An Inconvenient Blog

By Ashkan

Deciding my vote for President has forced a profound questioning of my core values unlike anything I’ve ever experienced — my uncompromising devotion to procrastination has not wavered, though. And it never will. You have my word.

I still don’t know who I’m voting for. And election day is creeping up on me (to be precise, it’s no more than 2 Rand Paul filibusters away). When asked for my opinion over the past few weeks, I’ve slyly hid behind a quip that I’ll be writing in Jimmy Carter. And I’ve earned all of the halfhearted chuckles and pregnant eyerolls that a mildly witty, confused voter could ever ask for. But it’s time to get serious. Rand Paul might need to relieve himself soon and I’ll be forced to vote.

I’ve been on a listening tour of sorts as I’ve solicited diverse perspectives from other swing state voters in college. There has been one persistent theme dominating each conversation: fear. Kamala voters are terrified of what a Trump second term could look like. They foresee the conclusion of the American experiment, felled by a vindictive narcissist who skirts the rule of law and drives a dagger into democracy as we know it. And poor Liz Cheney is not making it out alive. Trump voters are anxious about losing the soul of America to an open border and critical race theory. They are afraid that Kamala is a radical Bolshevik coming for their guns and unrealized capital gains alike.

This is an election motivated almost exclusively by fear. I’m not immune. I’m scared of both of them. I’m having trouble weighing my fears. This simple inconclusiveness has made a third-party vote appetizing to me; insofar as the two candidates are both some comparable degree of malicious, why not send each a middle finger, refuse to endorse their agendas, and avoid the inevitable buyer’s remorse that would come with choosing either? The problem with this mindset is that it assumes Trump and Kamala to be truly equal ambassadors of destruction, which is hard to believe. If I think long enough about it, one has to be worse, right? 

I can imagine Abigail and other good friends of mine banging their heads against their keyboards at this point. To them, the answer is painfully obvious. One is a fascist and one is not. I share their fear of Trump. He would be a bad President. I had a surreal 60 minute conversation with my parents yesterday in which we ran through every potential armed civil war Trump might incite — it is 2024 and this is unfortunately a somewhat ubiquitous thought experiment for undecided voters.

I’m also scared of Kamala, though. I’d like to explain why there’s enough substance for me to at least consider either submitting a protest vote or affirmatively voting against her. 

The world is on fire right now. I can’t help but ascribe this to incompetence and weak leadership from the Biden-Harris administration. Russia initiated land invasions of Ukraine twice in the 21st century: once in 2014 to annex Crimea during Obama’s presidency, and once in 2022 during Biden’s. This can’t be a coincidence. Biden-Harris mangled the 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal so badly that the world’s most ferocious military actors felt emboldened to attack as they pleased. Meanwhile one could argue that Trump’s strong-man unpredictability deterred Putin from ever acting out. It’s the same story in the Middle East — I don’t think it is a coincidence that we remember October 7th, 2023 and not October 7th, 2019. It is hard to trust Kamala Harris to be Commander-in-Chief given her repeated assertions that she would do nothing differently than Biden on the world stage. She’d continue to be shockingly weak towards all of our adversaries, especially on Iran, extending Biden policies like gift-wrapping the Islamic Republic $10 billion to fund terror as he did earlier this year. I genuinely fear a nuclearized Iran, a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, and a host of other unpleasant surprises that a Harris presidency might invite. 

I don’t think a President Harris would do anything to address a porous Southern border kindly propped open by Biden (and by Kamala via her questionable Border Tsardom). It’s no secret that illegal border crossings skyrocketed immediately following the beginning of Biden’s term — there have been over 8 million illegal attempts to enter the United States through Mexico under Joe’s watch compared to his predecessor’s 2.4 million. That’s a huge difference. Biden-Harris only decided to get serious about immigration when the polling seemed irreparably fraught and a looming election forced the introduction of a new bill this year. A fundamental facet of any nation-state is having borders and laws which dictate who and what can enter. I am scared that Kamala will enable record levels of human trafficking, illegal drug imports, and other threats to our national security. 

It’s easy to forget that Kamala was ranked the number one most liberal member of the United States Senate (before GovTrack conveniently expunged this metric from their website) and was an original cosponsor of the Green New Deal, a fairly unapologetic socialist roadmap for America. There isn’t enough discussion on the fact that Kamala ran on an obviously untenable $30 trillion single-payer healthcare plan in 2020, and that her platform out-Lefted Bernie Sanders in asking for the largest increase in government spending of any candidate in that election cycle. Sure, she has recently moderated many of these stances, but I’m fearful she might take office and dash right back to where she was before. Inflation has been the most damning indictment of Biden’s presidency, and if Kamala ever achieves the money printing heights she previously aspired to, we can expect high prices to only get far worse. I’m similarly concerned about an emphatic stifling of the American economy under the weight of her unprecedented planned tax increases. People are really struggling right now — I worry times could get even harder for working families.

I say all of this to attempt to explain the very real fears that many undecided voters might have about a President Harris. Of course, there’s even more that I haven’t touched on (like packing the Supreme Court, the fight over what’s being taught in schools, et cetera) which could again present significant red flags for others and for me.

I’m scared of Kamala Harris and the damage she might do to this country. Policy matters. I’m also obviously scared of Donald Trump and the damage he might do to this country. Democratic values matter. I wish I didn’t have to be so fearful, but I see this race as one between an incompetent closeted radical and a reckless closeted authoritarian. I’ll have to choose one of them (or someone else) soon. Maybe I’ll just write in Jimmy Carter after all.