I am that great mystery: The voter who is politically engaged, and yet just 5 weeks away from the election is genuinely undecided. During the primaries I supported and donated to Andrew Yang. I would have supported Corey Booker as well, if he’d lasted longer than Yang. And, I think a Biden-Booker ticket would have been a far superior move for the Democrats, had Biden not committed to making Y chromosomes a disqualifier for the VP slot. The last person I supported before Yang in any primary was Jon Huntsman. He’s actually the last person I’ve voted for in a general election — even though he wasn’t running.
So, here I am, a voter without a candidate. Or, with 3-ish. Depending on the time of day and my relative blood sugar levels, I can talk myself into voting for Trump, Biden, or the Libertarian. Here’s why.
Trump
Without a doubt, Trump is a disaster. What I’m less sure of is that Trump has been a disaster. He is personally a disaster, but I don’t feel that he’s been a disaster for the country. He certainly hasn’t been a disaster for my life personally, nor for any of my close friends, at least as far as I’ve gathered from them. Many hate the living shit out of him, but if pressed to explain how their life has been made worse through any legislation or official policy, they would struggle to find an answer. “Kids in cages,” and “undermining abortion rights,” and now “200,000 dead from Covid,” but ask a simple follow up and they’d fare no better than Trump in the Axios interview.
SARS-CoV-2: Since it’s the most pressing issue, I’ll dive into this one just a little bit, though only to counter the anti-Trump narrative I’ve seen floating around. “Trump lied. 200,000 died.” Post hoc ergo propter hoc. Yes, Trump (like many) downplayed the seriousness of Covid-19. Yes, there’s been 200,000 American deaths. But, did Trump’s downplaying of it cause 200,000 people to die? Absolutely not.
The spread of Covid-19 in the US was inevitable, and some portion of those 200,000 people would have died no matter who was in the Oval Office. If Clinton had been President and the deaths were held to 180,000, would we blame her for all 180,000? Yes. But only because we’re partisan hacks with no sense of truth or honesty.
And the honest truth is that we have no idea how many deaths resulted from Trump’s actions or inactions. Did Republican governors fail to take action because they were influenced Trump’s lead? Maybe. If Trump had hyped the virility and deadliness of Covid-19, would Democratic governors have enacted more lax policies in defiance of Trump, leading to more deaths in blue state? Maybe.
Covid-19 has been a disaster. Partly a natural disaster, and partly a policy disaster. The question for me comes down to just if someone else would have really produced a better result. Maybe. But probably not by much.
Nap Time: If you hadn’t noticed, the country got awfully woke in the last couple years. Much of the progressive movement has merit, but by “woke” I’m referring to the excesses and nonsense. For most of his presidency, Trump has done little to combat wokeness. In fact, he seems to be fomenting it, perhaps out of an expectation that riling up the worst elements of the left will result in moderates becoming terrified of a Democratic victory. See for instance the decline in support for BLM as its members have harassed citizens and actually called to not just reapportion police funding but actually abolish the police.
However, early on in his Presidency, the Trump administration did take a pro-active step in rolling back some of the excesses of the woke point of view by undoing the Obama administration’s Title IX “Dear Colleague” Letter. If you’re out of the loop on this, here’s a tl;dr: Colleges find it hard to prove sexual assault allegations. This is because there’s usually no third-party witnesses and little or no evidence. To make it easier, at the prodding of the government, colleges started removing evidentiary rules and procedural due process, lowered the burden of proof, and in some cases just appointed an inquisitor to investigate and reach determinations all on their own. The goal was simply more findings of guilt, without regard to if the accused was guilty. Betsy DeVos, Trump’s Secretary of Education, more or less undid that.
More recently though, the Trump administration took racism training to task with an executive order ending any government funding for such nonsense. Left-wing media has spun it as an attack on “diversity training,” but Trump’s executive order prohibited only training that taught the United States is inherently racist and evil or that any one race is inherently racist and evil. If your training session includes labeling an entire people as evil, it’s not diversity training, it’s racism training. 10 points for Slytherin.
And then we got the epic trolling of Princeton. The university issued what’s essentially become a form letter mea maxima culpa for a racist past and admitting that racism persists at Princeton. However, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits federal funds from being given to a university that engages in racial discrimination. Naturally, the Department of Education responded by launching an investigation. Another 10 points for Slytherin.
