It’s that time again. Early voting is starting in Georgia and many other states, and I’m seeing a chorus of my online friends who have been critical of the Trump Administration trumpet their intent to sit out the election and vote for neither side. Sometimes they say they’ll vote for a third party, while other times they don’t plan to vote at all. That’s a great plan if you don’t care what happens to your country.
I’ll confess that I used to sympathize with this point of view. Back in 2016, I didn’t think either Trump or Hillary was suited for the presidency. I couldn’t bring myself to vote for either of them, and I ended up both volunteering and voting for Evan McMullin. I did some third-party voting after that as well, mostly as a protest vote. I might as well have just flushed my vote down the toilet.
What I’ve realized since then is that, no matter whether you think both major party candidates are unqualified or unsuitable, one of them is going to win. (Extremely rare cases to the contrary, like this year’s Nebraska Senate race, prove the rule.) Knowing that, it is logically better to have input into which side is chosen, because even though both candidates may be bad, they aren’t equally bad.
It’s the old complaint about voting for the lesser evil, but that isn’t really a bad thing. By definition, the lesser evil is preferable to the greater evil (unless you like evil), and those who don’t choose the lesser evil are likely to end up with the greater evil.
This also becomes a question of how you look at life. The optimistic way of looking at the lesser evil is that it’s the greater good. Is the glass half empty or half full?
In certain situations, it’s true that your vote probably doesn’t matter. In a presidential election, if you aren’t in a swing state, your vote won’t make a difference in the presidency, but it might in down-ballot races. In deep red or blue states or districts, that may also be true in off-year elections.
But the flip side to that is that the only way to make races competitive is for the opposition to get out and vote. This year, states and districts that are often deep red are becoming battlegrounds. Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, and South Carolina are in play, as well as Michigan on the Democratic side, thanks to a bad primary choice by Democratic voters.
The reason for that shift this year is that the two sides are not the same level of bad. Yes, there are some extreme candidates on the Democratic side, but they pale in comparison to what is considered mainstream in the Republican Party. Even the best Republican candidates are totally beholden to and subservient to Donald Trump, a president who is completely unbound by the Constitution and increasingly unaccountable to the courts.
It’s also true that the smaller the voter pool, the more your vote counts. So, in local and district races in an off-year election, your vote matters more than when voting for president. A few votes can make a difference in these races.
The list of Trump’s transgressions is too long to cover completely, but any other president who acted so imperiously and corruptly would have rightly been impeached and removed. It is the Republicans who are up for re-election this year who have enabled his grift and abuses of power. If they are returned to power, it will be more of the same.
I’m not a Democrat. I’m a conservative and a former Republican, but I’ll be voting Democrat again this year, because the parties are not equally bad. We have a liberal party, and we have an insane personality cult that already tried to steal one presidential election and is currently talking about an unconstitutional third term and seems to be seriously considering martial law if they don’t get the midterm results they want.
In other words, this election is not about policy differences. This election is about whether we want to continue enabling a wannabe authoritarian and whether we want him to lock in his power grab or be held accountable for his crimes. This election is about whether we want to continue being a constitutional republic (which is a form of democracy, for those who say we aren’t a democratic country) or if we want to keep ceding our freedom to a lawless, political strongman.
Those who choose not to make the not-so-difficult choice to rein in the man who would reign over us are not being politically courageous. They are being apathetic. They are throwing their hands up into the air and saying, “Let the chips fall where they may.”
I agree that Democratic candidates are flawed and sometimes even dangerous, but it’s a matter of degrees. We should be considering political triage. When a patient with multiple illnesses presents at a hospital, doctors treat the life-threatening problems first. They don’t let a patient bleed out or die from a heart attack while they wheel him to radiation treatments. No, the proper sequence is to stop the bleeding, stabilize him after the heart attack, and then worry about the long-term threat from cancer.
It’s the same with politics. Trump and MAGA represent a serious, existential threat to our survival as a free nation. That doesn’t mean the Democrats are not a threat, but they are not the imminent danger that a Trump grabbing power at the expense of the Constitution is.
As a longtime follower of conservative and Republican media, I can also point out that many of the accusations that Republicans now level at Democrats are either hypothetical or things that Trump’s Republican Party is already doing. Republican fearmongering over Muslims is hypothetical, for example. Muslims are a small minority (less than two percent of the US population), and the First Amendment already prohibits Sharia law.
Most of the Republican accusations lack self-awareness. Socialism? Trump is nationalizing American companies at an alarming rate. Taxes? Trump’s unconstitutional tariffs are costing Americans thousands of dollars. Endless wars? Wars and rumors of wars are constant under Trump. Government overreach? Trump has created a vast, brutal and unaccountable police state that is already targeting American citizens. Lawfare? Trump already has a long list of political persecutions, even before the recent raid on Rep. Ilhan Omar, while pardoning his criminal friends at eight times the rate of Biden pardons. Corruption? Trump has amassed billions of dollars with open graft and monetization of the presidency. Kimberly Guilfoyle’s $100,000 alleged bribe request is small potatoes. Pro-life? Not only is the Trump Administration not reining in abortion (the abortion rate is increasing), but his cuts to USAID have resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, most of them children, and now the Administration is planning for public executions. Christianity? This Administration is probably more hostile to the teachings of Christ than any in our history.
Back in 2025, I predicted that the Trump presidency would be like another dark age. That prediction is coming true. The world is sinking into conflict and chaos. Trump’s government is internationally aggressive and he is openly siding with Putin, even violating recently passed Russia sanctions to make a deal for a token amount of Russian diesel. This as Russia aids Iran in targeting American soldiers. Trump’s trade barriers mean the US is being left behind internationally, and his attacks on scientific funding and research will cost us in terms of technological leadership. RFK’s assaults on health research and vaccines are allowing disease to flourish. America is in decline, thanks to MAGA.
Your vote matters. That’s why Trump and the MAGA Republicans are trying so hard to make voting difficult and to convince their opponents to stay home.
In fact, voting matters more than anything else when it comes to holding the government accountable. Election results are the one thing that politicians can’t dismiss or ignore, even though they sometimes try.
If you have spent the last two (or more) years complaining about Donald Trump’s government, now is your time. Don’t screw it up. Be an adult and make the unpleasant but necessary choice to vote Democrat and block a tyrant.
If you love America, the stakes are too high not to.
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Oh my gosh! Every single word in this article is exactly what I’ve been trying to tell my sister. I agree 100%! Thank you for putting it into the words that I could not.