Republicans Must Move Past Trumpism — Or Remain a Permanent Minority

With Georgia the last state to be called for Joe Biden, it is clear that President Trump has lost the election. Though lawsuits and recounts are ongoing, they are unlikely to change the final outcome in any of the battleground states, let alone the race as a whole. As of Friday, the Trump campaign has lost 26 of at least 40 cases contesting state election results, with the remainder still pending. And despite several ongoing recounts (most notably in Georgia), the margins in most states are nowhere near close enough to expect any of them to flip red. A recount may change results where the initial margin is in the hundreds, but not the tens of thousands.

President Trump himself seems to see the writing on the wall. While he has yet to concede, he has admirably authorized the government to begin the official transition process with the incoming Biden administration. He reportedly already has his sights set on 2024 — “If this doesn’t work out, I’ll just run again in four years,” the President said on a call with North Dakota Senator Kevin Cramer. If he does choose to run, the nomination will likely be his for the taking — a recent Politico poll found that Trump has the support of 53 percent of Republican voters in a hypothetical 2024 primary. The next two runners-up were Vice President Mike Pence and Donald Trump Jr., with 12 and 8 percent of the vote, respectively. Candidates outside the Trump camp, including Senators Ted Cruz, Mitt Romney, and Marco Rubio, and Nikki Haley, each received less than 5 percent of the vote.

Trump’s appeal is understandable. In just four years, he cut taxes for middle-class families, nominated three excellent Supreme Court justices, oversaw the defeat of ISIS, brokered three Arab-Israeli peace deals, pulled the US out of both the Iran deal and the Paris Agreement, avoided embroiling the country in new foreign wars, and (until the pandemic) presided over one of strongest economies in recent American history. That being said, many of his accomplishments — tax cuts, conservative judicial appointments, a robust foreign policy — would be expected of any Republican president. It is not a denigration of Trump’s record to acknowledge that at least a portion of the credit he gets for many of his achievements comes by virtue of him simply exceeding low expectations. Nor does it downplay Trump’s place in history as an effective conservative president to recognize that Republicans can, and must, do better. 

As commendable as much of Trump’s record is, it is undeniable that his tone, character, and undemocratic tendencies have harmed the public discourse and alienated many past and potential Republican voters. In the future, Republicans will need candidates who attract new constituencies into the party instead of relying on an aging, increasingly white base. To be fair, exit polls have shown that Trump improved his performance with black, Asian, and Hispanic voters in 2020 compared with 2016. However, contrary to Trump’s claim that this was “largest share of non-white voters of any Republican in 60 years,” it was actually only the best showing in 12 years, and represents a recovery from the GOP’s sharp drop in minority votes during the Obama era more than anything else. George Bush, in fact, won the largest share of minority votes since 1960, in the 2004 election — not coincidentally, this was the last presidential race in which the Republican candidate won the popular vote. 

Trump’s improved standing among minorities is worth celebrating, but simply making up for lost ground is not a recipe for success in a country that grows less white by the day. This has been a consistent problem for Republican presidential candidates in recent elections. In 2012, Romney — like Trump — lost overall, but was similarly commended for his performance among minority voters. In fact, polling revealed he bested the GOP’s previous showing against Obama virtually across the board, outperforming John McCain among men and women, whites and blacks, independents, older voters, and even Millennials. If Romney had run in 2008, he would have easily won the election — but by 2012, the country’s demographic makeup had shifted so significantly in favor of black, Asian, and Hispanic voters that Obama was able to keep his edge, despite decreased margins among whites and minorities alike.

Not only were Trump’s gains among minorities insufficient, they were offset by losses among other groups that are normally safe for Republicans. Edison polls showed that in 2020, Trump lost ground among white men, voters over 65, and college-educated white voters. Trump’s margin of victory among white, college-educated men — which was already lower in 2016 than for previous Republican candidates — plummeted from 14 percent to just 3. Some might argue losses among groups like this are inconsequential, and point to white working-class voters — who helped propel Trump to victory in 2016 — as an alternative core constituency of the GOP. This is shortsighted. While every effort should be made to keep working-class whites in the fold of the Republican Party, they are not sizable enough to form a viable base going forward. In 2019, they formed just 40 percent of the population — down from 60 percent in 1990 — and are expected to continue to decrease both numerically and as a percentage of the population. Hedging bets on a shrinking constituency while settling for losses among cohorts of the population that are growing will only make each successive presidential election a steeper uphill battle for Republicans.

It is worth mentioning again that of the past three elections going back to 2000 in which the Republican candidate won the presidency, only in one — 2004 — did he carry the popular vote. While losing the popular vote but winning the electoral college is an entirely legitimate path to victory, Republicans should not be satisfied with letting this become the party’s modus operandi. Without the popular vote, even the most decisive electoral college victory leaves the winning Republican candidate with a weak mandate to enact the conservative policies this country so desperately needs. Without neglecting white working-class voters, the GOP must find a way to rejuvenate its appeal among white college graduates and people of color, lest it become relegated to the position of a permanent minority.

Who can accomplish this feat for the GOP in 2024? Not Trump, if the 2020 results are any indicator. Nor Donald Trump Jr., who somehow exceeds his father in boorishness and divisiveness. A good option might be Nikki Haley, a staunch conservative with an immigrant background — not to mention a woman of color  — who could appeal to voters of diverse racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. As the popular governor of South Carolina, a state with a relatively blue-collar, less-educated population, she knows how to speak to working-class voters. She also has a conciliatory side — in 2015, after the Charleston church shooting, she called for the removal of the Confederate flag from South Carolina’s statehouse grounds. If she were to run, she could capitalize on her background as a Trump administration alum (she served as his UN ambassador in 2017–18) to keep his coalition intact, while also potentially winning back Never Trumpers and other wayward Republican voters who went blue in 2016 and 2020.

Anyone who works in marketing will tell you that perception matters as much as reality, and presentation as much as the product itself. Much of Trump’s record has been great, but his tone, rhetoric, and personal character often bely his substantive successes. If the GOP wants to win in 2024 and beyond, it will need to find a candidate and message that appeal both to Trump’s largely white, working-class coalition, and to the educated and minority voters who will increasingly dominate the American political landscape. Besides Nikki Haley, other potential candidates who might fit this mold include Ted Cruz, Tim Scott, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton, and Ron DeSantis. Republicans like Marco Rubio or Charlie Baker would probably represent too much of an establishmentarian reversion, while potential nominees like Kirsti Noem, Mike Pence, Tucker Carlson, Trump Jr., and of course, Trump himself, would lead the party further down the same failed path as in 2020. Finding a candidate who can bridge the gap between both wings of the GOP will be difficult but necessary if the party is to remain viable in the future.

Trump’s loss aside, the 2020 results as a whole were fairly rosy for Republicans. Of the seven Senate races classified as “tossups” by the New York Times, five so far have been won by Republican incumbents, and polling for the remaining two (runoffs in Georgia) looks favorable for the GOP as well. Republicans also flipped 11 House seats, cutting Democrats’ margin of control in half. Remarkably, all 11 GOP candidates who defeated Democratic incumbents were women or minorities, as are half of the roughly 40 incoming Republican House freshmen. Many of them were recruited by Elevate PAC, led by Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, who herself is a paragon of exactly the kind of Republican the party needs. A small-government, pro-life Millennial woman, she combines staunch conservatism with an independent streak, breaking ranks with Trump and other Republicans on issues like climate change, immigration, and net neutrality. If Stefanik is a bellwether for Republicans of the future, there is cause to be hopeful about the party’s prospects in congressional, Senate, and presidential races going forward.

