@roamer_1 But that is not how it is taken @Maj. Bill Martin .
Taken by
whom, exactly? Trump won the GOP nomination with less than 45% of the GOP vote, yet he got over 90% of the Republican votes in the general election. Very clearly, he was not the Republican a majority of Republicans preferred, but they preferred him to the Democrat alternative. Most of the people with whom I interact completely understand the concept of voting for someone with whom you have some disagreements, simply because you believe the alternative is worse. The whole idea of "if you voted for him, it means you support everything he does/stands for" is a strawman. It simply is not true, people
know it isn't true, but say it anyway because they think it gives them a rhetorical advantage.
Nobody does all that navel gazing. Tumpy went forth like he had a mandate, even though it was a very narrow win, and with a depressed electorate.
You're the one doing navel gazing, and reading into other peoples' votes things that are not there. My vote can fairly be read as "I preferred the things Trump advocated over the things Hillary advocated." That's particularly true over the two biggest issues on which he ran -- the Supreme Court, and border security. So I don't have an issue with that. But trying to impute "your vote means that you approve of all of his statements and personal conduct" is without any rational basis.
You only have an affirmative vote, and the vote you cast is approval of the agenda and the man.
More navel gazing. And no, it isn't. The vast majority of people understand that a vote is an expression of
relative preference -- the idea that "I don't really like either of these two, but I think X is worse so I'm voting for Y" has been openly discussed and acknowledged by for decades. We talk about it all the time here -- the "lesser of two evils" vote. To pretend such votes don't exist, and that they are all just blanket endorsements of candidates, defies reality. You and others may disagree with it as a matter of political strategy, but saying "it means you support everything about them" is very much a minority view. And I'm not certainly not going the views of an idiosyncratic minority determine how I will vote.
So, read into it whatever you want. Doesn't make it true.