Amid the lowest voter turnout in two decades, Donald Trump won the White House. His victory was brought about by 80,000 voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. He won those last two with fewer votes than were cast for Barack Obama in 2012, and he won the latter with fewer votes than Mitt Romney received in the course of losing those states.
Both Trump and Clinton faced their own bevy of allegations of corruption and concealing or committing sexual misconduct. Voters, asked to choose between the lesser of two evils, either stayed home or joined the most expansive third party electorate in recent history.
2020 doesn’t have to be like this, but with Democrats edging towards electing political, not personal, evil in the form of socialism, it’s shaping up to be so. If Democrats choose front-runner Joe Biden and the former vice president sticks to the campaign he’s ran thus far, the next election could be a referendum on Trump, personally. If voters are asked to choose between big government socialism and big government protectionism, that’s another story, one in which a third party candidate or Republican primary challenger could prove palatable to the disaffected center.
I’ve already mapped out what a compelling primary challenger would look like: An affirmative free-marketer who rejects the protectionism of both Trump and the left-wing of the Democratic Party and appeals to decency and civility. Based on the polling, it’s statistically improbable that a primary challenger could beat Trump for the top of the ticket, but a pivot to a third-party bid, especially if the candidate were a popular libertarian like Justin Amash, would seem likely.
That candidate probably isn’t Mark Sanford, and it sure as hell isn’t Joe Walsh.
Americans who voted their conscience in 2016 by backing Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, or Evan McMullin didn’t do so because they viewed their choice as the lesser of five evils. They did so to reject a binary of evil and instead affirmatively endorse candidates they viewed as genuinely palatable. Such an ask will be bigger in 2020 seeing as Trump’s degradation of the Oval Office is already a sunk cost, and asking disaffected Republicans to choose a vitriolic Islamaphobe or a disgraced, adulterous liar is an impossible one.
Trump has certainly said ignorant and racist things. Joe Walsh built his entire career spewing much worse rhetoric, squarely at black Americans and Muslims. Trump’s racial insensitivity or animus (depending on your interpretation) is already baked into the electoral cake. The stain on American history is already set. Yet Walsh supporters want the morality vote to be cast for someone undoubtedly worse? Not likely.
The case for Mark Sanford is less egregious, as despite a year of cable news hosts huffing and puffing over Stormy Daniels, adultery is nothing new in politics. But again, asking a Republican to risk a president who nationalizes our entire healthcare and energy sectors — roughly 30% of the American economy — to cast a morality vote for someone who lied about his affair and then had to resign to avoid impeachment is absurd.
If a moral candidate were to emerge as an alternative to Trump or the socialists, with an affirmative message in favor of reducing the size and scope of the federal government, conservatives ought to embrace the opportunity to vote their conscience. But the more-intemperate-than-Trump racist and the lying cheater can’t really be held up as standing for a vote for decency. Their candidacies stand as a mockery of the past three years of pearl-clutching and rhetorical warfare by Never Trump conservatives.
