the nomination, which these delegate wins just continue to inspire some hope in me about) is a vote for the most evil, totalitarian-minded, anti-American, anti-man, anti-freedom, anti-happiness thug the American system has ever produced -- Obama. Obama is almost like a comic book villain, it's that black and white. His use of executive orders and his cultural influence could very well be THE milestone event of America's crossing into territory we simply can't recover from in our lifetimes.

    It's a little stunning, really, to believe it's come to this. But with a candidate as bad and evil as Obama is ... I still will not vote for Romney. That's how bad Romney is, and that's how corrupt the current Republican wing is, that HE could actually be the guy. I would rather risk the damage that Obama will inevitably do than support Mitt Romney.

    If I vote it will be to write Ron Paul in or a protest vote for Gary Johnson, whom I regard as a pretty weak libertarian, and almost as weak as Romney on money and economics.

    Oh, it is so depressing to write this ....

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  24. I know two People who will be staying home on election night if Ron Paul is not on the ticket.

    From past experience, if I do something, I notice At Least 25,000 others do the same. I imagine the numbers are bigger this time around.

    - clark

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  25. People tell me that staying home is the same as voting for Obama. So? What's the difference between Obama and Romney? I was listening to an NPR story the other day and the reporter asked a political analyst how Obama was going to differentiate himself from Romney since they seem to be so alike in policies. Even NPR gets it!

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  26. I'm sure Jesse Benton is going to be disappointed to hear the news.

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  27. As a Paul supporter, for me the question is whether to vote for Obama to spite the GOP for their vicious and criminal treatment of Paul or to write in Paul's name... that's assuming the establishment have succeeded in stealing the nomination from him. But I'll be voting for Paul whether he's on the ballot or not.

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  28. Mitts said he would have signed NDAA that's enough for me to say ,"notta chance in Hell I'd vote for Mr. Plastic"

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  29. Jesus, you people bear an uncanny resemblance to some Communist cabal in the 1920s Europe or a late 19th century anarchist cell from a Dostoyevsky novel :))) Your fanatical zealotry is a destructive and not a constructive force. Democratic politics everywhere in this world, except for the deluded utopians which seem to be in the majority here, is by definition a choice of a lesser evil, because it's always about compromise. I'm not entirely happy with Mr Romney either, of course, but the only thing this kind of thinking can accomplish is to help Obama stay in office for four more years and continue to wreak havoc and push the US closer to the bankrupt EU satrapies, and, in the process, deservedly alienate a lot of reasonable and moderate people who may have some sympathy for Ron Paul but don't buy his ideology wholesale, because they're into politics and not into eschatology :)) Once they see through to the real nature of his frustrated, radicalized, negativist fans whose mentality (and even some of their ideas) are in many ways closer to the extreme left than to any concept of conservatism or economic liberalism to which most republicans and even most libertarians in this country subscribe, they're bound to turn away from "ronpaulism", for a very simple reason: unlike you guys, they like America as it is, although they'd surely love to see much less socialism, more balanced budgets and more sensible foreign policies, whereas most of you have gone so far in your revolutionary psychosis and hatred as to be ready to vote for Obama in order to "punish corrupt GOP elites" (naturally, dreaming of some future, pie-in-the-sky Paul's grand victory, when the faithful will be rewarded and all the wrongs magically righted :) ), not thinking that those who you are really going to punish are all the people in this country who are not parasites or state employees (in many cases this is the same thing anyway :) ) and your own children and grandchildren. I have been following Mr Wenzel's and a couple of other similar blogs for about a year now because their "modified Austrian" :) thinking offers interesting insights about the current economic crisis, but it is your comments (apart from rare exceptions, who are, like the guy above who suggested that voting for Mitt might not be such a bad idea, instantly ripped apart by a school of rabid extremist piranhas smelling blood :)) ) that have been a real eye-opener - they completely changed my attitude to Ron Paul and his campaign, and, as soon as I realized what kind of people (really no different from the Occupy crowd and other similar essentially un-American groups) his core followers mostly appear to be, from a lukewarm supporter who found Paul a nice guy on the visceral level (I still do :) ), despite a deep scepticism about his peace-at-all-costs agenda and over-moralistic approach to politics, I've already become a bitter opponent of his candidacy, for the simple reason that somebody who attracts the likes of you in such numbers should never ever come into a position to make important decisions about the future of the US :)) Sorry for my frankness, but I had a feeling it was high time somebody told you what you look like to outsiders, so I took up the ungrateful task, :) but don't expect me to reply to your comments if it's just the usual brain-washed, wild-eyed "piranha" stuff and not something exceptionally thought-provoking, life is short, and I'm quite busy :)))