But the GOP cannot take this for granted. With the exodus of college-educated, suburban, and white female voters from the party since 2016, it may already be too late for the Republican electorate to shed — or at least mitigate — its Trumpist tendencies by 2024. But then again, maybe some of them will return, empowered by Trump’s loss in 2020. Either way, it won’t be too hard to find a 2024 candidate with less baggage and better rhetorical skills than our 45th president — so long as Trump himself is not the nominee. If he is, the change the party needs will have to wait until 2028. Whether it is in four years or eight, whichever Republican nominee comes after Trump will have a difficult task ahead of them — they must keep Trump’s coalition (working-class whites) energized and loyal, bring the voters Trump lost (white women and college grads) back into the fold, and make significant gains among fast-growing Democratic constituencies (blacks, Hispanics, and Asians). To do so will require walking a thin line, and Republicans cannot afford to gamble on another wild card nominee à la Trump. What the GOP needs is a candidate whose moral qualities align with their public stances; a candidate who can energize voters without peddling untruths and conspiracy theories; a candidate whose persona is suited to the dignity of the presidency. Anything else would be a death wish for the party and a disservice to the country.

A Thanksgiving Wish to my Students

As our last classes before the Thanksgiving break approach, I want to wish each of you and your families, just as I do each year, a very happy holiday.

But this year, particularly in view of the violence, intolerance, and endeavors to disown our nation’s history, exemplified  by denunciations of our remarkably successful constitutional regime of freedom, and the tearing down (or proposed tearing down) of monuments to our country’s greatest heroes – including, incredibly, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and even Frederick Douglass! -  I wanted to add a special wish. As you will recall, 2020 marks the four-hundredth anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims on our shores – the event that truly launched the American experiment in self-government. Yet, amazingly, this event is being marked to my knowledge by no national commemoration whatsoever. Indeed, the trustees of Plymouth Plantation, the living-history museum that has explained the Pilgrim settlement to schoolchildren and tourists since 1947, have recently announced a change in the institution’s name to “Plimoth Patuxet” (the Wampanoag name for the location) as a way of signifying, in effect, that we should think of the spot as still really belonging to the “native Americans” who previously inhabited it. The trustees are apparently signaling that they are embarrassed by the charge it has fallen on them to uphold. Instead, as many of you will be aware, the New York Times has launched a “1619 Project” for inclusion in schools across the nation, designed to teach children that our “real” national beginning occurred when a Spanish pirate ship landed the first cargo of African slaves in what was later to become the colony and then state of Georgia (but before that state, let alone the United States, had any actual existence).  

According to the original description of the 1619 project (since slightly modified on its website, in response to a welter of denunciation of its factual inaccuracies by a bevy of distinguished historians, most of them political liberals), its purpose was to demonstrate that America’s purpose, from the outset, was chiefly to promote the institution of slavery; that the American Revolution was fought mainly for that purpose; that the Constitution itself (contrary to the vehement denials of Lincoln and Douglass) was a “slave document”; and hence (we are led to infer) that Americans today have nothing to be proud of, but instead should either be atoning for our supposed “white privilege” (whatever our economic status, ethnic background, or when we or our ancestors first arrived in this country) or else demanding “reparations” for the oppression that the United States has inflicted, and continues to inflict, on members of certain “minority” groups (African-Americans, so-called “indigenous” people, and even Latinos – nearly all of whose ancestors, if not they themselves, arrived in the U.S. long after the end of slavery and approaching six decades after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act). Joining in the trend of self-flagellation not merely for the sins of our country, but for those of the European explorers who first discovered the Americas in a manner that paved the way for their lasting settlement, Holy Cross’s administration this past fall announced that the holiday previously celebrated as Columbus Day would henceforth be commemorated as “Indigenous Peoples Day.”

As anyone with the barest modicum of historical knowledge should be aware, slavery, and its attendant horrors, was anything but an American, or Western, invention. As the scholar Robert Royal has pointed out, it has been “a universal in human history from ancient Greece and Mesopotamia to China, classical Greece and Rome, as well as Russia, the scattered kingdoms of Central Africa, the First Nations of Canada, various other North American tribes, the great empires of the Mayans and Aztecs, the Ottoman Empire,” as well as the antebellum American South. The vast majority of African slaves brought to the Americas were shipped to Iberian South America, not the land that later became the United States. What distinguished America from this worldwide tradition was not the practice of slavery, but rather our political founding in a declaration that all human beings are naturally equal, and equally entitled to the protection of their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – which became the ground of the world’s great movement to abolish that evil institution. (The English abolition movement, which also began in the late 18th century, affected far fewer people. And it was the English, after all, who first planted the institution on our shores – against the strenuous efforts of the great liberal philosopher and statesman, John Locke, who inspired the Declaration of Independence, to combat its spread.)

As for lamenting the European conquest of the Americas from their previous “indigenous” inhabitants, this condemnation rests in part on a myth that those inhabitants shared a sort of Edenic, pacific, nature-respecting existence prior to the arrival of the new settlers. This impression is utterly false. Long before the Pilgrims’ arrival, local Indian tribes, as Royal observes, practiced “continual tribal warfare with … scalpings, kidnappings, and torture of captives.” And in 1776, the very year in which Americans declared their independence, he adds, “the Lakota Sioux conquered the Black Hills, where Mount Rushmore” (the site of anti-American demonstrations this past year) is located, “wiped out the local Cheyenne who held it previously,” and who themselves had conquered it from the Kiowa. Slavery, too, “was a part of Native American traditions, both before and after” the European arrival, with at least 4,000 black slaves perishing along the Trail of Tears, the series of forced migrations of Indian tribes from the American Southeast to the West during the early nineteenth century. (See Royal, “Discovering Columbus,” Claremont Review of Books, Fall, 2020).

Respect for nature? When our daughters were young, while on a tour of American and Canadian national parks out west, we stopped off (on the enthusiastic recommendation of a multiculturalist from our hometown) at the “Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump,” a UNESCO World Heritage site in Alberta – where we were invited to admire the “wisdom” of Native Americans who had devised means of tricking huge herds of buffalo (with the aid of fires lit at night) into jumping over a cliff, to their death, so as to harvest their remains. Imagine how many carcasses of those large, if not particularly intelligent, mammals must have been wasted! (By contrast, the Chicago stockyards at their worst seem far less cruel – and certainly less wasteful.) Finally, it must be remembered that the great urban civilizations of middle and South America, such as the Incas and Aztecs, were  built, Royal observes, “by conquest over neighboring peoples, and maintained by human sacrifice to bloodthirsty gods who required human blood” to maintain the world’s “equilibrium.” (The Spanish explorer Cortes was able to defeat the Aztecs with only a small number of troops because he was aided by members of other indigenous peoples desperate to escape the sacrifices imposed upon them by their native, imperial overlords.)

