As the election approaches, a recent topic of frequent discussion has become how each of us will vote. The topic is particularly revealing and angst-ridden for those of us who are independent, non-Trump-aligned conservatives. With no conservative candidate and no conservative party, our voting plans can become a Rhorshach test for how we view politics, the country, and the world.
David French recently penned an op-ed in which he revealed that he has decided to vote for Kamala Harris even though he is a Christian conservative. French notes that Trump’s dishonesty and cruelty have become epidemic throughout the Republican Party and argues that the only way to save Reaganite conservatism is by delivering an electoral rebuke to Donald Trump.
“The only real hope for restoring a conservatism that values integrity, demonstrates real compassion and defends our foundational constitutional principles isn’t to try to make the best of Trump, a man who values only himself,” French writes. “If he wins again, it will validate his cruelty and his ideological transformation of the Republican Party. If Harris wins, the West will still stand against Vladimir Putin, and conservative Americans will have a chance to build something decent from the ruins of a party that was once a force for genuine good in American life.”
On the other side of the spectrum is Erick Erickson, my old boss at The Resurgent. Erickson takes exception to French’s decision, as many on the right do. French’s objectivity and nuanced takes on politics are not popular with partisan Republicans, and his decision to vote for Harris won’t help matters.
Erickson embraces a strategy that I’ve heard from a lot of Trump skeptics, saying, “The better option for evangelicals and conservatives is to show up and vote and leave that line blank. That registers your disgust and makes you a meaningful demographic that both parties will want in order to win. That will force change. Voting for a pro-abortion candidate who will advance far-left positions just because you think the other side is bad will only ensure the side you vote for keeps moving left. They’ll treat your vote not as a vote against Trump but as an endorsement. You’ll be their cheap date.”
I’ll note that Erickson has an ulterior motive here. He endorsed Trump early for the 2020 election and I’ve seen no indication that he won’t vote for Trump this year. I’m pretty sure that Erick wants Trump to win so he has a reason for urging Never Trump conservatives to avoid voting for Harris. (To be fair, Jonah Goldberg, who does not seem to be a closet Trump supporter, has also endorsed the write-in strategy.)
Joining this storied company is my friend and Racket News co-writer, Steve Berman. Steve is not a Trump supporter, but recently opined, “My vote will not be cast to anyone who demands it. It will be given to someone who earns it. Even if that someone is no one at all.”
My own opinion on how to vote has changed over the years. Prior to 2016, I was a straight-line Republican. That year, I couldn’t vote for Trump, but I also wasn’t ready to vote for Hillary. I cast my ballot for Evan McMullin, an independent conservative.
Looking back, I think it would have been better for the country if Hillary had won. Hillary’s damage would have been limited by a strong, united opposition, and Trumpism would have been squashed before it could take root. Hillary would have likely been defeated by a conservative Republican in 2020.
Over the next couple of years, I thought seriously about voting for Trump for re-election. His first year wasn’t all that bad, but then the adults in his Administration were forced out and Trump became a loose cannon. By the time 2020 approached, I had decided that Trump needed to be fired and my vote was needed to help in that process. I voted for a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time in my life.
Nothing I have seen since then has made me regret that choice, even though I knew I’d disagree with a lot of what Biden did and said, or convinced me that an unrepentant Donald Trump is once again ready to assume control of the government.
Let me qualify what I’m about to say. For most of you, your presidential vote does not matter. If you live in one of about 45 states, you can be assured that your vote won’t make a difference. The partisan mix of your state is so lopsided that the outcome is assured. If your state is in play and it’s not a normal swing state then the election is already decided.
But vote anyway. As I’ve written in the past, even though your vote for president doesn’t matter, your vote for down-ballot races does. The smaller the jurisdiction, the more your vote matters. You’re one of millions in a statewide race but possibly one of hundreds or even tens in a city or county election. Do your due diligence on the candidates and cast your ballot in these low-on-the-ballot races.
On the other hand, if you live in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin, your vote does matter. (I’m aware that this list doesn’t dovetail perfectly with “about 45” nonswing states. The list of swing states varies, that’s why I said “about.”) Your one vote probably won’t decide the election like Kevin Costner in the 2008 movie, “Swing Vote,” but the margins will be close and a few hundred or thousand votes can make a difference.
