&gt; If your perfect candidate in every other respect also planned to take away the right to vote from Native Americans, could you vote for her? Of course not.<p>If there&#x27;s no reasonable way they could push that pet issue of theirs through (because the rest of Congress would just call them an idiot) then sure, why not?<p>It&#x27;s sort of like the think&#x2F;say distinction (&quot;you can&#x27;t get in trouble for thinking&quot;), but taken another few notches further: politicans shouldn&#x27;t really be judged for what they say they&#x27;ll do, or even what they <i>appear to attempt to do knowing they&#x27;ll fail</i>—only what they&#x27;re likely to actually use power granted to them to accomplish.<p>Most candidates, once in power, are effectively centrists. With presidential candidates, there&#x27;s the moderating influence of Congress and the Judicial system; but even with individual Congressmen or Senators, once they attain their positions, they&#x27;re sitting atop a hierarchy of (technocratic) policy advisors that tend to—when all advising in the same direction—override the boss&#x27;s personal preferences. If all your employees, all your lobbyists, and all the think-tanks say to do X, you&#x27;re going to do X, even if you (and your &quot;base&quot;) would rather do Y. (Which is why we call the thing the President heads the <i>Executive</i> branch: the President isn&#x27;t much setting policy, they&#x27;re effectively just <i>executing</i> policy decisions arising from the entirety of the D.C. strategic intelligence community.)<p>Thus, most candidate positions are <i>postures</i>: things said to signal allegiance to certain voting bases, in full knowledge of the fact that those promises will never (be allowed to) come to pass. Posturing is PR: a big machine which gets set aside when the election is over. And thus, posturing should be ignored—given no weight—when trying to predict the <i>value</i> of electing any given candidate. The candidate&#x27;s posturing—their PR—has no predictive value on what they&#x27;ll really accomplish when handed power.<p>If, on the other hand, you can look below the posturing, and figure out what each candidate will really <i>do</i> with power (which is much harder; it involves a lot of looking at who they have ties with and what promises or deals they&#x27;ve made to <i>get</i> power), then you can actually pick a candidate based on how you want the world to look in the future.