Why I'm voting Blue

Yesterday, I started to tweet out my reasons for voting Democrat, but one tweet was too unnuanced so I added another, but that overstated things so I did one more, and then another, and… I figured, heck, I’d better make this a Substack essay.

Once upon a time, this wasn’t even a question. I voted blue because all my friends voted blue and the idea of doing anything else was like the idea of kissing your sister or walking a cat on a leash. You can do it but it’s wrong, very wrong. If I’m honest, that’s probably still where I’m at, but not totally. In the last few years, I’ve become somewhat disenchanted with the extreme edges of progressive politics. I still almost always¹ vote blue but it doesn’t feel automatic anymore. I feel I have to, well, justify it. So…

I don’t think any party has a monopoly on virtue—you can find awful candidates among both Democrats and Republicans—but I support the Democrats because of their more liberal social positions and because too many Republicans have embraced election denialism.

On social policies, I’m one of those horrible tax and spend liberals. (Although, I think we can go overboard, so, unlike many of my friends, I don’t think Joe Manchin is evil.) Obamacare is far from perfect but it’s better than no Obamacare. I’d like to see Medicare expanded. I want social security protected (“Republicans, Eyeing Majority, Float Changes to Social Security and Medicare”). I agree there have to be limits, I’m ok with Republicans sometimes pushing back a bit, but I’m generally a fan of European-style social safety nets.

I’m pro abortion rights, pro gay marriage. Overturning Roe was bad. Clarence Thomas in his concurring opinion on Dobbs, the decision that ended Roe, said that the Supreme Court “should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.” Griswold gave people the right to buy contraceptives, Lawrence gave gay people the right to have sex, and Obergefell allowed for same-sex marriage. I don’t want those reconsidered. Republicans would push for more judges like Thomas, Barrett, and Kavanaugh and that’s bad for policies I support. I will never abandon my gay family and friends.

January 6, 2021, was a big deal. Not just the riot—that was only the tip of the iceberg—but the whole long process of election denialism. That day was merely the culmination of an ongoing attempt to circumvent the results of the 2020 election. Trump wanted the mob to intimidate Mike Pence into not certifying Biden’s victory, which is bad, but he had already spent months pressuring election officials into declaring that he had actually won in their states. His team even created illegal slates of electors who could be offered as alternates to the actual electors who had been chosen by Biden voters (“The Fake Electors Scheme, Explained”). Was this a coup? An insurrection? I’d say not quite, but only because I’m careful with my words, perhaps too careful. It certainly smelled a bit like an insurrectionary coup. Trying to illegally overturn an election is the epitome of being anti-democratic.

At this point, someone always yells, Hillary Clinton,” and “Stacey Abrams!” This is comparing apples to apple trucks. Yes, there were a few times Clinton called the 2016 election “illegitimate.” This was sour grapes and very bad. However, Clinton was not president and had no power to do anything about her sore loserdom. More importantly, her comments came long after the voting was done. After the election, she called Trump the next day to concede. President Obama immediately reached out to Trump to begin the transition process. Both Clinton and Obama stood behind Trump during his 2017 inauguration ceremony. Trump did none of these things after his 2020 defeat.

Stacey Abrams has never officially conceded because she argues that “voter suppression” was used to defeat her in Georgia. This is also bad. Still, she’s a wannabe governor of a medium-sized state, not president, and she made no illegal efforts to overturn Kemp’s election. I dislike her position, I think it’s also bad for our democracy, but on a tiny scale compared to Trump.

Rob Reiner @robreiner

Not hyperbole. A vote for a Republican is a vote to end Democracy.

Rob Reiner @robreiner

If you don’t vote for the Democrats or don’t vote at all, you are choosing to accept living under Fascism.

Trump’s election denialism is anti-democratic and bad for the strength of our democratic systems. I don’t say “fascist” because I think it’s unhelpful hyperbole. That language is overstated and likely to lose more votes than it gains. I am concerned by the number of public officials who have signed on to Trump’s election denialism but I still have faith in our system to carry out free and fair elections. The hacks aren’t good for democracy but our democracy is stronger than the hacks.

Jonah Goldberg over at The Dispatch wrote a good piece on why “Democracy Is Not on the Ballot.”

Sure, Americans like to complain about democracy, but they don’t want to get rid of it. Indeed, besides a handful of fringe dorks and radical fantasists, there is literally no significant constituency on the American right or left for getting rid of democracy.

(In passing, let me explain my “little old lady theory of democracy.” Democracies need to build cultures of democracy to survive. This is why young democracies (Weimar Germany) have a hard time getting going: they lack that democratic tradition. In America, people have lived their lives under democracy. They believe in it, a faith rooted deep in their bones. Then, after retirement, these faithful democratic little old ladies go to work on Election Day. All my life, whenever I’ve voted, I’ve seen these same ladies serving at polling places. Each one conscientiously getting me to sign in the right spot, checking my name off a list, and directing me to the part of the gym that contained my electoral district voting table. In my old neighborhood, it was little old Jewish ladies, in my new neighborhood, it’s little old Latina ladies, but always the same air of civic-minded seriousness. I still have faith in those little old ladies, keeping democracy alive all across America.²)

Trenchwar @Trenchwar1

@EndWokeness

Are there any reasons to vote Republican? Perhaps a few.