Having said all that, I do think that voting is a civic duty. I think that casting a meaningful vote is a civic duty. Let’s look at the different options.
Writing in the name of someone who isn’t running is a popular option. Jonah Goldberg seems to think that it sends a message to the parties that they are unhappy with the options. But that write-in vote may not be counted, depending on the state. If you write in “Mitt Romney” or “Mickey Mouse,” the powers-that-be in the parties may never know about it. That candidate certainly has no chance of winning.
What about leaving the race blank? In recent presidential elections, many voters did not vote in the presidential race but still supported down-ballot Republican candidates. I think that this may be a better option. Party leaders can see the difference between statewide vote totals in statewide races like senator and governor and the presidential race. Undervoting statistics are easy to find. They know that people avoided voting for Trump while still supporting Republicans in Congress.
Similarly, you can cast a protest vote for a third-party candidate such as a Libertarian. I’ve voted Libertarian several times in recent years rather than voting Republican or Democrat.
The problem here is that the Libertarian Party is not a serious party. I can’t get past that a Libertarian convention delegate did a striptease onstage in 2016 when the party had a chance to make a difference. Their candidates and leaders seem to be increasingly out of touch, conspiracy minded, abd radical. Official Libertarian social media accounts are often transparently pro-Putin and anti-Semitic. I don’t want to reward Libertarians for bad behavior and off-the-wall policy proposals either.
These strategies have not made a difference. Most state Republican parties are still beholden to Donald Trump, and Donald Trump is still the nominee again this year.
The only thing that political parties seem to understand is losing. And Republicans under Trump don’t even understand that because they don’t understand that he lost.
Your strategy for voting depends a lot on what you hope to accomplish with your vote. In the past, a lot of people thought that I didn’t want to vote for Trump out of principle but that I really wanted him to be president. Not true, even though I do know people like that. I’m reminded of a Facebook friend who claimed to be an independent Never Trumper yet who was really upset when Trump lost to Biden. A lot of these people place a higher emphasis on culture war issues than on Trump’s corrupt record. I have encountered many people who claim to not like Trump but are among his most ardent defenders.
I am not one of these people.
My objective in 2024 is to keep Donald Trump as far from the Oval Office as possible. If I could ban him from White House tours, I’d do that as well.
I don’t believe that skipping the presidential race or writing in a noncandidate is a principled option. In fact, I’d call it moral relativism.
In reality, the election only has two possible outcomes. Either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris will become our next president. If you don’t want Donald Trump to be president, there is only one logical option. That is especially true if you live in a swing state. Conservatives shouldn’t abdicate their duty to make a choice just because they don’t like the choices.
Our options are not equally bad. While I oppose much of the Biden-Harris-Walz platform, those objections pale in comparison to a candidate who is willing to tear down constitutional guardrails for his personal benefit. In 2016, I remember people (approvingly) saying that Trump was prepared to “burn it all down,” and he is. He’s willing to destroy any institution that gets in the way of his obtaining and maintaining power. We’ve seen it time and again by now.
That’s not the way to make America great again. That’s an existential threat to America’s continued survival as a constitutional republic.
It’s also an existential threat to Ukraine, Europe, and Taiwan. MAGA isolationism and pro-Putin policies would endanger Ukraine’s survival in the near term. It would also embolden China to take action against Taiwan. This isn’t an issue of lofty principles or culture wars, it’s an issue of real world realpolitik.
The threats from the two parties are not the same.
In the past, I’ve described the difference between MAGA and the Democrats as the difference between a heart attack and cancer. Both will kill you, but one is a much more immediate threat. A principle of medical treatment is that immediate threats are prioritized for faster treatment. At this point, I might change the analogy to call MAGA a brain-destroying zombie virus, but other than that, the comparison holds up.
I’m a fan of David French, but with all due respect, I think he’s at least partly wrong here. I don’t think voting for Harris will move the GOP back in a conservative direction. That ship has sailed. If Trump had lost in 2016, that might have been a possibility. At this point, MAGA has metastasized throughout the Republican Party. There’s no going back.
