I will not vote for Donald Trump
and am very willing to vote for Hillary Clinton to help keep him from becoming
President. In my life as a political
science professor, such an opinion is barely worth stating as it is more or
less assumed. In my life as an
evangelical Christian (they are actually the same life, I live both of them at
the same time), this surprises some people.
Given one known Supreme Court vacancy and the distinct possibility of
more in the next four years, why vote for Clinton who will assuredly nominate
justices who are pro-choice [or insert your favorite Supreme Court Issue here]?
First, because past experience indicates that voting for a
President is a very indirect and rather ineffective way of changing the Supreme
Court's position. In the early 1990s, a
Supreme Court consisting of eight Republican appointees and one Democratic
appointee voted to uphold Roe v. Wade
6-3, and the Democratic appointee was not among the six supporters. Further, I have even less confidence in
Trump's actual commitment to being pro-life or other issues evangelicals care
about than any Republican nominee in my lifetime. I am not a one-issue voter.
Second, because when I put all the other issues on the
scales, they clearly outweigh the Supreme Court issue. I don't want to validate Trump's comments
about women or minorities, I don't want someone with his temperament
representing our nation abroad, and I
certainly do not want him as commander-in-chief of our armed forces with access
to nuclear codes. In sum, his character
is unacceptable and his actual policy proposals strike me as consistently
wrongheaded.
Many people I talk to are planning to write in or vote third
party. I can respect that position, but realistically either Trump or Clinton
will be president. If there is even a chance of the former, the most effective
way to stop him from being elected is to vote for Clinton. That, to me, is more important than
"sending a message." The
pollsters will figure out than many Clinton votes are in part anti-Trump votes
anyway.
Trump is making outlandish promises and proclamations and would
surely disappoint his supporters who think that America's problems are
sufficiently superficial that electing an angry outsider is enough to fix
them. Trump is more a symptom of what is broken than
the real cause of the brokenness. My
hope is that his loss will be a time to think deeply about the underlying
issues that brought us here.