But enough of the relatively remote past. Most black people aside, the vast majority of present-day Americans who are not themselves immigrants are descended from immigrants (including, in my case, my father, and my mother’s family) who came to this country seeking liberation from the oppression they endured abroad, and the opportunity to advance in life that was denied them by the oppressive rule of the Russian Tsars, the British in Ireland, French aristocrats, Turks oppressing Armenians, Chinese and Japanese dynasts, and so on. In recent decades, their ranks have been swelled by millions of refugees and asylum-seekers (both legal and illegal) from the Spanish-speaking nations south of our borders – as well as many thousands from the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, India, and the West Indies. To lament the European conquest of the Americas is to wish that all of our immigrant forebears had remained in the often-crowded “old countries” whence they came, and that we ourselves (assuming that our antecedents had survived such events as the Nazi Holocaust and the mass murders perpetrated by villainous despots like Stalin and Mao) had inherited the mantle of serfdom and permanent poverty. (It is also to lament the development of the single world power without whose efforts the Nazis’ and Communists’ pursuit of world domination might well have succeeded.) 

It will serve no purpose to stress here a fact that everyone knows: the continued existence in our country of large inequalities in income, education, opportunity to advance, and susceptibility to criminal violence among different racial and ethnic groups. The reasons for these inequalities are complex, but they are not typically the result of legal obstacles placed in the way of people’s advancement. The causes, identified by numerous highly competent social scientists, include the continuing rise in single-parent families (a growing problem among “whites,” but much more serve among blacks and Latinos), which provide a poor environment for children, and one in which criminal gangs flourish; poor public schools, suffering from a failure to enforce discipline, and teachers’ unions that make it almost impossible to dismiss incompetent or unmotivated teachers, while doing their best to block the establishment of charter schools, and programs of vouchers that enable kids from poor families to attend private and parochial schools; minimum-wage laws that make it harder for young people to obtain entry-level jobs (along with other market restrictions, such as requiring individuals engaging in personal-care activities like hair braiding and shampooing to obtain special licenses), and insufficient policing (polls show that a majority of African-Americans do not favor “defunding the police,” but rather wish the police presence in their neighborhoods to be either maintained at present levels of increased). 

Unfortunately, so long as considerable differences in crime rates among people of different racial appearance, or living in different neighborhoods, remain, it will also be the case that perfectly law-abiding members of certain minorities will continue to suffer the indignity of being stopped by police for the offense of “driving while black,” or (in cities which still allow this) being randomly stopped on suspicion of carrying illegal firearms. Nonetheless, politically incorrect as it is to point this out, the vast majority of violent deaths of African-Americans come at the hands not of the police, but of other black people. (See, for instance, Jason Riley, False Black Power, and Heather MacDonald, The War against Cops).

Regardless of  difference of race or ethnicity or religion, the United States continues to offer greater opportunities for poor people of all backgrounds to advance in life than any other nation on earth. The proof of this is the desperate quest of so many people from around the world to enter this country. Notably, black people from countries like Ghana, Somalia, and Nigeria along with the Caribbean, and Latinos from many impoverished and poorly governed nations to our south (poor government being the chief cause of impoverishment)  continue to migrate here, and often to prosper. (My weekly Sunday tennis partner is a dark-skinned woman in her early 30’s from the West Indies, who attended Xavier University, a “historically black” college in New Orleans, earning a degree in biology; then moved to Massachusetts to take a significant job with a biotech firm, while at the same time completing an M.A. at Worcester State University. She is a bundle of energy and cheer, as well as a devoted daughter to her single mom. She will go far in life.) If America is a racist country, why are so many poor people of color seeking to enter rather than flee it?

So as to avoid disclosing family confidences, I have not spoken here of my remarkable biracial grandchildren and their parents, on one side, or of my other impressive family of Orthodox Jews on the other. Who in history, prior to the founding of the United States, could have imagined a country in which a single family, as religiously, ethnically, and racially diverse as mine, whose forebears include slaves and also Jews who escaped  Tsarist oppression (the latter having left behind relatives who refused to emigrate and  who were later wiped out by the Nazis), could flourish as we have done?

Contrary to those aiming to achieve prominence, wealth, and even public office by spewing race hatred. America is not a country best characterized today as suffering either from widespread racism or “White Fragility.” As the distinguished African-American scholar Shelby Steele recently observed, in contrast to the claims of the “grievance industry,” since the era when the Civil Rights Act was enacted (1964), the threat of anti-black racism has greatly receded, to the point that “we blacks aren’t much victimized any more. Today we are free to build a life that won’t be stunted by racial persecution. Today we are far more likely to encounter racial preferences than racial discrimination. Moreover, we live in a society that generally shows us goodwill – a society that has isolated racism as its most unforgivable sin” (“The Inauthenticity Behind Black Lives Matter,” Wall Street Journal, November 23, 2020, A17). And as journalist Heather MacDonald, who was allowed to address a Holy Cross audience last fall (limited by a black student organization who had occupied half the seats in auditorium, departing after five minutes with assurance from the Administration that none of the students waiting outside to enter the hall would be allowed to take their places) pointed out, students at colleges like Holy Cross, whatever their race or economic status, are among the most privileged people on earth. The College provides a devoted faculty, extensive library resources, remarkable athletic facilities, and numerous staff aiming to help all of you succeed. Even more than most Americans, you have every reason to be grateful. 

But beyond your particular privileges, I beg you, above all, to celebrate not only a happy Thanksgiving, but a thankful one, expressing your appreciation at least by memory to all those who have given their lives – often literally, on the field of battle – to secure you and your families, along with the rest of your fellow  Americans, the blessings of liberty. Attend not to the slanders hurled at our country by race-baiters and demagogues like the Times editors, “the Squad,” and Ta-Nehisi Coates (who named his son, the addressee of his 2015 book Between the World and Me, after a late 19th-century African leader who according to Royal “captured and sold black slaves” in order to finance his empire-building). Contrary to Coates and the Times editors, the great African-American abolitionist expressly denied (just as Lincoln did), in his justly renowned 1852 Fourth of July Oration, that the American Constitution was designed to support slavery (since the words “slave” and “slavery” appear nowhere in it), but rather “a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT” (his caps), whose full promise only remained to be fulfilled. And back in 1849, in his essay “The Destiny of Colored Americans,” Douglass refuted those who would separate black people (once emancipated) from their proper place in the American polity, calling this nation – rather than Africa – “the abode of civilization and religion.” Those like ex-quarterback Colin Kaepernick who express their contempt for our country’s flag and all it represents while raking in millions merely for playing a game and turning themselves into media celebrities are guilty of the extremest form of ingratitude. Douglass, a man of enormous pride as well as heroic achievement, would I am confident have had nothing but scorn for such behavior.

Please, this Thanksgiving, be thankful. In the future, do your best to acquaint yourselves with the thought and achievements of America’s greatest thinkers and statesmen – and of the liberal political philosophers who inspired them. And – when you find the time – please watch Ken Burns’s marvelous documentary film series “The War,” which originally appeared on PBS a decade or so ago. It depicts  the inestimable sacrifices that ordinary Americans made, both on the battlefield and at home, to keep our country, and the world, free during the Second World War.  

Speaking for myself and my wife, I  can never cease to be grateful that her and my respective fathers and grandparents, who possessed practically no material wealth at the time, were allowed to enter this country and become citizens, a century and more ago. Like so many other immigrant parents, they worked like hell so that we and our siblings and children could attend college and graduate school and enjoy opportunities that are unsurpassed in the world, and are of a kind unrivaled by anything that anyone but  kings, aristocrats, and despots might have enjoyed in the world’s previous history. (And yes, our parents and grandparents, along with other Jews, lived amid a good deal of anti-Semitic discrimination and prejudice in this country through at least the first half of the twentieth century: for instance, it was practically impossible for a Jew to be hired as a college professor nationwide until sometime in the 1950s. And in Worcester, a surprisingly backward place, a remnant of such discriminatory attitudes and practices  towards Jews and other “minorities” in secondary areas of life had only recently eroded by the time my wife and I arrived in the mid-‘70s. But that never reduced our parents’ or our own appreciation of America’s greatness and the justness of its fundamental political principles, or the fundamental goodness of its people.)

