Choosing sides is not polarization
Sometimes it's unavoidable, and what's good for the country
On Election Day this week, I confronted the ugly reality of what our politics have become. This was entirely unexpected. After all, the election was unremarkable, featuring only local races in my little rural town of less than 2,000. Zoning board, school board, town treasurer, first selectman (the New England equivalent of mayor) and library board offices were all on the ballot. They are little offices, almost all filled by volunteers.
But as I looked over the array of candidates in the privacy of the voting booth, I realized I faced an unexpected question:
Could I risk voting for any Republican that I didn’t know personally?
Connecticut is not Trump country - far from it. My state and region may be among the last areas in the nation where Republicans are moderate, often pro-choice and believe abortion decisions belong to women, period.
Nevertheless, I wondered whether I could vote for Republican candidates for school board without a risk that one of them had the blessings of Moms for Liberty, the far-right fringe group endorsing such potential officeholders in many states. The organization has been behind scores of book bans. The Southern Poverty Law Center considers it an extremist organization.
Were any Republicans running in my town election deniers, believing the lie that Joe Biden lost the 2020 election? Did they support the trashing of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2020, and the interference with the peaceful transfer of presidential power for the first time in American history? In August, seven out of 10 Republicans had a favorable opinion of Trump and more than 70 percent would vote for him in 2024.
Would they cheer on Donald Trump’s plans to politicize the Justice Department if he is elected president next year, going after political opponents? Trump also plans to pardon Jan. 6 insurrectionists and authorize the military to suppress protesters. During an interview this week on Univision, Trump said, “…if I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them.’ They’d be out of business. They’d be out of the election.”
He is open about his intention to roll out banana-republic, fascist tactics if he is elected president. Trump is a cancer on democracy. He is our greatest threat.
Small-town offices have nothing to do with the president, either one past or one present. But what if electing one of these true MAGA believers, even for a minor office such as a seat on the the planning board, gave someone a political start to join Trump and his allies who seem determined to take a wrecking ball to our democracy?
As I looked over the ballot, I decided it was too risky to vote for any Republican whom I didn’t know personally. That amounted to one zoning board candidate and two running for library board. I voted for them. Everyone else I voted for was a Democrat, whether I knew the candidates or not.
This is what happens when a political party decomposes.
I have never been comfortable with casting straight-party ballots and just barely managed to avoiding doing so this week. My discomfort stems from decades of interviewing hundreds, maybe thousands of candidates for every office while writing opinion columns for four newspapers. It taught me that stupidity and short-sightedness can be found in candidates of all parties. No one party has a lock on integrity.
I remember, too, when voting machines instead of paper ballots were once common. The machines were great; they had a little lever above the name of each candidate. To cast a vote for an individual you could press down the lever with a satisfying click. And for a long time, it was legal for voting machines to have straight ticket levers, in which a voter could just pull one lever and cast ballots automatically for either all Republicans or all Democrats on the ballot.
It was an awful idea. Wisely, Connecticut outlawed such levers in 1986 and added a ban on them to the state constitution.
Candidates deserve to be considered on their own merits.
Yet we have entered a new era. As long as Donald Trump rules over the Republican Party and its members respond to him with eerie worshipfulness despite his 91 indictments, his lies, his bullying and his attempt to overthrow the government, the organization will have more in common with a cult than the Party of Lincoln.
That statement is no exaggeration.
Here is one measure of how extreme the party has become. An international study took place not long ago measuring ideological values and issue positions of more than 1,000 political parties in 163 countries. The study showed that the Republican Party was one of the most extreme. In. The. World.
And here is the scary part: The study took place in 2019. The GOP has hardly moderated in the years since.
So that few minutes in the voting booth confronted me with an uncomfortable truth. I am reluctant to cast ballots for any Republicans I don’t personally know, under any circumstances, until the party stops acting like an unhinged, fascist cult.
May that day come quickly for all of our sakes.
Goodness, Maura, you must have been looking over my shoulder as I completed my ballot on Tuesday. We had a few candidates who were cross endorsed, so I chose to vote for them on the Green or Working lines. And I do personally know some local Republicans so did vote for one. But I have been sad that no one answered our local paper’s columnist David Collins when he asked local Republicans to disavow Trump before Election Day.
I agree Maura. As long as the GOP is the party of Trump, I go across the Democratic ticket. Prior to that I always looked at each individual candidate to cast my vote. So sad!