This might all sound like small potatoes stuff when compared to economic policies, pandemic responses, the Supreme Court, climate change, and a dozen other things. But, I work in academia. What’s more, I work in a department where one can say with a straight face that having standards for our students is racist. Not just that our standards are racist, but that all standards are racist. Having someone at the top fighting back against this nonsense is important to me and can have a direct impact on my day to day life.
But, I wish Trump had a longer track record of actually taking action to push back on this stuff. I want some indication that this is more than just part of his reelection strategy that will be immediately dropped the next time some shiny objects captures the administration’s attention.
Biden
The argument for Biden is a lot simpler for me. I want a return to normalcy, and I think he at least moves us in that direction. He’s less volatile. I think there’s less of a chance the country will burn down with him in power.
I also like some of his policies. I think he has the right approach to education by emphasizing trade schools and community colleges. I think a public health care option (that competes by being more efficient and affordable) is a good idea.
But back to the country burning down thing. I don’t think I’m alone in worrying about the riots that will ensue if Trump wins reelection. In fact, I feel like we’re living under a sort of implicit threat of destruction and violence in response to a Trump victory. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the threats have begun to be explicit.
As much as I want to see the country calm down and think a Biden win will act as a much-needed pressure value, I also feel a moral imperative to not allow the fear of Antifa-style rioting to influence my vote. There is a meaningful chance that if I don’t vote for Biden it will be because I don’t want to give Antifa a win in the process.
Cognitive Decline: That’s the elephant in the room with Biden. Also, I don’t really buy it. I’ve seen plenty of social media posts claiming proof positive that Biden is in severe cognitive decline. And without fail, these posts have been easily explained through rather mundane reasons. Much of it is just the kind of mistakes people always make when they’re speaking off the cuff.
But, with Biden there’s another very important factor at play, and it’s that he has a profound stutter. You won’t, however, hear a st-st-st-st-normal way stutterers pre-pre-pre-pre-the way they come out.
The key to understanding a ton of the quirks of how Biden speaks is to understand how he copes with his stutter. With stutters, the speaker often cannot get themselves to make the next sound, and the stereotype (as shown above) is getting stuck on a sound several times, then changing the course of the sentence. Biden has just gotten to the point of knowing the difficulty is coming up, stopping before the repetition, and changing directions. The effect is that he often sounds like he’s lost his train of thought, but in reality, he’s figuring out how to rephrase his thoughts on the fly when suddenly prohibited from saying a specific word as if in the middle of a Whose Line improv scene.
Is he at his intellectual peak? No. But the folks I’ve seen trying to argue that he’s addle-minded have done little more than to show their ignorance of Biden’s stutter or how stutters work outside of scripted television.
The Libertarian
Look, no one is voting for whoever the Libertarian Party nominee is. People vote for the Libertarian Party. Or often, they vote against the Other Two Parties. But point is, the candidate here doesn’t matter.
Wasted Vote: No, fuck off with that unthinking nonsense. I live in a safe state, the same way most voters live in a safe state. And while we tend to think these votes “don’t count,” they do, but in a subtle way.
The most obvious is that for the Libertarian Party, being able to crack the 5% popular vote count grants them access to over $100 million in public campaign finance, a move that would forever (and I think for the better) change our political landscape. I don’t like the Libertarian platform at all. Opening the borders and closing public schools strikes me as insanity. But, pour in money and turn the party into a serious movement instead of a meme, and far more reasonable voices will rise up.
A vote for a third party also signals to the other two parties that there are people unsatisfied with the status quo — and willing to vote. That creates a stronger incentive for the duopoly to appeal to folks beyond the base.
Why someone in a non-swing state would vote for someone other than Libertarians or Greens has long struck me as confusing. It seems like voting for the side either guaranteed to win or guaranteed to lose is the only way to waste your vote. Why not vote for the only folks for whom the vote matters?
Back to Biden vs Trump
In any other year, I’d be a lot more sympathetic to my above reasoning. But, this year the election results are already being called into question more than a month before election day. This makes the popular vote matter so much more if for no other reason than to lend legitimacy to the final result. Whether Biden or Trump wins, the best result for the nation is that it be a decisive victory. So, that seems to take the Libertarians off the table as a real choice this cycle.
Jon Huntsman
I might write in Jon Huntsman, as is my tradition. He is still the person I think best suited for the office, and there is certain appeal in just voting for whoever you most believe in, realpolitik be damned.