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    1. Exactly! Four more years of Obama and this country is finished... It will not rise from the ashes, it will become a totalitarian state beyond rebuilding! Even if Obama doesn't get re-elected, we will have an uphill battle to free ourselves from the, sovereignty destroying, international treatise he signs during the lame duck session.

      The lesser of two evils is at least a step in the right direction! And since a vote for RP is a vote for Obama (the greater of two evils) it's no different than committing suicide and taking the whole country down with you.

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    2. you come in 'our' site tell us we are all wrong and then are surprized at the reaction?
      You may well have read here for over a year but you obviously didn't pay much attention as we would make compromises, say with antiwar progressives even thought we would disagree on what to with the cash freed up by the elimination of the Military Industrial complex, which is an objective be both share.
      What do you mean by unamerican? Who are you to define what an american is?
      And describing Ron Paul as a peace at all costs candidate? since when is having defence policy that, you know defends the US, instead of projecting power all across the world in some imperial fashion, which is what Romney and Obama propose. Their economic program revolves funnelling taxpayer money to their contributers while taking a return in the form of campaign contributions and then telling the rest of us that, while they recognize our need, it's up to them to decide how much we can keep.
      To me, Romney is no "lesser evil" than Obama.

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  30. Apparently you are also too busy to learn to use periods or understand the proper use of parentheses. They do have a function and you have effectively destroyed any credibility your opinion might have garnered by demonstrating quite clearly that you a)cannot express your opinions in a lucid and straight forward manner b) do not understand the value of critiquing another's position.

    If your argument had been well structured and intelligible you might have actually had some impact, as you are clearly an 'outsider' and your opinion is actually pertinent in this context. The whole idea of the Ron Paul movement is to awaken other individuals in our society and educate them as to the value and strength of liberty, both economic and personal.

    Unfortunately you chose to use some typical and unoriginal arguments like "Obama stay in office for four more years and continue to wreak havoc and push the US closer to the bankrupt EU satrapies" without responding to the biggest objection of the "rabid extremist piranhas smelling blood," that is, Romney would do exactly the same. What is more unfortunate is that you have seemed to completely miss the liberty message despite spending a whole year around Wenzel and other similar sites.

    Finally, your incessant use of the smiley face would suggest one of a few possibilities: you do not understand irony, you would like to critique these positions you disagree with but truly fear or dislike the possibility of offending someone, you are really insecure.

    I hope someone can break through to you and instill the values of freedom and liberty that everyone (I thought) that reads this site support un-equivically, but some people are so used to slavery they are just not ready for freedom.

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  31. I have always considered the fact that a majority of eligible voters do not bother to vote to be their very intelligent way of saying that voting does not really matter. Every election is thus a plebiscite on the value of voting, and it almost always looses by a landslide. If Ron is not on the ballot, not voting is an excellent choice. It will not be my fault it the GOP refuses to nominate the only person capable of beating Obama.

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  32. The worse thing you can do is stay home and not vote. At the very least get out there and write in Ron Paul. This way the GOP will know that the people are tired of voting for the lesser of two evils.

    As a Ron Paul supporter I am going to write him in. I WILL NOT under any circumstances vote for Mitt Romney.

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