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Boxerrider wrote: Sat May 30, 2026 5:22 am It has been a very long time since I really voted "for" a candidate. I choose the one that is least likely to act against my rights and interests.
While that isn't what our founding fathers intended, it appears to be the way things are for now.

This is an absolutely foolish position. Paxton has had one or more affairs, which led to his wife separating from him in 2024 and divorcing him in 2025. He was cleared of bribery charges and had to make restitution to avoid prison time for a charge of securities fraud. So obviously there are problems with him on a personal level. But faced with a choice between him and Talarico, where voters will get one or the other, voters are far better off with Paxton. It is not even remotely close.

Paxton is solidly conservative and Christian in his policy positions, and I don't see him promoting any policies that justify errors in his own personal life or even see him using his office as Senator to brag about such things. Talarico, on the other hand, is a hard-left promoter of LGBTQ immorality and coercion (including a very strong push for transgenderism to minors and regarding males in female private spaces and sports), abortion, illegal immigration (and thus election scamming), restrictions on religious and civil liberty, etc., even trying to persuade people that these are all biblical positions. As a senator, he will promote the appointment of hard-left jurists to the court, which can have a deleterious impact for decades.

Paxton's personal life is unfortunate but, as long as he isn't promoting his mistakes to his constituents, that will have little impact on this and future generations relative to Talarico's possible election. This isn't a preference for power over personal immorality. It is a preference for a person whose personal failings will have a far less adverse moral impact on the nation than the alternative candidate. Of the two candidates the immorality being promoted by Talarico is far more cataclysmic to us all. There literally is no advantage to doing nothing to stop his election, unless one is both a masochist and a sadist.

Bahnsen disagrees with his own position in 2012 when Romney was running against Obama. He had more wisdom on these matters back then:

//One of two major parties always prevails. This means that you have to compromise in supporting the best candidate that can get elected, not the best candidate. This means, in turn, that you must always account for how your fellow citizens will or are likely to vote.... In a general election, every principled non-vote for the best electable but not the best candidate in favor of the best non-electable candidate is a vote for the worst-but-very-electable candidate. In 1992, a principled Christian vote for Ross Perot was in effect a vote for Bill Clinton. In opposing the far-from-perfect George H. W. Bush these principled Christians helped elect the even farther from perfect Bill Clinton. Well-intentioned Christians may have felt very pleased with themselves for their principled vote, but intentions aren’t counted at the ballot box. Only votes are. Perhaps Christians should consider adopting the principle that they will never help elect the worst candidate and abandon the principle that they will help elect the unelectable best candidate. In making political decisions in a modern Western constitutional democracy like the United States, the first lesson you learn is that the best is often the enemy of the possible. A few well-meaning souls who refuse to settle for anything less than the ideal often end up settling for the opposite of their ideal. They are willing to accept this bitter defeat as a small sacrifice for the satisfaction they feel in having refused to accept anything but the best to start with.//