Despite being in the majority (and technically winning 6 of the last 7 Presidential elections), we Democrats do a good job of losing when we could have won. Some of it is due to the left’s refusal to support a candidate who isn’t liberal enough for them.

This meme brought that to mind recently:

Ignoring the insult that compares liberals to dogs eating vomit, the underlying point makes sense.

“But no,” some reply, “Even if you add the 3rd party votes to the Democratic side, they still wouldn’t have won in some of these races.”

The problem with that argument is that it ignores how elections really are won.

It ignores the donations given to the other candidates that could have gone to the Democrat. It ignores  the volunteers who worked for the other candidate that could have been working for the Democrat. It ignores the people talking about their candidate instead of the Democrat.

An election is won before election day, by the work and investments made by a campaign. Splitting those resources that could have been used to convince even more people to get out and vote for the Democrat could have made the difference in each of these elections.

At the same time, better candidates would have made a difference. Humphrey, Carter, Mondale and Hillary Clinton just weren’t candidates that inspired people in the way that Obama and Bill Clinton did. But when you don’t have that better candidate, splitting the resources only gets Republicans elected.

Dedication to purity may be noble, but it ain’t politics. Politics is about winning and about getting as much of what you want as possible, as I’ve said quite a bit recently (while making some of my more “pure” liberal friends angry).