To hear some people, getting a court to cancel an election is "defending democracy." In what county of Bizarro World would that be true? The recall provision has been in the California constitution for decades. It required many thousand signitures on petitions (over a million, if memory serves) to bring the matter to a vote. It then took a majority of the voters to recall the governor. How is complying with the constitution, petitioning the public, and winning an election threatening to democracy?

As for "principled Republicans", they're in danger of becoming fringe elements (at least in California) like the single issue advocates. I remember discussing this with a single issue (abortion, in his case) coworker several years ago. He said that he'd rather lose every election than suffer even the slightest compromise on his principles. He saw that as a moral victory. I saw it as a self-defeating strategy that ended up with more of the very thing he claimed to oppose. In politics, before you can do much of anything, you have to win elections. There's a word to describe people who win moral victories. The word is losers.

Based on the election results, it appears that McClintock's more traditional conservatism isn't selling. Every citizen is free to vote for whomever he/she choses. Tell me, though, what would've been the outcome had Bustamonte won, especially if the margin of victory was less than the McClintock vote tally? Would you have gotten more of what you wanted from the election or less?

I've voted for 3rd party candidates from time to time in the past and may well do so in the future. However, I'd rather vote for a candidate whose views are mostly in line with mine and who has a chance of winning rather than a "perfect" candidate who not only has no chance of winning, but who might cause the election of someone whose views are mostly opposite of mine.

Call it copping out, pragmatism, cynacism, compromise, or what have you. "All or nothing" is a loser strategy. Better something than nothing.