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My Super Tuesday Ballot of Shame
My efforts to make my vote count show why primaries can backfire and need more reforms
On Super Tuesday, I voted for seven candidates. I supported none of them and hoped that if any made it onto the general election ballot in November, they would lose.
It gets worse.
In 2022, Katie Britt ran in the Alabama Republican primary for the U.S. Senate against election-denier Mo Brooks, a five-term Congressman who read from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf on the House floor, comparing Democrats and the media to the Nazi Party.
You don’t want to know who got my vote. Let’s just say that if an election involves a man who sees my fellow journalists as Nazis and a little-known female candidate, I’m inclined to think the woman has to be better.
All of these betrayals of my political beliefs occurred because I’m a blue voter in redder-than-red Alabama.
Republicans hold every statewide office and supermajorities in the legislature here. Their stranglehold on government means that the results of the November election are almost always determined months earlier in events like last week’s Super Tuesday primaries.
But in Alabama, primaries are “open.” That means you don’t have to declare a party…
