When voting, people examine the candidate’s positions on the issues that are important to them. It’s rare that a candidate will have a 100% match with a voter’s most important beliefs, so you try to match up as best you can.

Now, if a candidate has a platform that includes three or four of your most important issues, that’s a good fit. But, if the other two or three things are the opposite of what you want, and that might actually be horrible, then you might not want to vote for that candidate. If their platform is curing cancer, world peace, chocolate cake every Friday and strangling puppies, you might want to vote for someone else based on that puppy killing thing.

The problem is that some voters decide that the things that they agree with are serious points but the problematic one is just a joke or hyperbole. But when this person gets into office and starts killing puppies, the voters are stunned. “I didn’t vote for them to murder little dogs!” Ah, but, in a sense, you did! When you decided to disregard that last little platform issue you ended up voting for puppycide.

You don’t need to like everything that a politician proposes, but if some of their plans are horrifying, you might want to go for a different person. Just saying.

I wrote this last August and it's still very relevant.

Lately, due to the GOP picking Donald Trump as their presidential nominee, I’ve been seeing articles and think-pieces on poor whites and their voting habits. The pieces invariably take the tone that whites are voting against their own self-interests by voting for Republicans and that they need understanding and kindness to help them out of this dilemma. The problem with these articles is that they don’t realize (or want to realize) that poor whites have competing interests – one for being poor, and the other for being white.

Historians and social scientists are still trying to figure out exactly when “white people” officially became a thing. Many trace it to the colonial period in America when laws were first enacted that gave whites less severe punishments for the same crimes that blacks had committed. Some ask if it hadn’t started earlier; after all, something made them choose Africa as a supply depot for slaves. Whichever it is, there is no doubt that whites have been advantaged over blacks for the entirety of American history.

Despite working class whites lack of economic success, many still vote for Republicans and have since the Southern Strategy peeled whites away from Democrats over that party’s support for Civil Rights in the 1960’s. 

This is my first official blog post. The topic is…being my first blog post. I had ideas of what to write but I got those ideas so long ago that I’ve forgotten them. I also had an article from another blogger on what to write but I can’t find the article. So, I’m writing about just sitting down and writing.

Of all the advice that established writers give to new and aspiring writers, the most common and the most helpful is to just sit down and write. That’s also the hardest advice to take. I want there to be something magical that I can do but magic in real life is an illusion. To get anywhere truly special and wonderful in life, you have to work. So, here is my first post. It’s not anything brilliant but it exists and that’s the most important thing.

My next blog post will really be about something. I promise.