Slate Is (Mostly) Voting for Obama
Slate's editorial staff will vote almost exclusively for President Obama on Tuesday.
The online magazine's top editors and producers disclosed their presidential picks in a post on Monday morning, and out of 35 polled, 29 are voting to re-elect the Democratic president.
"There is probably a 0 percent chance I will ever vote for a Republican presidential candidate in my life," assistant editor Laura Anderson wrote. "But Romney is particularly unappealing; I'm appalled by his apparent inability to empathize with people who are less advantaged than he is."
Two Slate staffers -- including widely-read political columnist David Weigel -- said their vote was for Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson. One supported Green Party pick Jill Stein and two more were in Mitt Romney's camp.
"So I'll vote for the Libertarian ticket, which I agree with on everything besides the scale and speed of spending cuts, and the first third-party team that actually seems competent enough to run a country," Weigel wrote.
Some of the Romney support came -- perhaps, unsurprisingly -- from the magazine's business side.
Publisher Matt Turck, who said he has long voted for Republicans but voted for Obama in 2008, questioned Obama's budgetary priorities.
"While I don't agree with all the principals of the Republican Party, and I think Obama is a good man, I don't believe Obama prioritized well," Turck said. "More importantly, it's my belief that larger government feeds into a 'level of expectation' that is crushing our country."
The site's software engineer Greg Engel served as the staff's greatest voice of dissent, claiming that the election was really pitting a "wide-eyed idealist" against a conservative "pragmatist."
"It's a genuinely difficult choice!" he wrote. "So it is with some ambivalence that I've decided to vote for Jill Stein of the Green Party rather than Peta Lindsay (of the Party for Socialism and Liberation.)"
It remains unclear whether such political disclosures help or hurt the credibility of news organizations. Many newspapers, including the Chicago Sun-Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, have stopped endorsing candidates at the behest of readers clamoring for a purely unbiased staff of reporters.
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