Anti-Climacus

WELL: Our Girl has some thoughts immediately below on the Bobby Jindal situation. We can disagree (presumably because we can't ever know) about whether it was the case here, but there's certainly been a case of something like this in the past. The following conditions apply:

1. You have a candidate who doesn't support some particular bias against others
2. The candidate has some internal polling which suggests that they're getting appreciable support from people who have the above bias
3. The candidate announces opposition to said bias
4. The candidate nevertheless plans their campaign strategy counting on receiving votes from the bias-holders

Now, you might believe that as a practical matter this is unproblematic because the candidate can't help who they get support from, and might act to put in place policies that would combat said bias. You can then tweak the size of the group to be sufficiently big enough to be problematic (imagine it's half the support the winning candidate receives, instead of just enough to put them over the edge). The candidate is essentially saying that the group isn't good enough to receive political respect, but good enough for their votes to be respected. I'm not suggesting that politics is not worth doing as a result, but there's something inherently humbling in the realization you're morally compromised.

Incidentally, the 'what if you only won because racists didn't vote at all, and they were going to vote for the other guy' defense doesn't work, because racists (or their analogues) not voting is never problematic.

Then again, I've always had sympathy for what Riker called the Madisonian view of elections.