Ranking the Presidential Candidates

[_Analytics]

Once again I'll be tossing my vote to Gary Johnson and whatever lunatic the LP pairs with him. Johnson is so much better than the available alternatives this particular election cycle, I'm genuinely frustrated.

I hate all of the major candidates left in the Repub and Dem primaries....

I can't tell you how awful I think these choices are, though.

In general I agree with you, but let's narrow the ranking criteria to one single thing--the likelihood that they'll play God with the U.S. army. Maybe a more specific way to ask the question is this: which candidate, if elected, would result in the most deaths by U.S. government bullets, bombs, and nukes? Which in the least?

In general, I'm against being a single-issue voter in principle. But for most things, the president doesn't get much discretion without the collaboration of Congress and the Supreme Court. But when it comes to his role as Commander in Chief, he has a lot of power to kill a lot of people with minimal oversight. So not only does the president have an incredible amount of control over this part of his responsibilities, it's also an obscenely expensive endeavor that literally kills people--people who aren't soldiers fighting for countries of which Congress has declared war.

So somebody's proclivity to go out and kill people is the single-most important issue when choosing a president. Sure, you don't like any of them. Me neither. But which one is going to directly kill the fewest people?

[_subgenius]

...That being the case, how would you rank the presidential contenders in how likely they would be to start or escalate wars?...

Aside from the OP's flawed assumption that "war is bad".
My list -
1. Clinton
2. Clinton
3. Clinton
4. Rubio
5. Johnson
6. Stein
7. Almost every single 'write-in'
8. Kasich
9. Trump

(i have omitted Sanders and Cruz because they really aren't candidates per se)

[_EAllusion]

Once again I'll be tossing my vote to Gary Johnson and whatever lunatic the LP pairs with him. Johnson is so much better than the available alternatives this particular election cycle, I'm genuinely frustrated.

I hate all of the major candidates left in the Repub and Dem primaries....

I can't tell you how awful I think these choices are, though.

In general I agree with you, but let's narrow the ranking criteria to one single thing--the likelihood that they'll play God with the U.S. army. Maybe a more specific way to ask the question is this: which candidate, if elected, would result in the most deaths by U.S. government bullets, bombs, and nukes? Which in the least?

In general, I'm against being a single-issue voter in principle. But for most things, the president doesn't get much discretion without the collaboration of Congress and the Supreme Court. But when it comes to his role as Commander in Chief, he has a lot of power to kill a lot of people with minimal oversight. So not only does the president have an incredible amount of control over this part of his responsibilities, it's also an obscenely expensive endeavor that literally kills people--people who aren't soldiers fighting for countries of which Congress has declared war.

So somebody's proclivity to go out and kill people is the single-most important issue when choosing a president. Sure, you don't like any of them. Me neither. But which one is going to directly kill the fewest people?

I don't agree with your voting strategy, but if you are single-issue voting on propensity to inflame wars, then the answer still is Johnson #1 and Sanders #2, with the rest of the field becoming complex to disentangle.

Clinton is quite hawkish. That is well-known. She's definitely more so than some Republicans, but it is difficult to sort through the morass of bluster on the Republican candidate side to figure out where they will shake out. Rubio is probably GWB-esque in approach to foreign policy and therefore slightly worse than Clinton. Cruz is probably more of a dove than Clinton. Trump could fall anywhere on the political spectrum at all and I wouldn't be surprised.