To be, or not to be...a Republican
Many voting for Harris have cast the election as a simple choice between good versus evil, or about personalities, not ideology. Sorry, but for non-MAGA Republicans, it's more complicated.
“Who else could I possibly vote for,” writes a friend in a social media post I recently stumbled across. The writer explains why it’s a no-brainer to support Harris-Walz—and lists all their reasons for choosing Harris over Trump. It ends by posing what the writer assumes to be a question with an obvious answer: ”Who else would you vote for?”
One answer came from another friend’s post about a week or so later. “That moment when someone says, ‘I can't believe you're voting for Trump’,” writes the author, “I simply reply, ‘I'm NOT voting for Trump’.” They are, they wrote, “voting between two vastly different ideologies.”
And that’s the dilemma facing many right-leaning voters who aren’t enthusiastic about Trump. Do you abandon your political beliefs because you don’t like the man? Some prominent Republicans are doing just that, saying they are voting for Harris because they reject Trump, the man. Former Republican Congressperson Liz Cheney, and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, no left-wingers, have. So has David French, a pro-life conservative opinion writer at the New York Times. “I can’t vote for Trump precisely because I am conservative,” French has written.
Vote for Harris or don’t vote at all.
But what options do the rest of those disaffected but conservatively-inclined voters have? Vote for Harris? Don’t vote at all? For many, neither is an option. Beyond pointing to the coming apocalypse if Trump is elected, Democrats haven’t given those voters anything to hang their hats on—yet expect disgruntled Republicans and right-leaning independents to vote for a candidate whose policies and political philosophy they reject—and judge them when they don’t.
“The ‘ask’ of the Democratic Party in 2024 is not, as some anti-Trump writers would have it, to merely compromise one’s convictions on this issue or that issue, to accept a few policies you dislike in order to keep an indecent and unstable populist out of office,” writes Ross Douthat, another conservative New York Times columnist. “Rather, the ‘ask’ is to ratify a record of substantial policy failure and conspicuous ideological fanaticism, dressed up for the moment in a thin promise that we won’t make those mistakes again.”
Only four years ago Kamala Harris ran on a platform that was soundly rejected by Democratic primary voters and donors—a platform that was too far left for most Democrats. She didn’t even make it to Iowa. A New York Times profile said at the time that “She has proved to be an uneven campaigner who changes her message and tactics to little effect and has a staff torn into factions.”
In November 2019, Harris’ State Operations Director, Kelly Melenbacher, resigned from her presidential campaign. “I have,” wrote Melenbacher in her resignation letter, “never seen an organization treat it’s staff so poorly.” She said she no longer had confidence in the campaign or its leadership.
“You can’t run the country if you can’t run your campaign,” Gil Duran, a former aide to Harris who’s now the editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee, told the New York Times. And like her present campaign, the New York Times back in 2020 said that the “lack of policy specifics in her remarks was disappointing.” After dropping out she said she abandoned her campaign because she wasn’t a “billionaire.”
Staff and leadership troubles followed Harris to the Vice President’s office. According to a 2021 report in Politico, Harris’ Vice Presidential office was described by dozens of then current and former aides as “tense” and “dour.” Harris, the report says, “refuses to take responsibility for delicate issues and blames staffers for the negative results that ensue.” One aide told Politico that “It’s not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated. It’s not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like s---.”
Another continuing criticism of Harris is she changes her positions on issues when it’s politically expedient, or that she fails to adequately define her plans and policies to begin with. “When she ran for president the first time,” New York Times Washington correspondent Reid Epstein recently wrote, “Kamala Harris darted to the left as she fought for attention from the Democratic Party’s liberal wing,” and “often appeared as if she were not sure what she believed.”
Has she mocked a disabled reporter? No. Has she bragged she grabbed someone by their most private of parts? No. But she does have a track record of treating her staff poorly, avoiding being pinned down on policy, and changing her mind to court new voters or public opinion when it suits her purpose. Her record as Vice President? Let’s call it “undefined,” mainly because she refuses to define it with anything other than what has been described as “word-saying gibberish.”
She was “anointed” the Democratic candidate without a primary, or any meaningful democratic process, except having been the Vice President and not being a diminished Joe Biden. She avoids interviews—at least those with anything other than friendly interviewers—and ducks reporters questions. “In her first one-on-one cable TV interview since becoming the nominee,” the New York Times said of Harris’ Wednesday interview with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle, “the vice president repeatedly dodged direct questions.” According to the Times, “her media strategy has been to sit with friendly inquisitors who are not inclined to ask terribly thorny questions or press her when her responses are evasive.”
That’s a different kind of threat to democracy. “Trump may be much the worse sinner,” says New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, “but Democrats aren’t blameless when it comes to weaponizing the instruments of state power to interfere with the will of the voters.”
“But votes need to be earned.”