Again, I wish you and your families a happy, blessed, and thankful Thanksgiving.

Demographics Are Not Destiny for The Democrats

For decades, pundits predicted that the Republican Party will eventually wither and die due to changing demographics. This thesis was the basis for a highly regarded book, The Emerging Democratic Majority. The authors of this book posited that the Democratic hold upon racial and religious minorities, immigrants, college educated voters, and women would drive the Democrats to a permanent progressive majority. While there has been some evidence in the past that substantiated this theory, this month’s results have shown that changing demographics and high voter turnout in minority communities will not always benefit the Democratic Party and their candidates. 

Even after countless allegations of racism, President Trump performed better in minority communities than any Republican presidential candidate has in decades: according to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research, President Trump received the highest share of the minority vote since Richard Nixon’s first campaign in 1960. This claim is further supported by the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, an online academic study that includes over fifty thousand likely voters. According to their findings, which actually underestimated Trump’s levels of support, President Trump would perform eleven percent better amongst the Latino community and three percent better amongst the Black community. 

President Trump’s increased levels of support among minorities is excellent news for the future of the Republican Party, and if the trends continue in this direction, they are ominous for Democratic chances in our rapidly diversifying nation. However, Republicans should not take these voters for granted. In fact, they are the least stable component of the Republican coalition. If the Republicans go back to the establishmentarian politics expressed by George Bush, Mitt Romney, and now Nikki Haley, they will lose these voters. Many of these voters are first-time voters who specifically registered to vote for Donald Trump and against elements within the Democratic Party that are moving to the far-left especially on abortion and energy issues. They voted for the economic nationalism championed by Trump and against the growing left-wing of the Democratic Party. 

An example of this realignment is the small city of Central Falls, Rhode Island where President Trump performed nineteen and half percentage points better than he did in 2016. Central Falls is a poor, densely populated, immigrant-heavy community that is primarily composed of Puerto Ricans, Guatamelans, and Colombians. These are not your stereotypical Trump supporters, not even your stereotypical Latino Trump supporters. However, Trump did better in this community (which was ravaged by the coronavirus) than any Republican since 1988, when it had a significantly lower Latino population. James Diossa, the Mayor of Central Falls and a young, progressive Latino, has attributed this massive shift to controversy over abortion and increasing levels of support for socialism in the Democratic Party. 

This massive vote shift is not just happening in Central Falls. It is in every corner of our nation. From Lawrence, Massachusetts-- where there was a twenty-one point shift towards Trump-- to the South Bronx, to Doral, Florida,--the home of the Venezuelan exile community which Clinton won by forty points in 2016 and Trump won by a single point this year—and to the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas. In fact, the swing was nowhere as pronounced than in South Texas. 

The Rio Grande Valley and South Texas have historically been the most Democratic areas of the Lone Star State. Many of these counties have never voted for a Republican. President Obama carried this area with over seventy percent of the votes, and in 2016, Donald Trump even underperformed Romney’s drastically bad numbers. However, something changed in the last four years, and it does not seem to be a historical aberration. There seems to be a beginning of a long-term trend towards the Republican Party in the most Hispanic area of the nation. For example, in the 2018 Texas Senatorial Election, Beto O’Rourke massively overperformed Hillary Clinton in every suburban area of the state and achieved the highest Democratic vote shares in many suburban counties since the days of the Solid South. However, he massively underperformed Clinton in the Hispanic counties of South Texas. In Maverick County, where over ninety percent of people speak Spanish at home, O’Rourke underperformed Clinton by over ten percent. This pattern is evident throughout the entire Rio Grande Valley—where he underperformed Clinton in every single county.

This trend continued and massively accelerated in the 2020 Presidential Election. Many analysts expected Trump to slightly outperform his 2016 numbers in the area due to his increased share of the Hispanic vote in the polls. However, he blew past all expectations. In 2016, Trump lost this region by about thirty-three points. This year, he only lost it by seventeen points. Going back to Maverick County, Trump improved his vote share by twenty-four percent, even when turnout increased by over twelve percent. These new voters that Democrats hoped would flip Texas blue actually voted for Trump. This pattern was found throughout the entirety of South Texas, where Trump flipped counties that are over ninety-five percent Hispanic and hadn’t voted for a Republican in over a century. Some counties had an over fifty-five percent swing in the vote that benefitted President Trump. This swing is practically unheard of and virtually impossible in politics. However, it happened, and if it continues to happen throughout the nation, it will spell disaster for the Democratic Party and the stability of their coalition. 

Donald Trump did not just increase his vote share amongst Hispanic communities. The swings in Asian communities, especially Vietnamese and Korean communities, were almost as large as the ones in Hispanic communities. For example, in Westminster, California, the home of Little Saigon and the capital of the Vietnamese diaspora in the nation, saw a twenty-three percent swing towards Trump. Similarly, Garden Grove, California, a rapidly diversifying city where less than twenty-five percent of the population is white, saw a twenty-one percent swing towards Trump. This pattern was also replicated in Black and Native American communities, especially in rural areas. 

Robeson County, North Carolina is one of the most racially diverse counties in the nation, and it is also heavily voted to elect President Trump. Robeson is approximately forty percent Native American, twenty-five percent black, thirty percent white, and the rest identify with other races or as mixed-race. This area is not stereotypical Trump territory. Before 2016, it only voted for a single Republican candidate in its entire history, however, Trump won it in 2016 by around four percent. This economically depressed area with a large minority population was perfect ground for a Trump surge, and it happened. On Election Day, Trump won Robeson County by around eighteen points, and it voted straight Republican in almost every single down-ballot race. 

The typical consensus during this election, and especially in Texas, was that higher turnout, specifically minority turnout, would dramatically benefit the left and usher in a blue wave that would wash across the nation. However, it should be obvious to anyone who has paid attention to the results that this did not happen. In fact, the unprecedented wave of minority turnout actually helped Trump. Trump improved his margins and vote share in almost every single American city including Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Miami, and Milwaukee. He also improved in minority-heavy rural areas like the Black Belt, Robeson County, and South Texas. These results show that the consensus was just wrong, and that there is a shift up and down ballot for the Party of Lincoln, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Trump. While Trump definitely did not win this election, he laid the groundwork for the party’s future electoral success.

It is sort of ironic that Donald Trump of all people was able to collect the highest share of the minority vote in the past sixty years of Republican electoral history. The man who ran as the antithesis of the famed 2012 Republican autopsy by campaigning on limiting immigration, law and order, and building a wall won the very voters that Republicans have been wanting for decades. If anything, it shows that the political class honestly does not understand the voters of this nation, and they really do not want to. A typical Republican would have run on increasing legal immigration and lowering cultural tensions. However, Trump, to his credit, threw out this playbook and created the least racially polarized electorate in American history. One must admit that it truly is bizarre that this happened, but it honestly should have been expected. Many of these voters are working class, culturally conservative, economically moderate, and fled from nations that have a history of popular right-wing populist caudillos and unpopular socialist leaders. It should have been obvious that Trump, who is personally more economically moderate and culturally conservative than most Republican politicians, would win these voters over. However, most prognosticators, once again, got it wrong, and if this trend of minorities towards the Republicans continues it is only bad news for the Democrats unless they can drag a sizable part of the Republican coalition into their party. 

