Much is made of the big, splashy endorsements by celebrities and high-profile public servants. But I too, a dad, a husband, an IT professional and a small independent musician, now choose to publicly endorse a candidate in writing for the first time. Given that I speak to an audience of hundreds via email and thousands via social media, I feel it’s my responsibility to use my platform to speak out on an urgent matter facing my country.
The United States faces a crossroads: either we remain a democracy under the rule of law led by Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz or we veer off on a path to an autocracy under the rule of Donald Trump, JD Vance and their enablers.
Why Harris Is the Protest Vote
If you’re considering sitting out this election, voting for a 3rd party candidate or writing in a non-candidate, I’d ask you to reconsider. From my perspective, Kamala Harris is the protest vote. A vote for Kamala Harris sends a clear message that you do not buy the constant gush of easily provable lies spouted by Donald Trump, his surrogates and his right-wing media echo chamber. This is why lifelong principled conservatives like Liz Cheney, George Will, Steve Schmidt, Bill Kristol and numerous members of Trump’s own 2017 administration see consistency in endorsing the California Democrat Kamala Harris with maintaining their conservative worldview. They see their Republican Party as having lurched into an alt-right space they no longer recognize. These conservatives have chosen country over party; fidelity to the Constitution over one-way loyalty to a narcissist who, joking or not, repeatedly insisted he will be a dictator on day one.
There is much to protest about Trump’s candidacy: the way he conducted his 2017-2021 presidency, his instigation of a violent attack on the 2020 election, and the way he’s campaigning now. For those troubled with the flaws on both sides of the aisle, I would strongly urge you to recognize that those flaws are nowhere near equal. In this election, the differences between the candidates are as stark as they’ve ever been in my lifetime. I assert that Kamala Harris is the protest vote in this election.
Either Candidate Will Change Things – What Kind of Change?
I understand that American voters constantly seek change, especially when we feel economic anxiety. In this election I believe both candidates are ‘change’ candidates. The urgent question is: what kind of change do you want for our country?
Donald Trump would change our very form of government, from the world’s oldest functioning democracy to a dictatorship, one that would serve his self-interests and keep him above the law, shielding him from the legal trouble he’s trying to stall and outrun. He publicly distances himself from the 900+ page handbook to remaking our government in his image – Project 2025, created by conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation. But at least 140 former members of the 2017 Trump administration contributed to the creation of this blueprint for American dictatorship, which would hollow out our federal government agencies of their career-long nonpartisan public servants and replace them with political appointees serving at the pleasure of MAGA presidents. This blueprint also restricts voting rights and threatens intensified legal actions against election officials in the event MAGA ever fails to get election results they believe they’re entitled to.
Trump would change this country back to what it was before many of our lifetimes – a gilded age of robber barons, where women were walking uteruses that were the property of their husbands, where white men reigned supreme simply because of their gender and skin color and it was widely accepted that people who felt the tidal pull of love toward someone of their same gender had to keep it in the closet or “pray away the gay.” He would change us back to the age of the know-nothing movement that blamed immigrants for America’s problems. He'd revert us to when races were segregated and minorities “knew their place.” Sure, this is change, but it’s reactionary, backward-looking change. He already set the country back 51 years with three Supreme Court picks he selected with the specific purpose of striking down Roe vs. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that had barred every US state from denying women the right to reproductive care.
Voting for Kamala Harris is a strong insistence that we change our politics forward. It sends a message that the Republican Party must finally change its standard bearer if it wants to compete successfully in general elections for America's top office. Thanks to the all-in support of the MAGA wing of Republican voters, the party has ended up embracing a divisive, self-serving, losing candidate through the last three disappointing election cycles for the party: 2018 (Democrats flipped the House), 2020 (Democrats won the Presidency, House and Senate) and 2022 (a widely anticipated “red wave” never emerged and the slim Republican House majority proved embarrassingly dysfunctional). The GOP, to quote U2, is stuck in a moment it can’t get out of. An undeniable loss may help get them unstuck. We need two healthy political parties in this country with neither beholden to a would-be dictator.
Kamala Harris is a change candidate in her own right, distinct from, but connected to, the work of the current president Joe Biden. Her plans clearly build on the foundations for much needed change that Biden has overseen with her input. Biden’s work is the downpayment on the change Harris can deliver. The way I see it, it took decades for this economy to squeeze the middle class to the point where life is hard to afford, where rent and groceries take a huge bite out of our earnings. The Biden/Harris administration has acted meaningfully on the root causes of this hard-to-live-with trend. This is necessarily a slow process of change, like turning a massive ship around, rather than the nimble sportscar we’d like to see do a rapid 180 every four years.