Democrats tend to be the party that attracts social justice extremism. It was Democrats who were chanting “defund the police” and “ACAB.” (Leaders like Joe Biden and Eric Adams of New York have pushed back against this, with Biden calling out “we need to fund the police!”) Young Democratic activists are more likely to say stuff like “Latinx,” which is dumb (and culturally insensitive), but a minority of extremists using stupid language is not the same as enacting policy. I also think calling everything “white supremacy” is bad for our country. It goes against Martin Luther King Jr’s dream “that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Even so, while I think America is far less racist than these social justice activists believe, I think to the degree that it is racist, that racism is found more on the red side than the blue side (although neither party is immune). There are exceptions. I see a kind of liberal racism in some schools (creating racial affinity groups for students of different ethnic backgrounds, teaching kids not to talk to the police because they are supposedly all racist, etc.). That said, while I’m not happy about these trends, it’s hard for me to determine how widespread they are. And some of the Republican solutions—anti-CRT laws, banning books from libraries—seem worse than the problems they’re supposed to be solving.

Overall, if the only thing that worried me was “wokeness,”³ I might vote Republican. That, however, is not my only concern, far from it. I also think the best way to fight ideas I don’t like is with better ideas.

There is also a Democratic tendency to ignore bread-and-butter issues and prioritize political ones. Polls say that voters believe that the economy and inflation are the most important problems facing the country, Dems should listen. Democrats can claim that inflation isn’t important, but giant truckloads of history says they’re utterly wrong. A friend posted on Facebook, “armed election-denying conspiracy theorists are worse than expensive milk.” Well, maybe, but it’s probably easier to write that if you have enough money to live in a nice house, travel to Europe, and buy organic milk. For regular folks, those milk prices matter. I’m hardly rich but I do buy organic milk and went to Paris in February 2020, so perhaps that’s why I’m voting blue? I do think economics is less important than democracy, but I also have the luxury of knowing that next month’s bills are already paid.

In general, Republicans have the reputation for being better at the financial side of things but all too often that seems to mean they offer tax cuts to boost the economy, but don’t cut spending, particularly military spending. Do we need a military budget bigger than the next ten countries combined? I’m not convinced Republicans will do any better on inflation (although I agree that Biden’s “Inflation Reduction Act” didn’t).

On foreign policy, it seems mostly a wash. I prefer Biden’s belief in multilateral negotiations to Trump’s unilateral “America First” approach, but both guys wanted us out of Afghanistan and that’s a good thing. On Ukraine, Republicans in general have been pretty supportive of America offering aid to the Ukrainian government. There are nay-sayers in both Republican and Democratic ranks.⁴ An important note: I don’t think Trump would have been as ready to help Zelinsky as was Biden.

Finally, there’s crime. Here, the Republicans have generally been stronger in admitting that there is a crime problem. You can’t keep saying “crime was worse in the 90s” when folks can see that murders are up and they feel less safe. The “let’s just not talk about crime” attitude combined with “defund the police” chants doesn’t sell well, to America or to me. If I was only voting on crime, I might vote Republican. I’m not, however. Moreover, I’m not sure how much Republicans will improve things. Would it help New York City if “Governor” Lee Zeldin fired Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg? Maybe, but he’s only one part of the problem and Zeldin is a no-go zone for me because he backed Trump when he voted against certifying the 2020 election.

Trump again? Some Republicans will chime in, “why does it always have to be about Trump?” Because he hasn’t gone away. A bunch of candidates have joined his election denialism bandwagon and he still dominates his party. As of now, he’s the Republican Party’s leading contender for the 2024 nomination. He’s not my only reason for voting Democrat, but he’s a big part of the picture. The Republicans need to purge themselves of an anti-democratic charlatan who also happens to be an awful human being.

So yeah, I’m voting blue. Social issues, Trump’s leadership, and Republican election denialism make a red vote impossible for me. Crime and occasional social justice extremism are concerns but not on the same scale. Now I’m not saying I won’t hug a Republican, but when I do I’ll be whispering in their ear: “Love ya babe, but you were wrong.”

1. “Almost always,” what do you mean “almost,” Carl? Ok, this is awkward. Back in 2000, I was one of those liberal Ralph Nader voters. I live in New York, so my vote didn’t really matter, and I was fed up with Clinton-style triangulation. Looking back, I regret it. Then I voted one time for Mike Bloomberg (his second run in 2005) because I thought the was doing a good job. I have no regrets about that one.

2. Why not “little old men”? Because women in America live an average of five years longer than men. While the little old ladies are working the polling centers, the little old men are either deceased or relaxing on their reclining chairs not getting any exercise so they can have that early heart attack.

3. What is “wokeness”? I wrote a whole darn essay about this: “The Woke Apocalypse is Upon Us! (Or Do I Have To Admit It's Getting Better All The Time?)”

4. Marjorie Taylor Greene has called on Republicans to stop supporting Ukraine if they take control of Congress, but the idea has been rejected by Republican leaders.