I think that the best choice for conservatives is going to be to divorce themselves from both parties and become true independents. And true independents are swing voters, not reliable Republican voters who don’t like the Republican label.
Since 2016, I’ve found freedom in not being tied to either party. It’s liberating to be able to call them like I see them and not have to view everything through a partisan lens.
“Come on in, boys (and girls), the water is fine.”
There’s another option as well. There was once a conservative faction in the Democratic Party. As conservatives vote Democrat in increasing numbers, the party may find itself moving to the center. This may already be happening as primaries cut a swath through the Squad. I would be happy to see the growth of a Red Dog Democrat faction that could help offset the progressive left. Contrary to what Erickson says, an influx of conservatives into the Democratic Party could move the needle on policy.
If Democrats become more centrist, they’re likely to become more successful as well. That’s especially true if Republicans continue to embrace extreme right-wing nuttery.
If you think that moving the Democratic Party to the right is a long shot, you’re probably right, but it’s also fair to point out that conservatives haven’t been able to stop the extremist populist drift of the GOP. Continuing to vote for Republicans has only earned conservatives a giant FU from MAGA in the form of more extreme behavior and policies and the elevation of people like JD Vance, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Boebert. With all due respect to Erickson, Republicans have found conservatives to be cheap dates because they know most conservatives and white evangelicals will continue to vote Republican over the “Demonrats” no matter how badly Republican candidates stink.
If either party ever decided to reject their extremists rather than cater to them, that party would have a long-term majority. But it’s doubtful that either will adopt this strategy. (I blame primaries.)
However, for now at least, I’m happy to remain an independent. And this independent conservative is going to vote against Donald Trump, even if it means voting for Kamala Harris.
I hope that other conservatives will think about this and get off the fence. Even if you aren’t in a swing state, Republicans should pay attention to expanded margins in blue states or near losses in red states. Conservatives are a large enough block that we can make a difference, but it won’t work if we leave races blank, cast our ballots for Mickey Mouse, or refuse to consider voting Democrat when Republicans put up a bad candidate (or Democrats put up a good one). Threatening to leave the GOP won’t work unless it’s a credible threat.
I’ll consider Republicans in other races, but my hierarchy puts conservatives at the top and MAGA below the Democrats. In my congressional district, a new MAGA Republican running this year won’t get my vote even though I voted for his Republican predecessor.
For more than eight years now, Americans have been telling Republicans that we don’t want Donald Trump. Even when he won in 2016, about three million more Americans voted against him than for him.
The Republican response has always been, “You know what you need? More Trump! Just drink the kool-aid and get to know him!”
There is only one possible way to make Republicans listen. That is by delivering repeated and convincing rejections of MAGA candidates. We’ve been doing that for six years. They can keep losing until they start to pay attention.
A vote against Trump is necessarily a vote for Harris. That may or may not help put the Republican Party back on the straight and narrow, but it is the best thing for America.
MAGA Republicans have become like the radical leftists of old, where they are at war with the very people they claim to love.
They don’t want the childless cat ladies and trans people to be happy or thrive but rather, they really want to to not exist or at least, not exist visibly as co-equal citizens.
This is why as so many have pointed out, they are now at war with democracy itself because democracy can’t yield any possible outcome that they would like.
One of the main themes of fascism is that it is forever at war with a fallen world. Think of how many times we’ve heard the refrain about something haven “fallen”. For a long while they were wailing about “Eurabia”, and continue to talk about the “long march through the institutions” or more recently, “woke corporations”.
The common themes is the idea of the fall of civilization, that barbarians have taken over.
Notice also the obsessive fixation on crime and disorder. Notice how furiously they reject good news or optimism, and vehemently insist that things are getting worse, ever worse- and not just during Democratic administrations, but even under their own.
Even during the Trump years, even during the Abbot governorship of Texas, Texas cities like Houston or Dallas were never portrayed in conservative media as anything other than dystopian hellscapes rife with drugs and lawlessness.
There isn’t any large American city with a Republican leadership, because in the conservative portrayal, it isn’t the leadership of American cities that has failed the people, it is the very people themselves. When you read conservative lament about cities, its clear that the people who live in cities are themselves the problem.Report
I will defend the Libertarian delegate stripping on stage.
