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| Senator Ted Cruz of Texas |
“Stand and speak and vote your conscience, vote for candidates up and down the ticket who you trust to defend our freedom and to be faithful to the Constitution.”
Telling Americans to vote their conscience seems like a fine enough ideal to encourage. In an ideal political world, if more people would just vote their conscience it would keep the system honest. But, in a system that encourages (concretizes?) two parties, voting in this country has tended to be about not letting the other guy get in.
That's certainly how the 2016 presidential election is shaping up, with more people hating the opposing candidate than loving their own.
Telling Republicans at their convention in Cleveland to vote their conscience means what? With the absence of an expected, hoped-for endorsement for their chosen nominee, much might be read into it—but what does it actually mean?
The speaker that followed Ted Cruz last night at the convention—the redoubtable veteran pol with the quicksilver mind, Newt Gingrich—spun it around quickly to mean vote for the nominee. Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson, has said it meant vote for him.
Even Hillary Clinton has "trolled" the phrase for her own purposes. Does she know that if the Democrat "superdelegates" at the convention next week in Philadelphia heed the call they might not nominate her at all?
Senator Cruz has not said if he'll vote for the Republican nominee—just that he will not vote for Clinton. He would not seem to be steering Republicans to her.
Could it be about the "down-ballot" races, all the other Republicans that might be elected that day? The Senator says he's not asking anyone to write him in.
Trump supporters on whose ears such a call to conscience falls hard might ask themselves why. If they are voting their conscience already they needn't be upset. If they aren't, well, maybe they needed to hear about it from Senator Cruz.
“I have to say it was somewhat dismaying that, apparently, some of Donald’s biggest partisans right down front, when they heard that people should vote for someone you can trust to defend our freedom and defend our conscience, defend the constitution, immediately they began booing. I’m gonna say that’s a little bit troubling what they’re saying.”
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