A post in the Catholicism LJ Community left me rolling my eyes, but a couple of comments in it left me thinking. In one, a user frankly admitted to being a single-issue voter in the last election. That gave me the courage to post a comment of my own where I explicitly said something I’ve left implicit for a while: I was too. We voted about different single issues: hers was Iraq, mine was affordable health care. Given our respective backgrounds neither issue is particularly surprising.

This leads me to wonder if there aren’t a lot of other single-issue voters out there. One of the posters in the thread asked why “people unquestioningly assume that single issue voting is always and everywhere stupid and wrong.” After giving it some consideration, I have to admit she has a point.

I’ve been one of those people who has derided single-issue voting in the past because I felt like it would result in the election of a slanted administration that wouldn’t be good for anyone. However, it occurs to me that the fact that there are so many voters and so many issues effectively balances things out. For every voter like me who focuses on health care, there’s a voter like tepintzin who focuses on our military actions and a voter like the original poster in that thread, who voted on abortion. There’s also a voter like the person on my f-list who admitted that she voted for Bush in 2004 solely because of 9/11. We all balance each other out, and the four different issues I’ve named in this paragraph also tend to balance each other out.

After being a single-issue voter this time around, I’ve had to eat a lot of mental crow given my previous attitude toward single issue voting. But I think my shift is likely to stay the same simply because, overall, the presence of single issue voting doesn’t mean that national votes are decided on single issues. It does, however, mean that the issues that are the most important to the most people tend to be the deciding issues in an election. I can live with that. In fact, I think it’s a fairly good situation.