President Trump: the Catholic Choice

His personal life will not be discussed, as that is covered in an article elsewhere in this issue. The formatting of the argument is based on St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica.

Article 1: Is Donald Trump the Catholic choice for President in 2020?

Objection 1: Pro-life advocates are quick to point out the President’s record on abortion as evidence that he is a pro-life President. However, his other views are inconsistent. He supports and has used the death penalty on multiple occassions, which is a violation of the dignity of the human person.

Objection 2: His immigration policy is inconsistent with the teachings of the Catholic Church. His proposal to “Build a Wall!” across the Southern border is not only senseless, but is divisive and closes out a friendly country, and goes against the Roman Pontiff’s desire to build bridges with each other.

Objection 3: Continuing with immigration, the President’s policy of separating migrant families from their children was perhaps the cruelest policy in decades. Children were ripped from their parent’s arms, and many of them still have not been reunited with their parents.

Objection 4: The President, through leaving the Paris Agreement and repealing essential environmental regulations, has significantly damaged God’s creation, and if men like him continue to govern, the results to our environment will be catastrophic.

Objection 5: Even if Joe Biden’s beliefs contradict the Church's teaching in such a way that it would be sinful to vote for him, that does not automatically mean one ought to vote for President Trump. There are third party candidates to choose from who are more in line with the teachings of the Catholic Church.

On the contrary, “It must in any case be clearly understood that a Christian can never conform to a law which is in itself immoral, and such is the case of a law which would admit in principle the licitness of abortion. Nor can a Christian take part in a propaganda campaign in favor of such a law, or vote for it.”

I answer that, abortion is the single greatest human rights violation in the American justice system. Nothing comes close to this abomination in either nature or extent. In its nature, it is the direct murder of the most helpless person on earth: an unborn infant. It destroys the very object of the sexual act and the main purpose of the marriage bond: the upbringing of children. It has its roots in the eugenics movement and has impacted African American populations the hardest. In its extent, it has contributed to over 61 million innocent people being killed, all of whom were made in the image and likeness of God. U.S. Bishops, many of whom have been critical of some of the President’s actions, stated in a letter accompanying their 2020 voters guide that “the threat of abortion remains our preeminent priority because it directly attacks life itself, because it takes place within the sanctuary of the family, and because of the number of lives destroyed.”

It is clear where the candidates stand on this most important issue. Biden has stated that he will, if Roe v. Wade is overturned by the Supreme Court, “pass legislation making Roe the law of the land”. Further, the “public option” in his healthcare plan would cover abortion. The President on the other hand has been a consistent champion of the pro-life movement. After taking office, he reinstated and expanded the “Mexico City Policy”, which prevents about nine billion dollars of foreign aid from being used to “fund abortions internationally”. He has prevented funding for the “United Nations Population Fund” and has declared to the UN, along with other countries, that there is “no international right to abortion”. Two of his Supreme Court Justices dissented in the Louisiana abortion case of June 2020, and according to Planned Parenthood have long histories of “‘opposing abortion’”. Justice Barrett will likely be just as good, if not better, for the pro-life cause, as evidenced by the reactions of the Democratic Party throughout her appointment and confirmation. All of this being said, it is unlikely that the President’s Catholic critics doubt the President’s sincerity on this issue, but instead are focused on other aspects in criticism. He has done about as much as any President can do to end abortion.

Reply to Objection 1: Throughout most of its history, the Catholic Church has consistenly supported the death penalty as a just means of punishment by the State. The death penalty is allowed and even commanded within the Bible, was supported by Doctors of the Church St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, by Popes Innocent I and Pius XII (among others), and is allowed within the Catechism of the Council of Trent. At the very least, the question of its modern applicability is debatable and reasonable people can disagree on it.

Reply to Objection 2: While mentioning a right to immigration, the Catechism of the Catholic Church affirms that the State “for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible, may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions”. States are to let in immigrants “to the extent they are able”, which means that States can put just limits on immigration. Additionally, it states that immigrants must “obey [the State’s] laws and to assist in carrying civic burdens.” The United States accepts over 1 million legal immigrants a year, the most out of any country in the world. This means that the United States, perhaps more than any other country, has the right to limit the number of immigrants it takes in and to have just vetting procedures to keep its citizens safe. Tighter border security, including in the form of a wall, is a just way of accomplishing this end assuming it is effective. Whether it is effective falls into the sphere of practical policy.

Reply to Objection 3: In 2018, the Trump administration ordered the prosecution of all adults who crossed the border illegally, with or without children. Crossing the border illegally is a federal crime, and when one is arrested by federal marshals, they are separated from their children, as when an American citizen is pulled over and arrested for an expired license while their children are in the car. When this person simply wants to be deported back to their country, the criminal proceeding is quick, the family is reunited, and they are deported back to their home country. The trouble comes when the individual claims that they have a right to asylum in the United States. Asylum claims take much longer to process, and because of the Flores Consent Decree of 1997, the government can only hold immigrant children for 20 days before having to release them. This leaves the government with two options: either release the whole family until the proceedings are done, or only release the children, preferably with a relative who is legally in the country. The problem with the first alternative is that the families are released with ankle monitors, many of which are cut. In fact, according to statistics from the Executive Office of Immigration Review, 39 percent of “‘non-detained aliens’” failed to show up for their court hearings in 2016. This led many bad people to use children as a commodity to get them into the United States — many times not their own children; if these children were girls, they were very likely to be sexually assaulted during the trip. The Trump administration's brief solution was to separate the children from the adults after 20 days, hoping to remove the incentive to use children as a means of entering the United States. Many would argue that this policy was worse than the problem itself, and perhaps that is true: but that does not make it the policy of a Nazi, but a flawed solution to a real problem. The best solution would be for Congress to make modifications to current immigration laws so that the whole family could be legally held, which would both remove the incentive and avoid the separation. In any case the policy was quickly rescinded and is unlikely to make any reappearance, allowing the status quo to continue. It is a flaw of this generation that people view complicated gray areas such as immigration policy as absolute, while viewing actual black and white issues such as abortion as relativistic and open to debate. As for the 540 kids who have failed to be reunited, for 485 of those children, the parents have been found and none of the parents have agreed to take their children back, as the children have made it to the United States.

Reply to Objection 4: Unlike abortion, which is a moral question and falls within the Church’s authority, the existence and extent of climate change is a purely scientific question. That being said, the earth is a gift that we are meant to be good stewards of, which means that we are neither to undervalue it, or to overvalue it, viewing ourselves neither as conquerors or as parasites. When it comes to the Trump administration, one should look at the regulations that were actually rolled back: for instance, the Obama-era methane-emissions rule had little environmental impact and was very harmful to the fossil-fuels industry. With regards to the Paris Agreement, the Agreement includes a clause to promote “gender equality” and the “empowerment of women”, which when cross-referenced with other UN documents, most certainly includes the advancement of abortion and contraception, both intrinsic moral evils.

