Hey there, and happy Tuesday! As we’re one week out from election day, I wanted to talk with you about something that I’ve been mulling over the past couple of months. I’m sure the title gives away what that is. It’s a long post, but one that I needed to write. As always, my comments section is open and I’d love to hear your thoughts!

I’ve railed against Donald Trump consistently on this site. The argument against him is an easy one to make. I’ll briefly cover the bases:

And if that wasn’t enough, his rally on Sunday night might have just been the kicker. From endorsers calling Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage” and making jokes about black people “carving watermelons” to supporters explicitly calling the gathering “a Nazi rally,” shame was difficult to find at Madison Square Garden this weekend. What’s worse is that the campaign pre-read these speeches, meaning that the “jokes” about Jews being cheap and Palestinians being “rock throwers” had the tacit endorsement of the Trump team.

Those links all lead to evidence if you’re unconvinced or think I’m lying. The most obviously damning thing for me though, is that he was found by a court of law consisting of Republicans and Democrats alike to have forcibly penetrated the vagina of E. Jean Carroll against her will. If that—or any of the other stated reasons—aren’t enough for you to at least not support Donald Trump, this article isn’t for you.

So we’ve established that voting for Trump is unacceptable.

It’s one thing to say “don’t vote for Trump.” I’ve made that argument plenty of times on this site. But I’ve only sort of touched on making a possible conservative case for Harris. And even then, I ended the article with this:

But as I’ve thought more about the issue and read more about the impacts of their plans, I’ve come to the conclusion that there isn’t a conservative case for Harris; voting for Harris is the only truly conservative option here.

First, let’s define American conservatism. In Reappraising the Right, conservative historian George Nash describes it as:

The conservative movement, then, is an attempt to balance these five different impulses. Like a spider’s web, if any one portion of the movement gets too strong, it can pull at the weakening threads of the other groups and dissolve the fusionist coalition as a whole.

To take this to its logical conclusion, the conservative choice therefore is the one that upsets the balance of this coalition the least—the choice that best balances the varied and competing interests of these different groups which claim the title “conservative”.

So let’s talk policy. Specifically, let’s take a look at the three most important issues to many Americans, including myself. And I’m not going to just make the negative case for why Trump is not conservative on these issues, but also make the positive case for why Harris is actually the conservative choice.

Anyone who has taken a high school economics class knows that price is a function of supply and demand. If you want lower prices on goods, you either have to reduce the demand for them or expand the supply. A tariff does neither of these things. In fact, tariffs reduce supply for goods as it costs sellers more to import goods. And the goods that do get imported cost more.

Because of this, the Tax Policy Center has calculated that the Trump Tariff’s would cost the average American family approximately $3,000 per year:

This should be no surprise to anyone who lived under the previous Trump administration: the Tax Foundation has noted that in his first term, Trump used tariffs to impose one of the largest tax hikes in decades on the American people. According to their calculations, they claim that this has cost the Average American family approximately $1000 per year. Of his new tariff proposal, they state:

But what about the national debt?

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget is a group of budget hawks run by Republican former Governor and Bush Administration veteran Mitch Daniels (you might recognize that name from an earlier quote in this article). Other conservative members include former Senator Saxby Chambliss, former Congressional Budget Office director Dan Crippen, and former Senator Alan Simpson. These are no slouches, and they are no leftists. And just this month, they released a report showing that Kamala Harris’s economic plan would add far less to the national debt than Donald Trump’s:

To be clear, both plans add to the deficit which is not great. But while Trump’s plan consists mostly of corporate tax cuts, Harris’s plan at least invests in measures that can reduce costs for the middle class (building more housing, expanding the Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit, and expanding Medicare to cover long-term care as our population ages). Additionally, these numbers are even worse in reality for Trump, as they are offset by his tariff plan. If you remove his baseline tariff proposal, the total price tag of the Trump administration rises by an additional 2 to 4 trillion dollars.

And how do we think these impact inflation?

Inflation, at its core, is the result of more money chasing fewer goods. To combat inflation then, the healthy approach is to increase the amount of goods and avoid increasing the amount of money in the market through government spending and printing.

So when Donald Trump proposes tax cuts, growing the government, and implementing tariffs that reduce the supply of goods, the mathematical, objective reality is that Donald Trump will drive inflation higher. Kamala Harris’s plan also spends money, but it does so while increasing the supply of goods. This will drive less inflation.

Voting for Donald Trump means voting to expand the size of government, increase inflation, ratchet up middle class taxes, drive up the national debt, and erode our state capacity for very little return. Voting for Kamala Harris means voting to expand the size of government far less, attempt to curb inflation, cut taxes for the middle class, and make investments in our economy that make it easier to build in America.

Which one of these plans sounds more conservative to you?

Now let’s turn to immigration.

We as a country are struggling to answer the question posed by illegal immigration. During the campaign, Trump and his team have tried to make the argument that the Harris-Biden administration has had four years to address illegal immigration, and that they have failed. This is just not true.

The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol recently released its August update for encounters at the southern border. Their updated numbers show that border crossings are now less than half of what they were in May of 2019, when Trump was president, and lower than they were when he left office in 2021.

As Forbes notes, analysts have credited this success in reducing illegal crossings to the Biden administration’s expansion of legal pathways, use of the CBP One phone app, a more aggressive asylum policy, and greater cooperation with Mexico.

These findings are right in line with what conventional wisdom tells us: when you expand legal pathways to give would-be immigrants options to enter legally, and when you help our southern neighbors better secure their borders, illegal immigration goes down.