He was doing it to mock the proceedings and calling it a clown show. He was *PARTICIPATING* in the clown show by stripping. Not creating it.Report
Signs your political movement has plentiful issues dragging it down:
1 People trying parse the difference between starting the clown show or just being part of it at your national convention,Report
The libertarians have been destroyed by success.
All of the stuff that was attractive has (mostly) been co-opted. All they’re left with is the part of their platform that tells people to eat vegetables.Report
Well that’s a take. Let me look at the National LP sites re: eating veggies. Is “Mises” a kind of veggie?Report
“Fiscal… ‘responsibility’? What the hell is that second word?”Report
@David_Thorton
I understand your issue with MAGA, one that more than 50% of the country shares. But I do not understand exactly what do you find so objectionable about the Democratic Party.
This is not a gotcha or a trolling question. I honestly want to understand where you stand and what separates you and me, politically. As a start, I am going to assume none of your objections are related to the Culture Wars, and I am not going to go there. If that assumption is wrong, I am happy to dig deeper in that area too. I would also point that, unlike the Republican party, the (relatively) far left tail is nowhere near moving the party in any substantial in their direction, neither in economic nor in social terms.
So, in a Left-Right classical economic axis, the Democratic Party’s actual policies are probably to the right os the UK Conservatives -who are themselves to the right of Reform UK, a purely Culture War offshoot of the tories. The only material difference between the two in this axis is probably that the Democrats are more friendly to organized labor that the Tories. And this is, I think, a relatively new change. Neither the Clinton nor the Obama administrations were so labor friendly.
On a isolationist vs internationalist, the Republican party has for the longest time being at the isolationist end. As a non native that has lived in several countries, and married to someone from another culture, I am as cosmopolitan as it comes, so you’ll find me in the internationalist end of the spectrum. But from reading your pieces, I believe I’ll find you there too.
And maybe it’s my European blood, but I find the Democratic let’s try to reform and to address the causes approach to Law and Order to yield slightly better results than the throw the book at them punish and forget of the Republicans. Your mileage might be different in this matter, and we can discuss.
Since this is in hard numbers an urban country, and I am an urban guy, that was born in a big city and grew happily from baby to college bound in a (series of) high-rise building(s), I prefer a party that, to borrow a phrase, does not hate me, as Chip points above. I know you are more of a rural/exurban person, so that might be a difference between us.
I hope these few paragraphs show that this is not trolling, and I hope to hear your thoughtsReport
I think there are a fair number of voters out there who think Trump is vile and gross and corrupt but they have this cartoon version of the Democrats in their head which is basically close to Comet Pizza. Not exactly Comet Pizza but they still think the Democrats are some radical party that wants to allow Judith Butler to rewrite elementary school to introduce mandatory gender queer in second and third grade. I
Every now and then there is someone who can be very loosely associated with the Democratic Party (who is not officially a Democratic spokesperson) that feels like a blast of a furnace to a normal person.
The NYC City Council is trying to find a way to ensure students don’t get signaled out based on their race, gender, weight, etc. for dress code violations. This is known to happen a lot. Girls get hit with more violations than boys and in ways that are completely random. An internet acquaintance stated she was punished for wearing sundresses but not for her more revealing (in her words) cheerleading outfit.
Students who discussed this at a NYC City Council meeting were accompanied by a woman named Alaina Daniels, who allegedly introduced herself to the Council as a “white, queer, neurodivergent, nonbinary trans woman” (according to the NY Times article).
I think there are a decent percentage voters out there who here this, find it extremely intimidating, and somehow impute it to the Democratic Party overall and think we all talk like this, all the time.Report
Conservatives want to glide right over the anti-democratic and authoritarian aspect of Trump and deflect to “he is vulgar and vile etc.”
It becomes so much more clear if we look at it in a faraway place like ‘I oppose Communist Party Chairman Xi because he is vile and ill mannered and eats with his fingers”, studiously ignoring all the awful things he does to democracy in Hong Kong.
Like, if Trump were suddenly to be well mannered and genial and knew what fork to use, then all the attempts to destroy democracy would just be forgiven.