Reply to Objection 5: As shown above, from a policy perspective, the President is in line with the Church’s teaching on the most crucial issues, especially abortion. Additionally, most of the criticism of him revolving around secondary issues (immigration, the environment, etc.) is exaggerated or even downright false. That being said, while it is immoral to vote for a pro-choice candidate like Joe Biden, it is not immoral to vote for a third party candidate, especially if you are in a state like Massachusetts that is likely to vote Joe Biden in the Electoral College anyway. However, if you are in a swing-state, while it is not immoral, it seems very imprudent to vote for a third party, as President Trump is the greatest hope the pro-life movement has had in a long time, and his reelection could very well mean the end of Roe v. Wade. For a Catholic that ought to outweigh any other consideration.

Leave Your Cave: Applying Plato’s Cave Image to the 2020 Election

​To say that 2020 has been a challenging year would probably be the understatement of the century. Out of the many challenges thrown at us in this tumultuous time, Americans are faced with another one come November 3rd.

​Out of the many issues brought up in the 2020 election, the ever apparent polarization of American politics is one rarely discussed. And as the gap between Democrats and Republicans grows, it becomes more important than ever  not only to talk about why it is occurring, but to present real solutions to this concealed issue. Starting off this conversation, I turn to an unlikely source: Plato.

While the ancient Greek philosopher Plato is one of the most well-known and influential philosophers, many are unfamiliar with his writings and beliefs. In his work, The Republic, Plato writes about the Cave Image. In this image, everyone in this cave is chained up, not knowing about their surroundings or the circumstances of the cave. As a matter of fact, the only thing that can be seen is shadows cast on the walls by a fire behind them. If one were to be freed from these chains and look into the fire, they would experience a painful, yet entirely new perspective of their situation.

In using the cave image, Plato is evidently asserting that we are all chained up in our own personal cave, looking at shadows cast by others. In essence, Plato is challenging us to look “into the fire” of new, unfamiliar ideas and perspectives. While it can hurt to hear contradicting ideas, it is important to know the real truth.

Connecting this back to the 2020 election, it is ever more apparent that we are all stuck in our political caves. Whether it be a Democratic cave or a Republican cave, one can not be content with the information they have; one must continually be on the search for new information. In an age of opinion news, it is without a doubt hard to turn the channel when you are hearing what you want to hear. Whether it be Fox News or CNN, many Americans are content with their preferred news network.However, in a world  of modern technology, ignorance is a choice. And sadly, many Americans are content with this comfortable ignorance.

Just as staring into the fire was painful, flipping the channel and hearing news from a different perspective will also be painful. Upon hearing this differing view and being confronted with information you thought you knew, you will certainly feel threatened. As a matter of fact, you may feel dumb for believing in something that you once held to be true. Despite these feelings, it is important to remember that life is a struggle of finding justice and truth. And upon hearing this new information and becoming better informed, you have a duty to spread this truth to others who are just as ignorant as you once were.

However, teaching this new information can be just as hard as learning it. Many ignorant people will not listen to you and more still will simply not care. Others will challenge and fight you tooth and nail to protect their beliefs. Nevertheless, everyone has a moral obligation to become educated.

Whether you are voting for President Trump or Vice President Biden, one should not merely tag along and vote for either candidate because of partisan allegiance. With the remaining time left, undecided voters should do their homework, study each candidate, and come to an informed decision. Ignorance has repercussions and in an election with stakes this high, these repercussions can certainly have a damaging effect on the future of the country.

When it comes to any decision, whether it be politics or any other endeavor, one must choose to have an open mind. Limiting yourself to certain points of view is like being chained up in Plato’s cave. You may be content with the information you have, but one must explore life and be in constant search for truth. As Socrates once said, “The unexamined life is not worth living”.

Biden to Trump: “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Too!”

​Oftentimes elections, particularly presidential elections, are framed as matters of moral decision-making. Sometimes, this moral decision-making is centered around policy, with one policy being considered the moral option by one side, and the opposition considering it to be the furthest thing from a moral policy. This is also true of candidates, as those vying for power are framed through this lens of morality depending on their personal qualities and behavior. It is through this moral lens that the left is attempting to frame the 2020 Presidential Election. The argument goes something along the lines of, “Joe Biden is not perfect, but he’s still better than Donald Trump because we all know that Trump…” The remainder of this argument generally consists of a long list of moral grievances regarding Trump’s conduct, some legitimate, others decidedly less so. Democrats would do well to tread lightly, or not tread at all, with this approach. Joe Biden, for all his touted moral superiority, can be legitimately accused of engaging in the same behavior that Trump is so often criticized for.

​Opponents of Donald Trump often cite the numerous lies allegedly told by the President as examples of his flawed character and unworthiness for office. Unfortunately, Joe Biden has his own history of telling tall tales and bald-faced lies. A more recent example of this is Biden’s claim that “the boilermakers union has endorsed me because I sat down with them and went into great detail with leadership [about] exactly what I would do.” This statement was utterly untrue, as the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers has not yet endorsed any presidential candidate. Another infamous example is Biden’s tale of travelling to Afghanistan to award the Silver Star to a Navy Captain who rappelled down a ravine to retrieve a comrade’s body. Biden spoke of the sailor’s humility and stated that the story was “the God’s truth” and “his word as a Biden.” Except that it was not “the God’s truth.” The actual feat of heroism was performed by then Specialist Kyle White, who was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions. As noted by the Washington Post “In the space of three minutes, Biden got the time period, the location, the heroic act, the type of medal, the military branch and the rank of the recipient wrong, as well as his own role in the ceremony.” While hardly the only two examples of Biden’s dishonesty, the blatant nature of these two particular deceits demonstrates that Biden can hardly be considered on a higher plane to Trump in regard to honesty.

​Another common complaint is that President Trump often makes ridiculous or nonsensical comments. Again, Joe Biden is equally guilty, if not moreso, of engaging in this type of behavior. As far back as 2008, Joe Biden claimed that Franklin Roosevelt spoke to the nation in a television broadcast after the 1929 Market Crash. In fact, it was Herbert Hoover who was president at the time of the crash, and television would not become a common household utility until years later. During a December 2019 speech, Biden commented that he had hairy legs that turned blonde in sunlight and that the children at the pool he lifeguarded at would come up to him and attempt to straighten them. While it is unlikely that anyone would care to examine that quantity or quality of Biden’s leg hair to verify the story, it does raise the question as to why the former Vice President felt the need to make such a bizarre statement that was decidedly out of place.

​As far as ridiculous statements, Joe Biden also has a track record of insensitive and downright racist statements. While the media often touts President Trump’s uncontextualized remarks in the aftermath of the Charlottesville Rally, Joe Biden has made much more brazen comments regarding race. In respect to busing integration, Joe Biden stated that he feared his children growing up “in a jungle, the jungle being a racial jungle with tensions having built so high that it is going to explode at some point.” Regarding the Indian American community in Delaware, Biden stated in 2006 that “you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.” Perhaps his most infamously closed-minded remark occurred during an interview with Charlamagne tha God [sic], in which he told the presenter “I tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out whether you're for me or Trump, then you ain't black.” Needless to say, if Trump had made any of these remarks, it would have ended any chance he had for re-election, and rightfully so. But on account of the fact that Joe Biden is the alternative, Trump haters seem more than willing to overlook Biden’s history of comments that are at best gross and at worst racist.