Biden administration lawyers are suing massive companies to undo or stop mergers that eliminate competition, the most important force in keeping prices affordable. A company without competitors can charge whatever price they want for their goods and services, knowing that customers have nowhere else to turn. As we speak, the Biden Administration is working to prevent a major grocery corporation merger that threatens to drive food prices even higher. Harris, with her notable background as a prosecutor and state Attorney General, knows how to enforce our antitrust laws to prevent companies from establishing and maintaining monopolies and preying on consumers and their own employees. She will continue our present course of change. Encouraging the growth and development of healthy competition in fields overrun by monopolies will take years, but we must put leaders in place who will prioritize this work. Kamala Harris will foster competition. Trump would favor monopolistic enterprises that favor and flatter him.
Biden’s strong pro-union position runs counter to over 40 years of Republican union busting, which has weakened the power of workers to win wage increases that keep up with inflation. He became the first US President to ever join a union’s picket line: the United Auto Workers. Unions have historically raised the standard of living for all workers, union and non-union alike. We’ve seen decades of union busting erode that standard of living for the vast majority of us while the wealthiest sliver of the American population has sucked up far more wealth for themselves. Trump recently congratulated Elon Musk on a Twitter Spaces call for his tough-talking threats against unions that would assert their rights to better wages, benefits and working conditions. Harris stands with unions for workers’ rights, as does Biden.
Republican administrations since Ronald Reagan’s early 1980s team promised that massive tax cuts for the wealthy would trickle down to all those of us in the middle and working classes. I’ve seen enough of this movie to know this was a failed experiment at best, and a massive theft from working people at worst.
Would you rather see our country change from a democracy where we debate policies into a dictatorship where one strongman alone proclaims he’ll fix all our problems and then proceeds to only fix his own? Or would you prefer that our nation continue along the gradual path prescribed in our Constitution where we enforce our laws that were intended to make our economy responsive to the needs of our people – one where our government defends the principle of competition that makes goods and services more affordable and attracts willing workers with good pay?
Either Candidate Will Increase Taxes for Someone – Who Should That Be?
Donald Trump proposes across-the-board tariffs on absolutely everything we import – an all-out trade war that he falsely insists the foreign countries exporting the goods would pay. This experiment was tried in the Great Depression, and only made the crisis worse. It was also tried under Trump in a trade war with China. The Asian nation retaliated with a tariff that slashed American soybean exports our farmers were relying on, leading to massive numbers of farm bankruptcies and requiring a $12 billion dollar taxpayer bailout to soybean farmers to stop the bleeding. You and I paid for that in our taxes.
Trump’s proposed universal tariff on all imports would be paid for by American importers, not foreign governments. Since American sellers of imported goods are not running charities, they will naturally need to raise prices to their customers when their costs go up. Economists estimate this will ultimately cost the average American consumer nearly $4,000 extra each year. Would you like to see $4k extra gone from your budget each year over an ego-driven trade war?
In 2017 when Trump signed his “big, beautiful tax cut,” it indeed cut taxes for the very wealthiest Americans and corporations, people who wouldn’t even have felt a negative impact of paying their already low effective tax rates. I can’t imagine a billionaire had to deprive themselves of a 2nd or 3rd yacht purchase because their taxes were too high. I believe entrepreneurs should enjoy the rewards of their innovative work and long hours, but if they’re successful in America, it’s with the help of American infrastructure, national security and a consumer class that’s supported with good governing policy and personnel. This costs money, and it’s reasonable to expect businesses to share a fair cut of their good fortune with the country that makes their success possible.
Meantime, middle class folks like me who see a chunk of our income go to state and local taxes, lost a deduction under Trump that used to save us money on federal taxes. My taxes went up, thanks to that “big, beautiful tax cut,” intended for those who absolutely did not need them. Now he promises to reverse himself (without admitting he’s reversing himself) and restore that deduction to middle class voters. If he were to keep this promise, he’d also also further reduce taxes to billionaires, burning the revenue candle at both ends. This policy is estimated to explode our deficit by an additional $5 trillion, versus the $1 trillion deficit increase noted for Harris’ economic proposals.
One Candidate is Qualified, the Other is Not
Kamala Harris has proven herself capable of protecting the interests of the general population through her time rising through the ranks as prosecutor. She has led with this skill through her time in the U.S. Senate and in her role as Vice President. She would continue to do so as President. She’s committed to the rule of law and upholding the Constitution. She has welcomed Republicans into her campaign and in negotiations in Congress to advance legislation that moves America forward with a degree of consensus not generally thought possible in this polarized political environment. She would continue to mitigate the cumulative damage of “us vs. them” thinking by encouraging a variety of opinions in the room. She promises to be a president for all Americans, including MAGA supporters.
Donald Trump, on the other hand, divides us into “real Americans” and “other,” who he even referred to as “vermin” in a rally speech. Those who disagree with him are “the enemy within” according to Trump. He calls the mainstream media “the enemy of the people” and routinely paints a target on the backs of reporters at his rallies. While president, he was documented to have lied over 30,000 times. His biggest lie is that he won the 2020 election, that it was stolen from him. For this lie and the violence he instigated over it, he was impeached a 2nd time, though the polarized Senate lacked the 2/3 vote required to convict him. This alone should disqualify him from ever seeking any public office again.
