Don't Blame Me for Not Voting for Your Unbelievably Rotten Candidate

With a day left before the 2024 polls close, I’d like to say something to the Republicans and the Democrats, the Trump chads and the Harris stans: Don’t blame me for not voting for your shitty candidate.

There’s a reason why presidential contests have been as tight as they have been for a while, and why control of Congress has flipped back and forth so much over the last couple of decades. It’s not because of voters like me, who just want to vote for politicians and policies that won’t bankrupt the country or rob me of the ability to make meaningful decisions in my life. It’s not too much to ask for candidates who aren’t colossal assholes, mental incompetents, or fakers that routinely lie and dissemble about all sorts of stuff. Your parties don’t stand for anything consistent or appealing or responsible or responsive. You’re not going to win elections easily until you stand for something consistent, productive, and respectful of the people you seek to govern.

Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are arguing about which one of them will add $4 trillion in new debt vs. which one will add $8 trillion, according to mid-range estimates from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Both want to abolish taxes on tips and have their own special twists on adjacent topics. Trump has said he also wants to end taxes on overtime and Social Security income and cap credit-card interest rates, while Harris wants to shovel “free” money at first-time homebuyers and push for free or nearly free college, plus a bunch of other stuff. Both have pledged to maintain old-age entitlements exactly as they are, meaning federal spending has nowhere to go but up as baby boomers retire en masse and are joined by Gen Xers, the oldest of whom are pushing 60. They each threaten free speech in their own ways and traffic in delusion (Trump, for instance, can’t admit he lost the popular vote in 2016 and 2020, while Kamala won’t say when she knew that President Joe Biden’s brain was cooked).

We know what a Trump presidency will look like because he’s served already. It wasn’t great, considering that most of the new debt he added to the nation’s came before COVID-19 tanked the economy. But it wasn’t a disaster either, at least until COVID-19 came along and he pushed to shut the country down and put together the very team of awful public health bureaucrats he spends a lot of time railing against now, as if they just showed in the Oval Office one day.

As part of the Biden administration, Harris was co-pilot during an equally mediocre run in the White House, especially when it came to prolonging or intensifying many of the worst COVID-19 policies that started under Trump. But if we’re being honest, despite all the best attempts of Biden/Harris to utterly tank the economy, it seems to be doing just fine, just like it was doing under Trump (which is to say, OK but not anywhere close to where it should be). The Dow Jones is doing swell, and for all their bitching and moaning, younger Americans are doing better than previous generations, with Millennials and older Gen Zers accruing more wealth than Gen X. And miracles of miracles: Gen Z is outpacing Millennials when it comes to home ownership. The genius of America is that we survive almost any fool presiding over us.

Whatever else you can say about Trump and Harris, this much is indisputable: They are not popular. Each is pulling under 50 percent of voters the day before the election. And their parties aren’t exactly reeling them in, either. Per Gallup’s survey during the last two weeks of October, just 29 percent of Americans identify as Republican and just 32 percent as Democrats—figures that are near all-time lows. Let the partisans explain why the rest of us are so misguided in our indifference or hostility to these candidates and their parties. Maybe one of these years, those partisans will get around to figuring out how to appeal to people outside of the shrinking groups who already agree with them.

Last week, I voted early and wrote in the Libertarian Party presidential candidate Chase Oliver on my New York ballot. Like a lot of places, the Empire State does everything it can to bump non-major-party choices from its ballots, resulting in much lower-than-average voter participation rates over the past seven presidential elections. But screw that, I was happy to have somebody to vote for who comes close to my vision of government. He’s talking about reducing the size, scope, and spending of government only a few years before our biggest budget items are about to go tits up. Good on him.

I get why Democrats and Republicans try to limit choices for voters and then denounce those of us who refuse to go along. I’m not above partisanship and in fact, I would love to be able to vote for a candidate who might actually win the presidency. But the major party candidates by and large suck and, even in an era of overheated, mentally diminished rhetoric where supporters of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump both claim this could be the last election EVER, the difference between the two is less than meets the eye. Or same thing, it’s not worth picking one over the other.

That’s on them, not me or my fellow citizens who are holding out for something better.

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