Why I Voted for Kamala Harris
Reflections on a necessary compromise
My internal dashboard for The Lewsletter informs me that 17 percent of my readers live in one of this year’s seven consensus swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin. So if you’re reading this, there’s only about a 1 in 6 chance that your vote for President really matters. For the rest of us (excepting those outside the United States) the Electoral College renders our White House votes effectively moot. There’s a chance Donald Trump wins New Hampshire or Minnesota, or that Kamala Harris pulls off an upset in Florida or Texas, but such a result would likely reflect the winner running up the score after already sweeping the decisive swing states. If the race is even remotely close in deep-blue Rhode Island, where I live, it means Trump has already won the election in a landslide.
For most of us, then, our Presidential vote is pure virtue-signaling. It is vanity mixed with a Schoolhouse Rock-esque sense of civic duty that makes us view the act as significant, as opposed to something you may as well do while you cast your ballot for the local races where your support could actually make a difference. With that in mind, my choice when I went to the polls last week was both excruciating and clear: I voted for Kamala Harris. And in case anyone reading this is undecided about how (or whether) to vote, I wanted to take the opportunity to explain why.
Kamala Harris does not share my values or my beliefs about how to build a better world. In neither her capacity as the sitting Vice President nor as the Democratic nominee has she made any meaningful distinction between her views on Israel-Palestine and Joe Biden’s unconditional support for the devastation of Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. She has gone back on her prior belief in Medicare for All. She has been conspicuously quiet about climate action — there are no specific environmental policies laid out on her campaign website — while she panders to the carbon-spewing, water-wasting cryptocurrency industry. The reflex to dismiss critiques of the Democrats because Republicans are worse, however true, rings particularly hollow while the Harris campaign crows about being endorsed by former consensus bogeyman Dick Cheney.
Though it is not as urgent as her callous disregard for the Arab-American community, I take her contempt for Jewish non-Zionists very personally. Whether out of cold political calculus or sincere devotion to the first principle of supporting Israel, Kamala Harris is content to see me only as a token. She has not distanced herself from the dangerous anti-Semitic language Biden wields in his stubborn defense of Zionism: othering his Jewish constituents by insisting that our safety is Israel’s responsibility, not his; comparing peaceful Jewish protestors to Nazi rally-goers; downplaying the death toll of the Holocaust by a factor of thousands. To the contrary, Harris has shamelessly advanced the party line of equating Judaism with Zionism over loud objections from the Jewish-American community. It is offensive enough for fellow Jews to insist that supporting genocide is in keeping with our values. It is abhorrent, and I believe fundamentally anti-Semitic, for a gentile to cheapen the hatred we face by weaponizing it in fealty to a rogue foreign state. If Trump embraced a gentile who purports to define who is and isn’t really Jewish as a campaign surrogate, Democrats would (rightly) call out his bigotry. It’s been sadly illuminating to see so many liberal gentiles look the other way when such anti-Semitism comes from their side.
So why, despite living in a state where my vote has no prayer of being decisive, did I vote for the lesser evil instead of a third party?
The first reason is that the popular-vote margin will matter this year more than ever. If Harris wins, which I still believe is more likely than not despite the proliferation of Democratic doomsaying, Trump will insist that the election was rigged and marshal his allies to attempt to overturn the results. A close popular vote, or especially the unlikely but plausible scenario where Trump gets more votes but loses the Electoral College, would only embolden him. In the absence of actual legal accountability for fomenting an anti-democratic insurrection, the best we can do is to kneecap Trump’s narrative of a stolen election ourselves. Every vote padding the margin makes it that much harder for his supporters to spin a Harris victory as illegitimate, and that much less likely that spineless institutions will give credence to their claims.
The second reason why I voted for Harris is that there were no good other choices. I am not opposed to protest-voting; I did so this year elsewhere on my ballot. Yet the two high-profile ostensibly leftist alternatives in the Presidential race, Jill Stein and Cornel West, are not worth even your token support. There is theoretical value in voting for Stein to help the Green Party maintain ballot access for future elections, if you assume Greens represent a serious vehicle for political change — which is hard to square with their disinterest in organizing, coalition-building, or doing anything besides sponsoring an anti-vax charlatan’s quadrennial vanity campaigns. West, who is running as an independent, has more credibility as an activist and scholar. But while Democrats accusing their left-wing critics of trying to help Republicans is usually a deflection to avoid engaging with the substance of the issues, it’s hard to reconcile West’s professed ideals with launching his campaign on the alt-right platform Rumble or his loyalty to his patron Harlan Crow, the conservative mega-donor best known for bankrolling Clarence Thomas and collecting Nazi memorabilia.
Finally, I thought about the future. Someday, if I have children and grandchildren, they will learn about the dark shadow Trump and his movement cast upon this era of American history. I imagine them asking me how I voted in the 2024 election. As Pollyannaish as it sounds, and as inadequate as it may be as the sum total of our collective action, I want to be able to tell them that I did my part to keep Trump out of the White House.
Many on the left will come to different conclusions than I did, and may vote third-party, or not at all. I understand being frustrated by the Democratic Party treating you with contempt while they ask for your vote, and not trusting that the coalition will hold up their end of the bargain and hold the Democrats accountable after Inauguration Day. I respect those for whom Harris’ support for the destruction of Gaza is a red line, and I resent the widespread reflex to be angrier at the voters who refuse to compromise on genocide than the leaders who enable it. I also know that letting Trump back into office — armed with his Project 2025 agenda, an obsequious judiciary, and a thirst for vengeance against his political enemies — would take us to even darker places.
Building a better world requires demanding our leaders be more than the mere lesser evils. It also means defeating Donald Trump. I hope you will join me on both counts.
I also voted for her, for much the same reason except that we are probably not entirely on the same page WRT the Gaza war.
Democrats are thinking they will clean up in the mid-terms but my entirely non-psychic prediction is that republicans will become even more entrenched. That is because facts don't move people; stories do. MAGA has a story and the Democratic party doesn't.
We lost the story-line somewhere around the time of the passage of the Endangered Spices Act. Yes I see that quizzical look. It's complicated. Someday I'll try to explain in detail but the elevator version is that the ESA told rural people that their lives and livelihoods were less important than those of animals, or to put it more succinctly, "You are less than animals." Then there was this hand waving about retraining, as if they were animals, which I suppose is a step up from being less than animals. This massive insult provided ample fodder for guys like Rush Limbaugh.
I'm all for preserving animal species, and supported the ESA back in the day. It's just that no one, least of all me, foresaw the long-term consequence we are living through right now.
FAFO, as Jeff Tiedrich is fond of saying.