David Michael Miller
The Wisconsin presidential preference primary is getting close. As a political junkie, I always know weeks in advance how I will vote on Election Day.
But I am still waiting to make a decision this time around, because an extremely unusual candidate will be on the ballot. I plan to use my vote, strategically, to damage this candidate to the maximum extent possible. Since the political landscape is shifting daily, I will have to assess the lay of the land on April 5, to determine how best to accomplish that.
I could fill a full broadsheet with the list of particulars indicting Donald Trump. But his personal and political enormities have, to me, sunk to the level of banality. (The media is saturated with them anyway.) I can barely imagine a candidate more blatantly unfit to be head of state and commander in chief.
So if, come primary Election Day, voting for Ted Cruz is my most Trump-damaging move, then I will put aside Cruz’s disgusting determination to find out if Middle East sand can glow in the dark, and fill in the bubble next to his name. We’ll see.
Strangely, I already have a firm plan for the November general election.
Though I disagree with the party mainstream on a number of issues, I am a Republican.
As a matter of fact, I have held a number of party offices at the county level. I do not vote for every Republican that is put forward, but I have not voted for a Democrat in many, many years.
I will, however, vote for the Democratic nominee this November if Donald Trump is his or her “Republican” opponent, an ever-more-likely scenario.
My reasoning is simple. Whatever serious faults Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders have, neither is an existential threat to America. Donald Trump might well be. I will do everything legally within my power to keep this country from the peril he represents.
I am far from the first Republican to say that I will not vote for Trump if he is the nominee. But the prominent voices of #NeverTrump talk merely of abstaining, or hold out hopes that the GOP will run an independent candidate.
Anyone who is as alarmed as I am should discourage such an independent run, which might serve only to split the anti-Trump vote. And for many in the Republican rank-and-file, a decision to abstain from voting in the presidential contest would mean that they just stay home. This would of course spell disaster for the GOP in down-ballot races.
Voting for a true third party is always an option, if polls show that there is no danger of a Trump victory. But third party presidential votes are usually little more than noise in the final results. I do not just want to prevent Donald Trump from winning; I want to help set a precedent with a visibly overwhelming loss. Somewhere in America, a young person with a flamboyantly unstable temperament, loads of charisma and authoritarian tendencies is watching. I want him or her to see Trump humiliated in the popular vote, in the grandest fashion possible. The message must be that if the few coherent and consistent positions you take flout the rule of law or enflame racial and religious hostilities, and you show contempt for all conventions of civility on the national stage, then the American people will send you running home with your tail between your legs.
I hope other Republicans join me in pledging to do whatever it takes to most decisively stamp out Trumpism. As uncomfortable and awkward as it might feel, voting for Clinton or Sanders against Trump in the general election would not be a betrayal of the Republican Party or of Republican principles. Far from it. In our largely open primary system, anyone can co-opt the Republican label, and a dangerous man has done just that. To sacrifice one’s vote in an effort to protect America from danger is, in truth, a fine expression of our party’s highest principle: love of country.