You Don't Have to Like Any of These Candidates, But You're Gonna Loathe Some More Than Others
Which would-be president is worse?
Elsewhere on this blog today, Robby Soave pointed out that on non-economic issues, Bernie Sanders is better than Hillary Clinton. He's still rather flawed in those areas, mind you; and he used to be considerably better. But she's worse.
So many political choices boil down to that question: Who's worse? You're not actually obliged to cast a ballot for any of these people, of course; I've never participated in a primary, and the last time I voted for a major-party presidential candidate was in 1988. But even if you write in your goldfish or just stay home on Election Day, you may find yourself balancing the candidates' negatives in your mind and quietly rooting for an especially awful person to lose. I don't like Ted Cruz, but I'd rather suffer a Cruz presidency than a Trump regime. On the Democratic side, as Robby wrote, Clinton is clearly worse than Sanders on civil liberties and foreign policy; in economics, I imagine Reason readers will be split on whether they're more offended by Sanders' cavalier attitude toward federal spending or by Clinton's support for corporatist measures like the bank bailout. (Clinton is no slouch as a spender herself, and Sanders has been willing to bail out other companies. So that debate will get messy.) Overall, I'm gonna have to tag Clinton as worse than Sanders, especially in light of her support for the Iraq and Libya disasters; feel free to tell me I'm wrong in the comments.
In fact, consider this your official Who's Worse? thread. Not "Who's worse, Democrats or Republicans?"—we'll have plenty of time to argue about that in the summer and fall. We're talking intra-party struggles here. Clinton vs. Sanders. Trump vs. Cruz. Christie vs. Rubio. Gilmore vs. Santorum. Rank 'em! Damn 'em! Pledge to move to Canada if one of 'em wins! Your thread is right here.