​Arguably, the most egregious example of an accusation leveled against President Trump is that of foreign collusion. A nearly three year investigation and impeachment trial cleared the President of any sort of collusion with foreign powers regarding the 2016 Presidential Election. Meanwhile, Joe Biden has either actively utilized his influence to enrich his family and shape actions by other countries, or has looked the other way while his relations grow rich off of his name. Recently, whistleblower Tony Bobulinski, one of Hunter Biden’s business associates, stated in a letter that the information uncovered from emails on a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden was authentic, and that various stakes with the Chinese energy company CEFC had been set aside for Hunter and “the Big Guy." Bobulinski went on to confirm that “the Big Guy” in question was Joe Biden. This is not the only instance of Biden using his influence in improper ways. Other emails from the same cache include one from an adviser at the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, thanking Hunter for arranging a meeting with the then-Vice President. Hunter also received an email asking for “advice on how you could use your influence” from the same advisor in 2014, when Joe Biden still was in office. It is almost certain that Biden used the status of his office to secure benefits for his associates, and possibly himself, in a manner that fits the definition of collusion with a foreign power.

​Then there are the allegations of conduct with women. President Trump has seen his fair share of complaints, most notably as a result of the infamous Access Hollywood tapes. Biden, however, meets him in this area as well. Next to Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden was the individual Secret Service personnel disliked the most, particularly on account of his predilection for skinny-dipping in the presence of female agents in the White House pool and at his Delaware residence. As photo and video records demonstrate, Biden also seems to have a particular tendency to massage the shoulders and sniff the hair of various women who happen to pass within his reach, be they young girls or middle-aged women. This is a tendency that is invasive at best, and inappropriate at its worst. Most infamously, the former Vice President has been accused of digitally assaulting one of his Senate staffers, Tara Reade, in 1993, an account which has been corroborated by Reade’s former neighbor. If the commonly utilized hashtag ‘Belive All Women’ has any credibility, then Joe Biden and his supporters have no moral ground to stand on regarding his conduct with members of the opposite sex.

​As it stands, the quantity of incidents should be illustrative of one clear conclusion: there is no argument over the personal conduct of the candidates to be had in this election, and certainly not one that singles out Donald Trump. Supporters of both candidates should either choose to ignore their particular flaws, or merely acknowledge them as baggage carried by them, and focus instead on what they perceive to be the greater issues at hand. The unspoken truth of this matter is that the greater issue is ideology. This election is one of, if not arguably the most, ideologically-driven contests in the history of American politics. Therefore, I would encourage those on the left of the spectrum, who attack Donald Trump for his personal flaws and wrongdoings, to drop their facade of caring about personal morality and acknowledge the reality of the situation. The personal morality of the candidates is not the arbiter of their decision in this election.

If they were to accept this reality, they would acknowledge that for every potential accusation laid at the President’s feet, Joe Biden has engaged in conduct of an equal or greater nature.

Hold Your Nose and Vote for Trump

That President Trump is a man of many flaws is a surprise to no one in 2020. This point has been covered relentlessly — in good faith and not — by the media and others over the last four years, and the minutiae need not be repeated here. Yes, he is crude and boorish; no, he is not genteel or eloquent or particularly agreeable. But we’re not hiring a new hostess at Applebee’s — we’re choosing the next President of the United States, and we can’t afford to make such a critical decision based on considerations of personality or character alone. Policy must come first, and on this basis there is only one choice — because what Trump leaves to be desired in tone and personal qualities, his substantive record more than makes up for.

In 2016, after he clinched the nomination, there was concern among some Republicans that Trump would not govern as a conservative. In 2020, only the most vehement “Never Trumpers” could still hold this view. While his administration has departed from some positions — like an unqualified commitment to free trade — that were previously axiomatic within the establishment GOP, he has otherwise proven to be an ardent and effective champion of conservative causes. Whether his positions on abortion, religious freedom, and other topics are sincerely held is inconsequential — what matters is his record, which on these and other crucial issues has been near-immaculate. The Trump administration has seen over 200 district and appellate court judges appointed in the last four years, providing a bedrock of conservative judicial restraint that will be felt in the American judiciary for generations. And with Monday’s confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett as Trump’s third Supreme Court appointee, the nation’s highest court now enjoys a 6-3 textualist/originalist majority, finally making possible the ultimate pro-life victory: the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

If his reshaping of the judiciary isn’t enough, consider Trump’s remarkable foreign policy record. Since 2016, the Trump administration has overseen the obliteration of the Islamic State; the death of its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, by suicide amid a US raid; and the death of Iranian general and terrorist sponsor Qasem Soleimani. He has gone where previous presidents wouldn’t dare, moving the American embassy in Israel to the country’s rightful capital, Jerusalem; cultivating a strategic relationship with the volatile North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un; and gambling on peace in Afghanistan through a deal with the Taliban. He has brokered deals to normalize relations between Israel and Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Sudan, and it appears that at least five more Arab states may follow. His administration has pulled the US out of both the capitulatory Iran deal and the farcical Paris Agreement. But perhaps Trump’s best accomplishment is not what he has done, but rather what he hasn’t — that is, being the first president in generations not to embroil the country in another foreign war.

Concrete victories at home include the Trump tax cuts, which overwhelmingly benefit the middle class, with an average household saving $2,140; the First Step Act prison reform law that reduced a number of the mandatory minimum sentences that disproportionately affected black Americans; and a vibrant pre-pandemic economy with rock-bottom unemployment and significant real wage growth for low- and middle-income Americans; among many others.

But these feats are not enough for some. Many establishment GOP politicians voting against the president this election — a long list of whom the New York Times published in September — cite Trump’s incivility and dishonesty. Anti-Trumpers like these frequently bemoan the perceived loss of the “dignity of the office” — and they have a point. But we cannot simply vote for the person who least offends our sensibilities — there are much graver issues to consider. President Obama, for one, was the ultimate gentleman — a man who truly possessed the kind of poise, character, and dignity becoming of the presidency. But he also presided over a ghoulish abortion regime, undermined religious freedom, oversaw the quasi-socialization of the American healthcare system, and destroyed American credibility overseas with a ruinously flaccid approach to foreign policy — to name just a few. That Obama was a “nice guy” is no comfort to the Americans forced off their private insurance, the Catholic nuns he sought to force to distribute contraceptives, the small business owners who suffocated under red tape and overregulation, and other victims of his administration.

To be sure, Biden is similarly regarded almost universally as a man of grace and decency. “If you can’t admire Joe Biden as a person… you got a problem,” Senator Lindsey Graham said in 2015. “He is as good a man as God ever created.” But if the Obama and Trump administrations have taught us anything, it should be that a good man can be a very bad president, and that a not-so-good man can be, in many ways, an excellent president. It is worth repeating that this isn’t to argue that Trump is the perfect president — he is not. But Americans do not have the luxury of being purists this election. This is a reality that progressive Democrats who now must stomach voting for Biden are experiencing just as much as Republicans who support Trump’s policies but are uncomfortable with his public rhetoric and personal character.

In a perfect world, Republicans could have a candidate who champions the pro-life cause and doesn’t separate migrant children from their parents; a candidate who defends family values while practicing them himself; a candidate whose persona is as suited to the dignity of the presidency as his ability to handle its powers and responsibilities. Maybe in 2024 the GOP will have such a candidate. But on November 3rd, America will choose between two imperfect options, and no citizen, right or left, will be lucky enough to vote for their ideal candidate. Instead, we must make do with whoever would do the least harm and the most good, and that man is President Trump.

