On Herschel Walker and the familiar question: What would get you to cross party lines?

 At this point, I do not know who would be shocked that Herschel Walker paid for an abortion.  The old joke about abortion is that everyone believes in three exceptions:  the life of the mother, rape, and me.  Walker, as it turns out, believes in but one exception.  Yes, I made an abortion joke.  [What, too soon?]  Anyway, consider the position of an ideological conservative.  What do you do?  What is the moral choice?  If this sounds like a similar framing to the Roy Moore question, that's because it is.  Roy Moore was a child molester, and the GOP, for the most part, stood by him because what was the alternative?  What was the policy cost?

Turn this around, if you are a lefty.  What personal sin would get you to vote for a conservative Republican?  Can you conceive of anything?  Anything?  To the lefties aghast that Republicans won't turn on Walker and support Warnock, the following question should be posed:  In a hypothetical 2024 contest between Biden and DeSantis, what would convince you to vote for DeSantis?  (Let's skip the Trump question.)  What if the accusations from Tara Reade had checked out?  Would that be enough?  How far would I have to push you?  Trudeau-blackface?  Secret Nickelback fan?

Because here is the problem.  Well, aside from Nickelback, which is also a problem.  An election is a binary choice, yet comparisons are multidimensional.  You can evaluate candidates by their positions along the liberal-conservative dimension, their honesty, their competence, personal honor, commitment to principles of democracy, experience, intelligence, or any number of other dimensions which may or may not be relevant to the job by any objective telling.

But if you excoriate your political opponents for failing to use a dimension which you, yourself, do not use, then do you see the problem with an accusation of hypocrisy?

Hence, ask yourself that vital question:  what would get you to cross party lines?  If you can think of nothing, then a) you should not demand it of others, b) you probably have a flaw in your method of assessing candidates, and c) remember my Converse reference(s)?  Ideology is not merely about logical constraint.  If you fall purely along party lines, you're falling into line.  Maybe think a bit, and in the process, think about what it would take.