You’d think that after years of covering politics I’d have learned that my one vote really doesn’t matter—it’s just a grain of sand on a vast beach.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

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That left me free to vote for Whitney without feeling I was helping to usher in a pack of gay-bashing, social-net-slashing conservatives who’d hand out tax breaks and other goodies to their wealthy cronies.

So yeah, you get it: he’s a free-market zealot and far-right social conservative. But he’s also a millionaire developer who’s made big bucks overseeing Brady Homes, a business his father started. Back in 2003 he cut a deal with the city of Champaign to build a 300-unit subdivision out by the intersection of I-57 and Curtis Road. The city hoped the subdivision would lead to further development near the intersection. But Brady underestimated what the project would cost, David Heinzmann and Rick Pearson wrote in a Chicago Tribune story this May that looked back at the deal. When proper bids were in, Brady’s share of the cost had grown by more than $1 million, “and he balked at doing the work without getting more money from taxpayers,” they wrote. “We made a deal with Brady, in which we were capping our investment at a [certain] level,” Bruce Knight, Champaign’s planning director, told the Tribune reporters. “More money from taxpayers was not ‘justifiable.’”

Then there’s the Senate race, where I want to vote Republican because I’m so irritated at Democrats for selecting Alexi Giannoulias in February’s primary. Here we are in the midst of a huge housing market meltdown, with the big banks foreclosing people out of their homes, and we nominate a guy whose family’s bank made so many bad loans that it had to be taken over by the feds?

So once again, I’ll hold my nose and vote for the Democrat.

This is not the first time I’ve faced this dilemma. Back in 2006, Claypool was challenging Cook County Board president John Stroger, who had a stroke and was in a coma by the time the Democratic primary rolled around.