I Didn’t Vote for Biden Or Trump In 2020— This Year Is Different

A Mint Condition 1959 Edsel Corsair Might Fetch $300,000 At Auction Today

I hate Biden; I’ve always hated him and it’s almost unimaginable that I’m likely to wind up voting for him. That’s how dangerous to democracy and our society Trump is. A week or so ago, Noah Smith, a quintessential moderate, made the positive case for Biden. I wouldn’t be considered a moderate and I’m not going to try fooling myself about Biden. I’ve been following him since the mid-1970s and I know exactly what he is. I know why I’m considering voting for him: Trump, the worst political scourge America has faced since the Civil War and, without a doubt, the worst president in history and a criminal who should be locked up for the rest of his, hopefully short, life.

On Wednesday George Will, purportedly a NeverTrump conservative, laid out a different kind of case, how to make sure Trump wins in November without dirtying your own hands: don’t vote. And speaking on “quintessential,” that’s quintessential George Will. He recognized that Trump was a bigger threat to his kind of conservatism than Hillary was and in 2019 he wrote that the GOP had become a cult. He publicly announced he would vote for Biden in 2020. I don’t know what he did in the voting booth, but I suspect Biden disappointed him and won’t get his vote again.

Now he’s donned the mantle of the right to abstain from voting. “[S]cores of millions of Americans normally— and reasonably— think their political options should be much better… [and urges his readers to] consider, without necessarily embracing, an argument in defense of principled nonvoting. Plainly put, the argument is: Elections register opinions. Abstaining from voting can express a public-spirited and potentially consequential opinion. Regarding the supposed duty to vote, the right and ability to ignore politics are attributes of a good society. (Totalitarian societies forbid not participating in the enveloping politics.)” Quintessentially elitist, he also worries that Americans are too ignorant and stupid to vote, so hopes they do abstain.

Many nonvoters’ inertia reflects rational ignorance: The chance of any person’s vote affecting an election result is vanishingly small, so why bother? In most years, the disposition of most states’ electoral votes is not in doubt (this year, in perhaps at least 40 states), so why bother?

…This year, however, some might consider forgoing the satisfaction of voting to send the parties a message.

Competing but complacent manufacturers of a particular product— think automobiles; think the late 1950s to the mid-1960s— sometimes ignore consumer preferences. Remember the mercifully short life (1957-1959) of the Ford Motor Co.’s Edsel? This clunky, chrome-laden, more-of-the-same sedan arrived just as something radically different— the Volkswagen Beetle— began to find customers: In 1959, the year of the Edsel’s interment (sales: 44,891), 120,422 Beetles were sold in the United States, en route to a peak of 569,182 in 1970, by which time its success had produced competitive emulators.

This year, many millions of voters so intensely dislike one or the other of the two major candidates, fury will propel them to the polls. But suppose bipartisan disappointment propelled millions to boycott the election? Imagine a dramatic upsurge in nonvoting that was explainable as a principled protest.

This could not be measured in exit polls because nonvoters do not enter the polls. But talented psephologists should be able to find a way to measure, from the mass of eligible voters, the size of a cohort that abstained because of thoughtful disgust.

In 1948, the first presidential election after World War II and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s four elections, with the Cold War beginning, turnout might have soared. Actually, at 52.2 percent of eligible voters, it was the second-lowest in the past 80 years. (The lowest was 51.7 percent in the 1996 contest between President Bill Clinton and Sen. Robert Dole.) The highest turnout since World War II was 66.6 percent in 2020, the highest since 1904. It was 6.5 points above 2016, a result of pro- and anti-Trump passions. High turnout is a more reliable indicator of national dyspepsia than of civic health.

It might be a constructive signal to both parties if, for the first time in a century, more than half the electorate would not vote. (Only 48.9 percent voted in 1924.) Voters’ eloquent abstention would say that they will return to the political marketplace when offered something better than a choice between two Edsels.

Normally I might even agree with Will on this… but not this year with a chance that Trump could regain control of the White House. Trump and his cult are at the root of just about everything wrong with America today. And I’m someone who has believed all my one that the only thing worse than the Democratic Party is the Republican Party, something I got from my grandfather, a socialist. I wouldn't be surprised if Will believes that the only thing worse than the GOP is the Democratic Party, especially the socialists.