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There is nothing wrong with voting against self interest. If you're an Angelina & Sarah Grimke, slave owners who advocated for abolition, you are voting against your own self interest.
It is not necessarily admirable to vote for your self interest. If you're a baby boomer voting to pile debt on the coming generations, it is in your interest, but hardly admirable.
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Originally Posted by wutitiz
There is nothing wrong with voting against self interest. If you're an Angelina & Sarah Grimke, slave owners who advocated for abolition, you are voting against your own self interest.
It is not necessarily admirable to vote for your self interest. If you're a baby boomer voting to pile debt on the coming generations, it is in your interest, but hardly admirable.
I dont think thats what he meant by self interest though.
It's usually true in American politics that voters vote their wallet. However, in 2012, millions of Americans cast votes against their economic self-interest.
Largely overlooked was that those who were most likely to vote for President Obama in 2012, were those who suffered the steepest income decline. Five groups were crucial to his re-election, according to exit polls: Young voters, single women, blacks, Hispanics, those without a high school diploma.
In the four years of the Obama recovery from June 2009 to June 2013, median black income fell just over $4,000. Hispanic households lost $2,000, and female-headed households lost $2,300.
The highest jobless rates for the Obama voter bloc: blacks, 12.6 percent; Hispanics, 9.4 percent; those with less than a high school diploma, 11 percent; and teens, 23.7 percent.
This is a stunning reversal of the progress for these groups during the expansions of President Reagan in the 1980s and President Clinton in the 1990s, and even through the start of the 2008 recession.
Census data reveal that from 1981 to 2008, the biggest income gains were, in order, for black women, white women, black men, and white men. The stimulus-led economic revival that began in June 2009 has resulted in lower incomes for at least half of Americans, people who were instrumental in electing President Obama twice. Class envy and class warfare worked.
Democratic policies hurt the very supporters whose interests they claim to represent.
Energy, Obamacare, the economy. This administration isn't qualified to do what they are doing.
So now "in their own interest" is liberal speak for wealth redistribution. Why do people not vote to take from Peter to give to Paul? I'm not surprised liberals can't see why that is wrong or why people would vote against it even if they were 'Paul'.
So, rather than fight for an extra $100 on the paycheck, they fight to keep $20 from going to a poor family? Sounds like voting against one's interests to me.
It is not necessarily admirable to vote for your self interest. If you're a baby boomer voting to pile debt on the coming generations, it is in your interest, but hardly admirable.
Voting exclusively based on self-interest is the most selfish act a citizen can partake in.
But if you dig into those numbers, you'll find that an awful lot of that 'difference' between liberal donors and conservative is because conservatives give more to their own churches -- which indirectly benefits themselves.
OK, we'll take out the church-run food banks and homeless shelters and add contributions to art museums...
According to Google’s figures, if donations to all religious organizations are excluded, liberals give slightly more to charity than conservatives do. But Mr. Brooks says that if measuring by the percentage of income given, conservatives are more generous than liberals even to secular causes.
People should know that with the majority of people in the Red States, such as Oklahoma, that when they vote they really are voting in their best interests. And, by far, the most important interests to them is to ban abortion and stop the homosexual agenda. Next, almost as important is protecting the right to have a gun. Other interests, such as supporting education, a better highway system, at better economy and more jobs, improving public health, run well behind those top three issues.
Even the big churches are pushing a selfish agenda these days. I was watching one well-known TV preacher selling his agenda on Fox this past Sunday. He was busy telling the audience that if "God isn't providing" in their lives, than "it is their fault - they must be sinning in some way." Yeah... cute... Not only is that a convenient way to let God off the hook, it is obvious how what he's saying - basically yet another variation of the Just World Fallacy - can easily be turned into, "Why should I help anyone but me? If other people aren't getting what they want in life, they are clearly sinners and deserve to suffer." If the church is going to peddle that type of selfish, mystical, Just World crap, you can rule them out as a source of sanity.
As for the OP's question, yes - by any objective standard, people in red states are voting against their own interests. Red states typically lead the nation in poverty while trailing in education and life expectancy. By any sane measure, that means the policies of their leaders are questionable. Unfortunately, those on the far-right literally do not think like the rest of us, so using sane measuring systems won't work.
Let me give you some examples based upon my time spent working in a company full of right-wing extremists. I'll list a few events and then their reaction to them:
1) Sequestration / government shutdown: They were jumping up and down over this, and many hoped it would continue forever. Mostly, they were glad that "somebody was sticking it to those lazy government workers" while hoping that "This would cut off welfare for the (n-word)." This is sad enough, but the key part here that these idiots didn't understand was that the company for which they worked derived 95% of its work from DoD contractors... and the sequestration and government shut-down ultimately broke the place, resulting in them basically entering bankruptcy in early 2014. But they either were not smart enough to realize that they, too, were basically "tax-payer sucking leeches" because of the dependency on DoD contracts, or they honestly didn't care if they lost their job provided somebody they didn't like was also hurt in the process.
2) Gun control laws: Various new gun control laws were passed in the past year or two, and this sent them into a rage. They didn't care about lost jobs, but this - oh, this was the ultimate insult for them. They ranted and raved about how they were going to move "out west" where they can "still kill the people who need killing" and so forth. So, yeah... guns matter more than jobs, apparently?!
3) Off-shoring of jobs and loss of manufacturing: They'd loudly proclaim Wal-mart the greatest thing that ever happened to American one day - because they can get cheap ammo there, and they don't care if all those (word-redacted, insult for Asians) died making the products, provided they were cheap. Then, the next day, they'd whine about the lack of American manufacturing jobs... Yes, they were too stupid to see the connection between fanatically supporting companies that use off-shored manufacturing and the loss of manufacturing jobs in America.
Summary: So, long story short, they were either total idiots who couldn't draw simple connections between cause and effect - in which case they didn't even know their own interests, so voting against them would be easy, or they were spiteful morons who don't mind having their own life screwed up provided somebody else suffers even worse. Either way, it is easy to see how people like this will vote against their own best interests time and time again.
3) On Monday President Clinton announced an "all-out" campaign to lobby Congress to pass permanent most-favored-nation status for China. The lobbying will be rough, with a fully mobilized American business community working as the iron fist inside the administration's velvet glove.
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Black Democrats vote against their own best interests