Yet there are so many other reasons he is unfit for office. He lacks character, integrity and, as he’s accused our current president of lacking, mental acuity. His own ex-vice president Mike Pence made history by refusing to endorse his 2nd campaign and even ran against him in the primary, largely based on Trump’s insistence that Pence violate the constitution in favor of revising the election results in Trump’s favor. Trump was unmoved when the most violent of his supporters attempted to hang his VP for upholding a law in the Constitution they didn’t like.
As president, Trump refused to lead on COVID-19 when the country needed clear and steady guidance. Other developed nations fared far better than we did in preserving the lives of their people. Trump chose to throw in with the anti-vaccination sentiment of his MAGA supporters at a critical time. He squandered his good accomplishments with the rapid development of life-saving COVID-19 vaccines by refusing to promote them and refusing to further endorse our only means of protection in the runup to the rollout of the vaccines – masking and social distancing – because he believed that would make him look weak. Around the first 2020 debate, Trump tested positive for COVID-19 and insisted on activities that endangered his Secret Service team, like a publicity-minded limo ride with his protective team enclosed in the car with him at close quarters. He held in-person rallies in which prominent political figures contracted the deadly virus, some of whom lost their lives, like former presidential candidate Herman Cain.
Trump irresponsibly blamed the virus on China before the facts were known. Those facts would have been known more definitively and sooner had he not dismantled our pandemic preparedness team that was monitoring epidemics in other countries. His reckless words about the so-called “China Virus” put a target on the backs of Asian Americans. Even with theories now gaining ground that the virus may have originated in a lab in China, it is deeply un-presidential to paint a vast nationality and race with one hateful brush. A crisis like this requires precise and measured words that strike at exactly those responsible, and coincide with concrete actions to address the situation. Did China’s President Xi authorize the lab experiment? If so, tell us that. Did a specific agency in China cook this up? If so, deal with that agency. Did this happen in the wild? In a wet market? How certain are we? Presidents shouldn’t get to endanger an American minority on a hunch.
There are so many other matters that disqualify Trump – his un-presidential mishandling of the racial reckoning surrounding the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer. His professed support for “both sides” of a rally that prominently featured Nazis and KKK members in Charlottesville, VA. Sure, fact-checking web site Snopes offered him a thin fig leaf to cover for his statement of support for “both sides,” but it shouldn’t be that hard for a modern American President to forcefully condemn neo-Nazis. He clearly can’t bring himself to do it and risk losing the support of someone who's “nice” to him. He also couldn’t follow the lead of George H.W. Bush who strongly condemned the candidacy of prominent KKK figure David Duke in a state election and even campaigned against him. Trump declined to outright disavow Duke’s support, instead playing games like he didn’t know who Duke was. He disrespects military service as something he was smart enough to avoid and cheapens the deep commitment generations of families have given to the defense of our nation and its founding principles.
Trump brags about resisting pressure to do something, anything, about the easy access mass-shooters have to high-powered military-grade rifles like the AR-15 after mass shootings and school shootings. Even attempts on his life with such weapons (one legal, one not) don't seem to have persuaded him this is a serious problem unique to the USA that could be mitigated with common-sense reforms that worked before.
He has proven he can’t be trusted with our most closely-guarded secrets, even before he was caught with classified documents at Mar-A-Lago that he insisted he had already returned and attempted to secretly move to where they couldn’t be found.
Even in this campaign, he’s openly spouting lies that endanger American people in real time. His provable lies about pet-eating migrants in Springfield, Ohio, foreign gangs taking over Aurora, Colorado, and politically driven hurricane neglect, have created needless risks of violence and discouraged desperate storm victims from seeking the help they’re entitled to. Without even holding elected office, he sabotaged bipartisan legislation that would secure our border and provide border agents the needed equipment to better detect and stop the smuggling of the deadly drug fentanyl. When Harris says Trump would rather run on a problem than solve a problem, she doesn’t go far enough. He lacks any official authority to solve the problem. He should get out of the way. He’s making the problem worse so he could benefit politically. We shouldn’t let him get that benefit.
Who Is This Election About?
Steve Schmidt has remarked repeatedly that the candidate this election is about is the candidate who will lose. Here, I’ve written much more about what disqualifies Trump than about the considerable attributes that qualify Harris. Trump’s record merits the condemnation. He has been president already. Harris has not. If she’s elected we will learn more about how she governs. And we will, in turns, praise and criticize her actions when either is called for. But we have seen enough to know this choice is not even close. Harris represents preservation of our American way of life and the institutions that guard our freedom and our rights. Trump represents burning it all down whenever it suits his personal needs.
The way I see it, this election is very much about Trump. He makes everything about himself, which has no place in governing a serious nation. But it’s also very much about the American People and the more perfect union our Constitution guides us to if we’ll follow it.