The Case for ‘W.C. Fields Republicanism’

When people ask me how I plan to vote on Tuesday, I tell them “I refuse to vote for the lying, corrupt, pro-big-government New York millionaire who supported the war in Iraq and shamelessly puts personal wealth over public good.”

Confused head shaking ensues…

But while I’m confident of what I’m not voting for, I’ve been struggling with the best way to vote “against.” What’s the right ballot to cast if you could never vote for Hillary Clinton and can’t imagine endorsing Donald Trump? There are three options:

• Vote for another candidate on the presidential ballot (in most states either Libertarian Gary Johnson or the Green party’s Jill Stein);

• A write-in ballot, most likely for independent conservative Evan McMullin;

• Leave the presidential line of the ballot blank, while casting votes in the down ballot races.

I can already hear the cries from upset GOP partisans: “You aren’t voting ‘against’ anyone, Graham! If you don’t vote Trump, you’re voting ‘for’ Hillary!”
I have received approximately 1.26 million tweets and Facebook posts along these lines, and they are all utter nonsense. If I don’t vote Trump, am I really stealing a vote from him? Only if you assume that it’s his vote in the first place, that it’s my job to dutifully return his vote to him on Election Day.

So when did my vote become the property of Donald Trump? Did I lose it to him at a craps table in Jersey?

Like I said: Nonsense. No, Trump fans, I am not voting for Hillary Clinton. I would never vote for Hillary Clinton, and the reason you keep insisting I am voting for her is because you realize there’s no defensible argument to persuade me to vote for Trump.

Or as the great mathematician Pythagoras theorized: “‘If you don’t vote X or Y, you’re still voting X because you didn’t vote Y’ is an argument made by people who know Y is an ass.”

So what’s the best way for me to “Brexit” this election?

For weeks I’ve been attracted by the power of the blank ballot. Imagine waking up the morning after the election and reading that, say, 20 million voters cast ballots in down ballot elections but left the POTUS line untouched. Millions of Americans who care enough to vote but hate both candidates too much to vote for either of them is a powerful indictment of two parties’ nominees.

Or, it’s hopeless idealism. There’s every reason to believe blank ballots will be ignored, the same way the 100 million-plus voting-age Americans who sit out every election are.

Then there are pragmatic problems. For example, in some places like Massachusetts, Manhattan, Donald Trump will be the only Republican on a local ballot filled with uncontested Democrats. If these Republicans leave the top line unchecked, they’ll literally be casting an empty ballot.

When I ran my “power of the uncast vote” theory by Bill Kristol in our most recent Kristol Clear podcast, he rejected it based on math. He wants a bigger pie, so Hillary gets a smaller piece.

“I think it’s likely—not certain, but likely—that Clinton will win, probably by about 3 points. If she does, I’d prefer her win 49-46 percent than 51-48,” Kristol told me. “I’d prefer to have enough 3^rd party ballots that she doesn’t have a majority, that it’s clear her victory was a grudging one, that she doesn’t have a mandate.”

So Bill Kristol’s suggestion is for “vote against” voters to write-in Evan McMullin. The problem: According to both the McMullin campaign and reporting by the Washington Post, in seven states (FL, NC, IN, OK, SC, NV and HI) write-in ballots are not counted. At best they are thrown into the “All others” category. A vote for McMullin will be treated the same as a vote for Mickey Mouse.

It turns out that, as a registered voter in Virginia, I live in the best of all electoral worlds: One of the eleven states where McMullin will actually appear on the ballot. All three options are easily available to me. What to do?

Well, it is 2016, the craziest of political years when all the rules have been thrown out the window. Maybe it’s time to break my W.C. Fields streak and actually vote “for” something.

Which is why I’ve decided to vote for Libertarian Gary Johnson.

Or, more accurately, I’ve decided to vote for the Libertarian party ticket. Johnson is a lousy choice, both as a candidate (“Aleppo who?”) and as a libertarian (“Religious-liberty what?”). And his pro-Hillary running-mate Bill Weld is even worse.

But by pulling that lever, I’ll be both rejecting the awful, unacceptable choices of the two major parties and doing my (infinitesimally-small) part to promote third-party efforts. Given the civil war inside the GOP, the latter has become particularly appealing.

Plus, as a libertarian-leaning Republican, this vote reflects my fundamental values of small government and individual liberty. It is the mirror opposite of a vote for Trump, which would be a rejection of my values in service of my political party.

I’ll be voting “against” that, too.