Many on the political left would have those on the right, at least the “moderate” right, vote for Harris. “Who else,” they ask. But, notes the Times’ Stephens, “votes need to be earned.”
What is Harris doing to earn the vote of non-MAGA Republicans? From what I can see, nothing. As a US Senator, she was aligned with fellow progressive Democrats Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker—part of what Politico called the “Hell-No Caucus.” And while she may have “moderated” her views (some say flip-flopped) on fracking to make her more palatable to Pennsylvania voters, she continues to refuse to elaborate on her plans for the economy, the border, or the role that the US expects to play in the Middle East—or just about anything else.
But Trump! But Trump!
“But: Trump”, writes the Times’ Stephens, “That’s the all-purpose response for many voters to any doubts about Harris’s qualifications.” The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan, a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, has described the choice between Trump and Harris as one between “Awful and Empty.” Empty, writes Noonan, “means trouble, a blur when we need a rudder, a national gamble based on insufficient information. It means a policy regime that would be unpredictable, perhaps extreme. You don’t want that.”
And “Awful?” According to Noonan, “Awful is—well, awful. But he [Trump] was president for four years, we didn’t all explode, institutions held, the threatened Constitution maintained. So—maybe that’s their vote. ‘Close your eyes and think of England’.”
What would it take?
About a week ago I was asked “what would it take to vote for Harris?” For many Republicans and right-leaning independents, the answer is likely, “a miracle.” But a start would be to begin to answer questions and give interviews with other than fawning media types like Oprah Winfrey or biased journalists like MSNBC’s Ruhle. What, for example, does she mean by “opportunity economy?” What else, besides voting for a border bill that may, or may not, ever cross the president’s desk, will she do about illegal immigration? What does she she mean when she says the stands with Israel?
“She owes us these answers,” writes Noonan, “It is wrong that she can’t or won’t address them. It is disrespectful to the electorate.”
The dilemma, if indeed there is one, is one of political philosophy, not necessarily personality. Are there Republicans who will vote for Harris, or not at all, because they don’t like Trump? Certainly. But the question that potential Republican voters get asked is “who else could you vote for” or “how can you,” not “why?” The implication being that voting for “Trump” (voting Republican), reveals some moral or intellectual deficiency, or character flaw, in the voter. If voters always voted for the better person I think we’d have had very different presidents. And Harris has her own failings, some of which I’ve touched upon.
“I hate the idea that we should condition friendship or respect based on the way in which a person votes,” David French wrote in the New York Times. “Time and again we make false assumptions about a person’s character based on his or her political positions.”
So, back to where we started. “I'm not just voting for one person,” my pro-Trump friend wrote, “I'm voting for the future of my Country.” And I’m sure that’s exactly how my pro-Harris friend sees it. A few weeks ago, a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center found that while the 2024 presidential election changed dramatically with Biden’s withdrawal, “What has not changed is the vast differences in political values between voters who support Harris and those who back Republican nominee Donald Trump.”
On issues like the Second Amendment, immigration, criminal justice, abortion, the role of government—and many others—Americans are deeply divided. While more voters, according to Pew, see Harris as “a good role model” (though not by as much as some might think), many others believe she won’t make “good decisions,” especially on the economy. Only 25% of Americans, Pew found, “rate national economic conditions excellent or good.” And Most American’s don’t believe either will “bring the country closer together.”
As much as some want to make the presidential election about the character of the candidates, and by extension, the voter—and lord their support for Harris over anyone who might deign to think of voting for Trump—most Americans are more concerned with the issues they care about and the direction they see the country going. “There are,” reports Pew, “wide differences between voters who support Harris and Trump when it comes to the issues.” Three-quarters of Harris supporters and eight of ten Trump supporters, for example, “fundamentally disagree with the other group about the nation’s core values.”
There is at least one thing that many voters do agree on, however—they are dissatisfied with both candidates. According to the same Pew survey, nearly a majority of Harris supporters (48%) and most Trump supporters (54%) are not “too, or not at all, satisfied” with either of the presidential candidates. Expect MANY Americans to be unhappy with either result, no matter who wins.
So, if you’re a person who asks “how could you,” or exclaims “I can’t believe,” maybe you’d be better off asking “why?” Virtue signaling won’t change anyone’s mind. According to the two latest New York Times/Siena College polls, Americans are equally divided between Harris and Trump. Driving home the other evening I passed a yard sign that read “Harris-Walz, Obviously.” Sorry, but to many Americans, including millions of undecided voters, it’s not that obvious. And while both Trump and Harris pander to the party’s extremes, many voters are caught in the middle, relying on their chosen parties withering tenets to guide them.
What many voters do have in common, however, is that they’ll be voting for a future beyond Trump. For many on the left, literally a future without a President Trump. For many on the right, they’ll be voting for things like future Supreme Court justices, or a better economy, or for more secure borders—decisions and policies that echo long after a president’s four years.
For them, that’s the “why.”