Opinion
After Donald Trump’s first presidential term and now nearly halfway through the second, I have come to feel that I cannot vote for anyone who runs for office as a Republican. I say this as a result of living through Mr. Trump’s attempts to dismantle democracy; his use of his office to enrich himself, his family and his political supporters; his misogyny, xenophobia and islamophobia; his demands that Greenland and Canada become part of the United States; his use of the justice department as a vehicle for revenge against those who disagree with him; his attempts to stifle the press; his cynically imperialistic military actions in the Middle East and in Venezuela where he condoned the murder of people he called drug dealers without any charges or proceedings being brought against them; his construction of prison camps where the undocumented, often refugees and exiles, live and sometimes die under dangerous and unhealthy conditions; his illegal separation and deportation of parents and children; his use of ICE as an agency of state terror; his refusal to allocate federal funds for basic scientific research or for the maintenance of social service programs in Democraticled states; his childish need to see his name and image everywhere; and his pretense of representing Christian values while behaving in the least Christian of ways.
Mostly, I’m tired of his lies.
But the real reason I can’t vote Republican even at the local level where the candidates are often my friends and neighbors, people I know who would do their best, is that over the last decade the Republican Party has not stood up and said no to Mr. Trump’s excesses. The party’s most influential members have refused to condemn what they know is wrong. In the face of what they know is graft and self-aggrandizement, they have remained silent.
Perhaps I feel so strongly about this because I, too, have sometimes remained silent in the face of obvious wrongs and I regret that silence.
But here’s the hangup with my sense that I can’t vote Republican — where I live, only Republicans hold office. My county has 5,058 registered voters; 229 are Democrats. That’s about 4.5% of the total. If we remove the 324 voters registered as neither Republican nor Democratic — Libertarians, Constitution Party members, unaffiliated voters and the 28 voters listed simply as other — there are 4,734 registered voters, with the 229 Democrats making up just over 4.8% of the total.
All this came home to me in our recent primary elections. The Democratic primary election ballot was, as it has been for the 40 years I’ve lived in Wyoming, a very short one. While there were Democratic candidates for the U.S. Senate and House as well as for the statewide offices of governor, secretary of state, and superintendent of public instruction, there were no Democratic candidates for auditor or treasurer, none for my Wyoming House district, and none for the countywide offices of commissioner, coroner, attorney, sheriff, clerk, treasurer, assessor, clerk of district court, precinct committeeman or precinct committeewoman.
Some years back I was asked to go through the county election records to see how many people had won local office in the past several decades running as Democrats. None. It’s the primary that counts. As the Buffalo Bulletin wrote in an Aug. 13 editorial, “This year, every countywide race will be decided in the primary.” It’s pretty much the same at the state and federal level. Even when there’s a Democratic candidate, the winner of the Republican primary is the de facto winner of the general election. In my county, the choice is not to vote for a Democrat, a Republican, or some other party’s candidate, but for one of various Republican candidates.
But since I’ve decided that at this point in American history I can’t vote for a Republican, what am I to do? I could stay at home on voting day — not vote at all. Or I guess I could run for office even though I’d certainly lose.
Maybe I’m asking too much. I certainly don’t agree with every policy of the national Democratic Party and I have respect for the public records of many Republican officeholders. Still, watching the Trump administration’s efforts to slowly unravel democracy while most Republicans remain quiet is awfully disheartening. So this year, following the primary, I’m going to withhold my vote from all Republicans. It’s not a rational or logical stance, but going with my gut, it’s the one I’ve decided to take.