Which really just validates that Crooked Timber essay where the author noted that really, the only difference between Trumpists and “reasonable” Republicans is that the latter don’t park their cars on the lawn.Report
“I have encountered many people who claim to not like Trump but are among his most ardent defenders.”
Oh boy. A good friend of mine from the old home town regularly insists that he’s not in any way a Trump supporter, yet he consistently and reliably parrots the latest Trump apologia Fox News spoons out to it’s viewers.Report
Is it so hard to picture someone favoring Trump’s policies (at least the ones he’d get through, compared to the ones Harris would get through) without holding the guy in high regard?Report
From the outside that would take a lot of cognitive dissonance.Report
There’s no conflict at all. Trump’s personal character is bad. His policies are 50/50. The policies he’d be able enact are 80/20.Report
And yet according to conservatives character counts. Go figure.Report
I will say that, in principle, holding your nose and voting for a bad-but-less-bad choice is defensible behavior in a democracy. Certainly it will be a very rare occasion when any candidate is near-perfect. Just like the Fellowship of the Ring having to choose between a) a dangerous, wintry mountain pass, b) the Mines of Moria, or c) trying to sneak by Saruman’s tower unobserved, sometimes you have to pick the least bad option and go with it.
Trump is so uniquely, terribly, amazingly, destructively awful it is very hard for me to imagine how anyone, from Ted Cruz to Elizabeth Warren, could possibly be evaluated as worse. To quote the OP:
I don’t really agree with all of the OP’s reasoning but this is the destination that it seems to me principled conservativism would arrive at. The immediate and durable erosion of the rule of law and institutional integrity that a second Trump administration would bring could not possibly be worth the benefit of the fraction of implementable policies that a conservative would see as beneficial regardless of the President’s identity, particularly when most of those policies would be evanescent and endure for only as long as Republicans could hold the White House.
YMMV. I’m generally okay with using a “more bad versus less bad” rubric, but here the choice is between Boromir and Sauron. Boromir had flaws to which he sometimes succumbed but basically meant well even when he disagreed with the prevailing wisdom about how to proceed.
Giving Sauron the One Ring back is never going to be the less bad option.
(I do not see Pinky saying — at least not here — “Let’s give Sauron the Ring.” Saying that there’d be some policies resulting from a Trump administration that Pinky considers beneficial is not the same thing. And we must admit that Sauron taking charge of Mordor probably did dramatically increase per-Orc productivity, so that was a silver lining of sorts?)Report
The only problem is when you and your opponent have different utility functions.
“Your candidate supports policy X.”
“But that’s good though.”
“No, it’s not!”
“Yes it is!”
“No it’s not!”
“Then why did your candidate adopt it as a policy yesterday?”
“Let me see that… okay. Well, for one thing, we want 20% more of it than you did. You wanted an amount that was bad.”
“So policy X, plus 20%, is good?”
“Yeah. So won’t you please vote for our candidate now?”Report
“Also, when your candidate proposed policy X we all knew what he really meant by it.”Report
There is only one Trump policy.
“Whatever Trump wants he gets”.
It doesn’t matter if it is two scoops of ice cream or the overturning of a free and fair election, Trump, and his defenders will work diligently to make it so.
So, no, it it isn’t possible to defend Trumps policies because they all trace back to the same callous disregard for the Constitution and the rule of law.Report
Other politicians might deserve this regard, but not Trump. So…yes.
Next question.Report
What regard? I said that I don’t hold Trump in high regard.Report
Try this instead:
Other politicians and their policies might deserve the benefit of the doubt, but not Trump. So…yes.Report
We should make a distinction between Trump-exclusive policies and policies that Trump has espoused. We should also note that Trump spent four years not implementing the Trump-exclusive policies. What we’re left with is support of entitlement programs, limiting regulation, appointment of originalist judges, and confrontation against Russia and China. I could do without the first, but I’m not going to turn my back on the rest simply because Trump implements them.Report
And Muslim travel bans, and significant tax cuts for the wealthy and large corporations, and attempting to significantly damage the professional civil service. None of which were good for the country.Report
Then why, again, are you working so hard to defend him as a viable political option?Report
I don’t defend him; I just don’t lie about him.Report
Neither is anyone else. We just happen to take him at his word, what with January 6th and all.Report
You just said there was a Muslim travel ban. That’s certainly not a true statement. Neither are many of the statements I’ve seen about January 6th.Report
Just so I’m being clear here without being snotty, could you make a specific statement about the “Muslim travel ban”?Report
Are you asserting that Trump being unable to implement his promise of ‘a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.’ is somehow to his credit?