Voting as a Catholic

Every time an election looms on the horizon, Catholics have to ask themselves: who will I be voting for? To pretend that there is ever an easy answer would be to fool oneself, for the fallen state of man makes a perfect choice almost impossible. That being said, there are certain principles that Catholics must abide by when exercising their civic duty at the ballot box. This article is not going to tell the Catholic voter who to vote for, as that is ultimately the choice for them to make. The purpose of this article is instead to inform the conscience of the voting Catholic so that he or she can make the best decision in line with Church teaching.

Catholics have a duty to participate in the political affairs of a free society, and to bring the Christian message into the world. In choosing a candidate, the first and most important consideration are the policies that candidate wants to implement. If those policies are intrinsically evil, a Catholic has an obligation to vote against them. Of course, it is almost never that simple. More often than not, every viable candidate advocates for an intrinsic evil of some kind. In this case, according to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, a Catholic can take the extraordinary route of not voting at all, or he can opt to vote “for the candidate deemed less likely to advance such a morally flawed position and more likely to pursue other authentic human goods.” 

Deciding which candidate is likely to affect the least amount of evil is no easy decision, but it is one that can be made. The USCCB designates abortion and euthanasia as the “preeminent threats to human dignity because they directly attack life itself, the most fundamental human good and the condition for all others” and “because of the number of lives destroyed [by abortion and euthanasia].” Further, the “direct and intentional destruction of innocent human life from the moment of conception until natural death is always wrong... [and] must always be opposed.” According to America Magazine and other news sources, Pope Francis has stated that he concurs with the designation of abortion as the preeminent threat. In 2017, 862,000 children were aborted, and since 1973, over 60 million have been killed. Pope Saint John Paul II, in his 1988 Apostolic Exhortation, Christifideles Laici, said that “the inviolability of the person which is a reflection of the absolute inviolability of God, finds its primary and fundamental expression in the inviolability of human life. Above all, the common outcry, which is justly made on behalf of human rights — for example, the right to health, to home, to work, to family, to culture — is false and illusory if the right to life, the most basic and fundamental right and the condition for all other personal rights, is not defended with maximum determination.” Thus the right to life supersedes all else — without the right to life, there can be no other rights; there can be no other priorities. 

According to the USCCB, a Catholic can never vote for a candidate because of his or her support for abortion. The Church teaches that to do so is formal cooperation with evil, and is a grave sin. Further, a Catholic can never vote for a candidate who supports abortion just because he or she agrees with the candidate’s other positions. To do that would constitute material cooperation with evil, and is also a grave sin. 

The USCCB states that it is “permissible [to vote for a candidate who supports abortion] only for truly grave moral reasons.” Catholics must not, however, engage in a “moral equivalence that makes no ethical distinctions between different kinds of issues involving human life and dignity.” A “truly grave moral reason” means that the alternative to the candidate who supports abortion must advocate for an evil that is inordinately greater than abortion. Because abortion is the greatest evil that the nation faces today, there are few issues that can supersede it. Some examples of a greater evil would be something on the order of genocide, or an openly expressed desire to use nuclear weapons without provocation. 

There are a few moral equivalencies that some make in an attempt to justify voting for a candidate that supports abortion. The most common equivalency is that the alternative (not pro-abortion) candidate does not take as stringent a stance against climate change or environmental degradation, and therefore it is justifiable to vote for the candidate who supports abortion and more stringent climate policy. The argument is that climate change will, eventually, be more destructive than abortion. Both climate change and environmental destruction are, undoubtedly, issues that Catholics must work to solve, for we are obligated to protect and care for our common home and God’s creation. There is an extremely important distinction between climate policy and abortion, however. First, the Church places the issue of abortion above that of climate change (as can be seen in the USCCB’s Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship). In other words, the Church unequivocally categorizes abortion as a worse, more pressing evil than climate change. Abortion is also the most immediate and direct threat to life that the nation faces, and results in hundreds of thousands of deaths every year in the United States alone. 

The climate issue, while certainly necessary to address, does not have the same immediate and direct threat. Even if one were to consider the long-term, whatever climate policies that the US enacts, the effect on overall climate change would be negligible, particularly when the largest polluter, China, and the other great polluters, namely India and Africa, remain (and are almost guaranteed to continue to remain) unchanged. Further, even with the most dire credible predictions, there is no reason that technological advances and engineering would be unable to prevent potential mass loss of life or to rectify the situation (be it through carbon-capture technology, renewable energy, emission reducing technology, infrastructure [like sea walls], or the like). This does not mean that the voter must abandon the environmental issue, in fact quite the opposite. Climate change is most certainly happening, and the Catholic will always have a duty to advocate for policies that protect God's creation. But the Catholic voter must consider the most immediate, direct, and known threat to human life as paramount, and that is abortion. Abortion, of course, is a policy choice with clear and obvious consequences (the killing of the unborn) being enacted. There are no major US politicians who are advocating for a purposeful increase in climate change with the intent to kill, so there is not even a remote comparison to abortion. 

Another claim made is that electing pro-abortion politicians has actually served to reduce abortions in the US. This claim is both illogical and false. Firstly, it neglects the fact that the abortion rate has slowly declined for every administration since and including Ronald Reagan. Further, the pro-life movement having gained traction and the Supreme Court allowing greater state restrictions on abortion after Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992, have served to aid in this decline. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion organization, much of the decline was due to the “declines in births and pregnancies overall,” along with state restrictions. It also has to be noted that the incredible strides in recent years of the pro-life movement are yielding very promising results, with pro-life judges appointed to the courts, and numerous states enacting pro-life legislation. The Guttmacher Institute, for example, reports that between 2011 and 2019, 483 legislative restrictions on abortion were enacted. So if nothing else, electing pro-life candidates and advocating for the cause of life have actually been one of the main drivers in the reduction of abortions in the United States. Electing pro-abortion politicians, especially when they look to codify Roe v. Wade into federal law or use federal money to fund abortions, would be a grave setback for the cause of life. 

A corollary to the previous claim is that it is reasonable to vote for pro-abortion candidates if they support expansive welfare programs, because those programs will help alleviate the need for abortions, and thereby reduce them. The first problem with this claim is that it assumes that abortions are mostly the result of financial issues. This is false. As the Guttmacher Institute found, 74% responded that their reason for receiving an abortion was because it would “interfere with a woman's education, work or ability to care for dependents,” 73% responded that it was about affordability, 48% responded that it was because of relationship issues or parenting concerns, 40% responded that they were done having children, and about 30% responded that they were not ready for a child. The reasons for abortions are therefore “typically motivated by multiple, diverse and interrelated reasons.” Therefore, while financial issues certainly play a role, they are far from the only, or even the largest, role. Further, the states with the largest welfare programs also tend to be the states with the greatest number of abortions. California, a state with generous welfare programs, accounted for 15.4% of US abortions (despite being only around 12% of the population), and had an abortion rate of 16.4 per 1000 women in 2017. New York, another state with generous welfare programs, accounted for 12.2% of US abortions (despite being only 6% of the population), and had an abortion rate of 26.3 per 1000 women in 2017. In the same year, the abortion rate for the entirety of the United States was 13.5 per 1000. In other words, the evidence for the claim that welfare programs reduce abortion is just not there (in fact, there is more evidence to the contrary). 

The nation faces an extremely important decision on November 3rd, and it is a decision with serious consequences. Hopefully this article has served to help the Catholic voter in making that decision. Catholics have a duty to participate in the democratic process, and equally have a duty to bring the teaching of the Lord into the formation of public policy. In the end, of course, the choice of who to vote for rests on the individual conscience.