Except for an occasional jab at Trump, I rarely bring up politics in my weekly blogs. Today I am making an exception, although even in this blog, the subject is more about me than about any candidate or political position.
Last Tuesday was Wisconsin’s primary election.* The key race was to choose the Democratic candidate for governor. Pollsters had predicted that the race was a 
done deal, so I voted for a candidate who had zero chance of winning. Kelda Roys was running well behind Francesca Hong and David Crowley, but I liked her the best, so I voted with my heart instead of my brain. By that evening, I was already regretting my choice.
It turned out that my vote might have mattered. Only a week before the election, Hong had a 20-point lead in the polls. Still, when I checked the election results just before going to bed on election night, Crowley was actually in the lead by a few thousand votes. A good share of the votes yet to be counted were from Hong’s stomping grounds (Dane County and the city of Madison), so I fell asleep assuming that Hong would eventually squeak out a victory. The next morning I found out that Crowley had maintained his lead throughout the night and would be the Democratic candidate in November. Still I was left thinking that I’d wasted a vote when it might have made a difference.
The last time I made any kind of protest vote was when I voted for John Anderson in the 1980 Presidential election. I regretted that vote soon after I made it, and I promised myself to never do it again. It took forty-six years for me to break my promise and, just as in 1980, I regretted my choice. In my defense, my vote for Roys was not a protest vote, so much as a statement that I didn’t care too much who won the primary. Crowley and Hong are very different from each other, but both are okay. This left me free to “waste” my vote. It was not until the race was neck and neck that I realized that I did have a preference.
Of Crowley and Hong, Hong is the more interesting candidate, but she also is the most slippery. Slippery did not cut it with me. Fortunately it also did not cut it with a sizable share of voters. The election results allowed me to get away with having made a mistake.
(The most interesting part of voting last Tuesday was not any race, but the polling place itself. I vote in a church. In the past, I could enter the church from any of three doors, then wander my way to the community room where voting was taking place. This time, two of the doors were locked, and I had to enter and leave through a specific door. That door had a sign that stated all unauthorized observers had to stay so many feet (I forgot the exact distance) away from the polls. There are people who’d like to mess with open elections, but the La Crosse City Clerk is doing everything that she can to keep those jerks away.)
* In Wisconsin, voters in a primary do not need to declare their political party until they step into the voting booth. At that point, they must choose a party for that specific election and then vote only for candidates in that party. On each ballot, there is Democratic column, a Republican column, a Green Party column, etc… If I vote Democrat in one race, then all votes must be for Democratic candidates. I cannot jump from party to party like I might in a general election. If I do, my ballot is rejected.
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