I'm getting really sick of all you sad excuses for American citizens regurgitating this moronic nonsense.
That fucking question should NEVER appear in your list of candidate selection criteria. Anyone who does should have their right of suffrage immediately revoked.
You're essentially saying, "I'm not voting for the person who best represents my ideal for the job because I don't think other people will vote for him."
Fucking sheep. Use your goddamned brain for once and arrive at your own conclusion...and then use your fucking balls to ACT on your decision.
I resent that, dude. I'm taking a more REALISTIC approach to my vote. I only got one, and I'm not going to waste it on a longshot candidate. Voting Ron Paul is like betting on a horse that has 1000-1 odds.
My main motivation for voting is
change. For the last 8 years, we have been subjected to some really bad decisions by our Republican government which has left the United States as the laughing stock of the world. Our economy sucks, our enviroment is going down the crapper (and the USA is one of the major contributors to that decline), the poor are not getting the support they need to survive and the richest people in the land continue to get more money from the misery of others. Ron Paul is not going to make any changes to the USA because he has no chance in winning the presidential election. He doesn't have the support of the so-called "sheep" that you want to associate me with. And there's far more of them than people like me who actually does think about making a vote that counts.
You learn at a young age that you can't always have everything you want. Somehow, we forget this when we try to elect a president? Do we always have to go with the one candidate that supports 100% of your views even though you know he doesn't have enough support to win ANY electoral votes? To me, that's not making a statement... that's wasting a vote. We all know that either Obama, Clinton, McCain or Romney is going to win this because these are the candidates that are getting all of the press and the media exposure, and the "sheep" are going to vote for one of them. That's why I resolve to my backup plan. I know the REAL choices in this election. I at least pick the one of them that will support a good number of my most important views AND has a chance in winning. And maybe, they can get elected and make SOME kind of change to our country. Use the 2000 and '04 elections as your guide. Ralph Nader took away some key votes in each of these elections that could have prevented Bush from being in office. Everyone who voted Nader thought they were making a statement just like you are doing right now with Ron Paul. When in reality, they were enabling the forces that were in power to STAY in power. Nader only got 2% of the vote NATIONWIDE. If you totalled all of his votes and put it in one major state with lots of electoral points, he'd still wouldn't win it. But because of those "statement makers", we all had to go through more of the same old BS that we didn't want in office in the first place. And before you go on about how Dems & Republicans are the same, think about this... compare how the USA stood after the end of the last Democratic rule, versus now? Even if they are the same, we were obviously in a much better place with Clinton in office. Even with the blowjobs from the interns.
Vote for Ron Paul if you want. But don't make this an issue about "running with the sheep" because I don't agree in some radical, political fairy-tale about some guy who doesn't even have enough votes to win Rhode Island, is going to magically win the election. Reality sucks and so does politics. But it doesn't have to be so bad if you just use your head.