The primaries are done and like the candidates or not, they are what we have to choose from. We have been watching campaign ads for awhile now. But it is going to get worse. From now until November, they will be nonstop. I bet you can hardly wait.
The other thing that is probably going to increase is phone calls and texts from pollsters and campaigns. So far, I have ignored them for the most part. I’m sure some of you have too. Maybe that is why polls are wrong sometimes, although they will often tell you that it is within the margin of error. I admit that even in the primary I didn’t know who I was voting for in some races until that morning when I was forced to make a choice.
The good news is that we have some good candidates out there, the bad news is that we also have some bad candidates. It is not necessarily about party so much as it is about who they are and how much they are willing to lie or stretch the truth to get your vote. I really appreciated the candidates that rallied around the winner rather than cry crocodile tears about losing.
We will hear more from some candidates than others over the coming months. The issue with that is that some of them will have a lot of money to spend, some not so much. I personally don’t believe that candidates, or political parties for that matter, should be accepting lots of money from people who don’t live in Wisconsin. Wisconsin is already a somewhat divided state between north and south, rural and urban. We don’t need others adding to that. A person should be able to run for public office without it costing millions of dollars or owing people favors because of the money they donated. Anyone should be able to afford to run for a political office if they so choose. That is true everywhere, not just here in Wisconsin.
So my advice to you between now and November is listen to what the candidates are saying, and sometimes not saying. Avoiding a position is as bad as taking a position I don’t like. I want to know what they believe so I can make good choices. One place where you can check out where the money is coming from is followthemoney.org. You can also track how much money candidates are taking in on FEC.gov/data. Another good source is transparencyusa.org. This site tells you who the big donors are.
However you choose to vote in November, make it an informed choice.