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.