In his 1980 presidential primary debate with Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush said it best:

Legal immigration is the antidote to illegal crossings. But immigrating legally is nearly impossible these days. Under Biden’s supposed “open borders”, this is the flow-chart one must follow to immigrate legally:

The Biden administration has made sensible changes to immigration policy to reduce illegal crossings. The administration even worked with Republicans to find a reasonable compromise that would have further enhanced border security while making it slightly easier to immigrate legally. Trump killed that bill. And Trump’s first term saw him engage in the exact behavior that we know increases illegal crossings: making it harder to come legally, and working less with Mexico to address the issue on their side of the border.

Our illegal immigration problem is so much better than it has been in recent years. The Biden-Harris administration has succeeded in bringing crossings down. That’s why some on the right (including both Trump and his running-mate JD Vance) have taken it upon themselves to invent new immigration-related crises, like Haitian immigrants “eating cats and dogs.”

A vote for Donald Trump is a vote to undo so much of the progress we’ve made in solving the illegal immigration problem, and it’s a vote to do so while threatening to round up immigrants in the night at gunpoint and separate them from their families. From Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller:

In contrast, a vote for Kamala Harris is a vote to stay the path on reducing illegal immigration. It is a vote to continue working across the aisle, to hopefully reintroduce that bipartisan legislation killed by Trump, and to make boring, effective investments to continue to reduce illegal border crossings.

Again I ask: Which of these approaches seems more conservative to you?

Lastly, let’s take a look at foreign policy.

Trump loves to call himself the “anti-war” candidate. He claims there were no wars during his presidency despite his term seeing a rise in drone strikes and dozens of American military deaths in Afghanistan. The facts show that Trump is not the anti-war candidate; he is the anti-leadership candidate. His plans for foreign policy in his second term are ignorant, if not outright cowardly.

In Ukraine, Russia’s war has ground to a halt. This year, the Russian military has gained approximately 120 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory—or approximately one Disney World. In order to acquire this small patch of land, they have suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties and lost approximately $200 billion. This war will be a war of attrition.

That makes it all the more concerning when Trump’s plan for Ukraine is to force them to capitulate to Russian demands. At the same time, Kamala Harris has advocated for continuity in supporting our allies with the tools they need to maintain their sovereignty.

And let’s make no mistake: China is watching this war with great interest.

As the Chinese Communist Party continues to eye the island of Taiwan, they look to how the international community—led by the United States—reacts to war. Trump’s weakness in Ukraine would not just spell defeat for our European allies, but it would also incentivize Xi Jinping to act more aggressively against Taiwan.

And while Trump has stated that Taiwan would need to pay us for defending them in the event of a war, the Biden-Harris administration has unequivocally committed to protecting the sovereignty of the island nation and its citizens. A president Harris would be a continuation of this policy that thus far has succeeded in preventing a shooting war in the South China Sea.

And in the Levant, Trump’s approach to Israeli-Palestinian relations is anything but productive. I’ve already talked about what it will likely take to settle the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people here. Trump’s actions while in the White House and his commitments to Bibi Netanyahu take the wrong path on this issue. In his first term, Trump acted in a manner of pure self-interest in Israel, exacerbating existing tensions and contributing to the conflict we see today. While the Biden-Harris administration has been less than stellar here, continuity in the region under Harris far better shot at ending the armed conflict than Trump’s blank check for Bibi.

In Trump, you have a candidate that will treat all foreign theaters of combat as opportunities to score political or personal points with tyrants and dictators, who has enriched himself in foreign dealings, and whose unpredictability puts our allies at risk. In Harris, you have a steady if imperfect foreign policy approach, a commitment to the rules-based international order that the United States leads, and a commitment to approaching foreign policy with the nuance and maturity that it deserves.

One last time I ask you: Which of these worldviews sounds more conservative to you?

Ronald Reagan once said: “The person who agrees with you 80% of the time is a friend and ally, not a 20% traitor.” For all of my gripes, I tend to agree with Republicans 80% of the time. But I agree with Donald Trump maybe 10% of the time. Compared to him, the 30% or so on which I agree with Harris seems like unity.

I don’t like most of Kamala Harris’s policy proposals. I do not anticipate defending much of her agenda. And my hope is that Trump suffers enough of a defeat to force the GOP into a period of introspection, and to convince them to nominate a reasonable candidate in 2028. From Nikki Haley to Tim Scott, Glenn Youngkin to Tom Cotton, the Republican Party is awash with candidates with which I agree on most issues.

I’m voting for Kamala Harris with the hopes that I can help one of them defeat her in eight years.

Simply put, my choice comes down to a recognition that politics is compromise, and that you only achieve lasting success by pushing and pulling on the world around you. My vote, therefore, is based on my desire not just to punish the Republican Party for nominating a senile, would-be tyrant sex pest, but to reward the Democratic Party for resisting the urge to engage in far-left talking points and tacking to the middle.

Harris has stated she will have at least one Republican in her cabinet. I want to reward that choice. She has advocated for bipartisan deals like the border bill. I want to encourage that behavior. She ignores left-wing activists by joining every call for a ceasefire in Israel with a call for the return of the innocent Israeli hostages. I want to incentivize that approach.

While she has not had a “Sister Souljah moment” thus far, Kamala Harris has shown moderates and disaffected conservatives that she sees more reason in our views than those of the street-marching far left. We can disagree on policy. And we can contest elections with all our might. But only one of the candidates obviously agrees that we can do so without threatening to rip down our institutions and demonize half of the country in the process.

For all of those reasons, Kamala Harris has earned my vote. I will still call myself a Republican, because I am a member of the party of Lincoln and Reagan. I will still call myself a conservative, because I agree with the intellectual traditions outlined by George Nash and Irving Kristol.

But I will do so while checking the box with a “D” next to it. For the first (and hopefully last) time in my life.