Ken
Well now let’s look at presidential elections as a single unit.
Too bad it is not a single unit.
The selection of a president has wide ranging impact in areas which are not apparent to the casual observer.
The most obvious of which is the nomination of judges to the supreme court. Bush I and Bush the dumber (with the help of Clinton of DLC) have created a court of neoconservative ideologues with a bench so deep our grandchildren will be dealing with them long after we are gone.
The far reaching implications of the politicization of the Justice department and other parts of the executive branch as well as the cancer of cronyism reaching down into the civil service ranks of those entities, will be nearly impossible to root out by those who are not willing to break the law the same way those who infested it were.
Congress has to take their share of blame for this starting with the giveaway of their power in the area of checks and balances. But the usurpation of Congressional authority by the executive branch is a tactic that began long before many of you were born and at the beginning of the shift of journalism from it’s watchdog of democracy role to its current lapdog of power role. It is not really surprising that some who have only lived through the lapdog period do not see the same picture some of us old farts do.
Until the balance of power between the executive, legislative and judicial branches are somewhat restored or at least the worst of the unconstitutional branches are trimmed, each persons vote in the presidential election is vitally important.
I suspect the next topic to be addressed is “How does our vote count if it is filtered through the electoral college?”
That is a longer response and I will need more coffee.