Hello, and happy Tuesday! I’ve been away for a couple of weeks due to jury duty and other similar events. But we’re back in the saddle with a comparison of the two main candidates for the presidency, and why I think there’s a clearly better (or less bad) choice. Part of it has to do with the fragmentation of our society, and the bias within our news sources—which is why I’m excited to be partnering with 1440 Media for today’s post!

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In 1884, one of the most divisive elections in American history took place. The candidates, Republican James G. Blaine and Democrat Grover Cleveland, each had checkered pasts that provided plenty of fodder for the opposition to target.

Cleveland was a responsible reformer who took on Tammany Hall as Governor of New York. His conquest against the corruption, patronage, and inside baseball within New York politics made him a widely liked figure by Democrat and Republican alike.

But he had a checkered personal life. A few years earlier, he had a relationship with a woman named Maria Halpin, and likely fathered a son with her. After it was discovered that Cleveland was paying child support to Halpin, she publicly accused him of raping her. It’s unclear to this day whether this was an attempt to save face on Halpin’s part (having a “bastard child” was a social death sentence in many circles), or if Cleveland actually abused her. Either way, Cleveland’s private life was ugly.

Blaine, on the other hand, had a quiet private life. He had a strong relationship with his wife, with whom he fathered seven children. In almost perfect contrast to Cleveland, his problems came from his alleged corruption as a government official. Rumors circulated that implied Blaine had taken bribes from the Union Pacific Railroad. Eventually, a set of letters related to the transaction surfaced, all ending with a damning phrase: “Burn this letter”.

In one candidate, an effective leader and reformer with questionable personal character; in the other, a family man with credible allegations of corruption, bribery, and fraud.

One Cleveland supporter explained their conclusion:

It seems that the electorate tended to agree with this reasoning: Cleveland was sent to the White House after barely winning the key swing states.

But does this reasoning hold true today? If we are faced with two bad choices, should we always make a pros and cons list, and then select the candidate whose political agenda benefits us most?

I don’t believe so.

In the above story, and in a lot of our minds, the comparison of candidates’ policies and personal character probably happens on a scale like this:

In reality, the President is a position that has influence far beyond the laws that get passed and the executive orders that get signed. In the age of social media, the President has a visible influence on the culture of our country.

In reality, the scale looks a lot more like this:

Our government has existed for hundreds of years. The most divisive subjects of our history—slavery, land acquisition, statehood, suffrage—have mostly been addressed and are no longer points of strong disagreement between the parties.

While our parties’ election strategies and communications have become more divided over the years, the gap between their policy preferences has shrunk. Those previously divisive problems have been solved, with both main parties agreeing that slavery is bad, women’s suffrage and minority American suffrage is good, etc. We are arguing over the next order of issues that, while important, are a step less critical to our survival as a country than the last.

At the same time, we as a society are grappling with many new, disruptive technologies, and our culture has not yet adjusted. While the gap between our parties has shrunk, the chasm between us as individuals has opened wide. We increasingly live in echo chambers, getting our news from fragmented sources, and shaping our world to fit our worldview.

While our government is strong, our sociocultural health is weak. Because of this, we need as many examples of good morals and strong ethics as possible. We need leaders that are good people even more than we need leaders with good politics.

Let’s use this scale analogy to compare the arguments for each candidate. Actually, in line with the historical example above, let’s look at the reasons to oppose each candidate.

Let’s use a scale like this:

On policy, both candidates are bad. They each have a set of economically illiterate plans that will hurt the average American, espouse unconstitutional domestic proposals, and spit in the face of federalism and subsidiarity that have made our country the safest and most prosperous in the world.

On policy, the scale is pretty even. Both are worth opposing:

But let’s look at the character of each candidate.

For my part, I can’t find any real character flaws with Kamala Harris. Conservative pundits might point to her relationship with Willie Brown, claiming “she slept her way to the top”. That just doesn’t seem true to me. Rather, it seems like she just had a relationship with a person who happened to be a politician. If you can find evidence that this relationship significantly and materially benefitted her political career, I’d love to hear it. Otherwise, it seems to me that Harris is worth opposing solely on policy grounds rather than character ones.

To support Trump, however, one would have to walk an ethical minefield. He’s conned numerous people (Trump University being the most well known of many examples), repeatedly cheated on his spouses, expressed admiration for some of history’s worst villains, and regularly spreads conspiracy theories about everything from election security to medicine. He’s also been found in a court of law to have raped E. Jean Carroll, which should be disqualifying on its own. And in calling the political factions of the American right to his defense, Trump has corrupted and weaponized the Christian faith to which I subscribe, roping in leaders to justify his sexual impropriety and venomous tirades against the weakest of our society.

When factoring in these variables, the scale looks a lot more like this:

That’s not my place to say. If you’ve been paying any attention to the anti-Trump right over the past month, you’ve probably seen a host of infighting between leading figures about whether one should vote for Kamala.

There are anti-Trump conservatives who can’t bring themselves to vote for Kamala because of their strong opposition to her policy agenda. And there are anti-Trump conservatives who will stomach their policy disagreements to ensure that Donald Trump doesn’t set foot in the White House ever again.

Both positions are respectable. The way I see it, there is only one wrong conclusion on this: that one cannot vote for Harris and call themselves a conservative. There are compelling conservative arguments for Harris, whether I agree with them or not.

Like I mentioned in this article, I probably won’t vote for Kamala Harris unless something happens to change the fact that I don’t live in a swing state. My vote won’t measurably impact who occupies the White House on January 20, 2025. So I’ll probably write in Mitt Romney, Mitch Daniels, or Mickey Mouse (or the “3 Ms” as I call them).

But if I lived in Arizona, Michigan, or Pennsylvania? That calculus very well could change.