https://web.archive.org/web/20151207230751/https:/www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/donald-j.-trump-statement-on-preventing-muslim-immigration
Seems extremely odd to complain that people are using the same words as Trump used to describe it.Report
Pinky is doing the thing where, since you can’t find a document titled “Trump’s Muslim Travel Ban” he didn’t do it.
Despite the executive order banning travel to the US from certain Muslim countries.Report
I’m going to treat this as your specific statement about the Muslim travel ban. The ban didn’t specify Muslims. It didn’t include the majority of Muslim countries, and it affected nowhere near the majority of Muslims worldwide. You could just as fairly call it the female travel ban, because it was applied to countries with females, without specifying that females were the problem and without banning them specifically. Or you could note what Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen have in common. Hint: the EO quoted quote from the State Department’s “Country Reports on Terrorism 2015”.
So your clarified statement about the “Muslim travel ban” actually isn’t wrong, but it’s different than claiming that there was a Muslim travel ban.Report
Since I’m feeling persnickity today – When you seek to ban travel from Muslim majority countries you are, in fact banning Muslim travel. You don’t get to hide behind the absolute volume of people banned.Report
That’s just silly. A Sudanese Christian is banned, an Indonesian Muslim isn’t.Report
Christians make up 5.4% of the Sudanese population. The country is 91% Muslim.
That aside – if one wants to believe Trump that he was trying to keep out terrorists, why weren’t Saudi’s banned? 15 of them were Saudi …Report
If a thing applies to AX and BX but not AY and BY, it’s unreasonable to describe it as applying to A.
That aside – if one wants to believe that Trump was trying to keep out Muslims, why weren’t Saudi’s banned? 85-90% of them are Muslim…Report
We have to understand where the bread is buttered.Report
It’s not unreasonable to describe it that way when it was explicitly presented as targetted at all A when proposed by the people doing it.
This isn’t a bunch of people guessing motives, Pinky. This is some extremely clear publicly stated motives about what is being attempted, even if the attempt was eventually watered down and then failed.
It is perfectly reasonable to describe something using the terms the creator described it as, even if it doesn’t live up to their hype. It’s certainly not a ‘lie’ to use that terminology…if they didn’t want it described as a Muslim ban, they shouldn’t have talked about how they were stopping the travel of all Muslims to the US!Report
As Holocaust deniers will tell us, there wasn’t a signed order saying: “Kill all the Jews. [signed] Adolph.”Report
But the net effect of all their policies was intended to achieve the same thing. The net effect of Trump’s policies was nothing for more than 90% of all Muslims who wanted to travel to the US.Report
This is almost the opposite.
It’s more analogous to “He promised in a tweet to kill all the Jews but the courts blocked him so really, he isn’t antiSemitic.”Report
I am not asserting that. Philip implied that there had been Muslim travel bans, while in another section I was arguing that we’re required to tell the truth about even those we disagree with. I also believe I should avoid personally attacking a fellow commenter. (I do take shots at you because that seems to be the only way you communicate. If you’d give me the room to be polite with you, I would.) I wanted Philip to back up his comment about Muslim travel bans with something specific so we could talk about whether Trump was unfairly being accused.Report
So the Capitol wasn’t attacked on January 6th by a mob of Trump supporters who believed he directed them to disrupt the counting of votes?
Fascinating.
Disgusting, but fascinating.Report
“That’s certainly not a true statement. Neither are many of the statements I’ve seen about January 6th.”
does not equal
“the Capitol wasn’t attacked on January 6th by a mob of Trump supporters who believed he directed them to disrupt the counting of votes”Report
Trump’s former press secretary backs Harris. Is slated to speak at the DNC:
https://newrepublic.com/post/185061/donald-trump-insider-support-kamala-harris-dncReport