There’s an idea among the voting public that you can “hold your nose” while you vote for a candidate. This makes the action of choosing a certain candidate, however horrible they may be, seemingly tolerable. After all, you didn’t like that you chose them…as you went ahead and did it anyway.
Never has such an argument seemed so absurd as this year during an election cycle which narrowed our many choices down to two deplorables. God help us.
Whether you like it or not, voting for someone is a full endorsement of them. There is no other way around it. Choosing a candidate by way of voting means you are selecting them, their expertise (or not), their vision, their policies, their character (or lack thereof), and yes, even their temperament. Voting isn’t a half-hearted measure. It is a full approval of the person whose name you’ve selected. You can’t only kind of vote for someone. You’re either in, or you’re out.
This is why heartfelt, seemingly “brave” explanations from some members of the GOP amount to nothingness. Speaker Paul Ryan, under fire recently for “abandoning” Trump in order to focus on Congressional races, is still part of the problem.
Politico reports:
Speaker Paul Ryan told House Republicans on a conference call Monday morning that he’s done defending Donald Trump and will focus on maintaining his party’s increasingly imperiled House majority, according to sources on the call.
Ryan stopped short of formally rescinding his endorsement of Trump — but just short. His move carries immense risk, and Ryan faced blowback from all sides: Trump and his surrogates warned Republican leaders they would pay a price for breaking from the nominee; some rank-and-file Republicans warned the strategy was a mistake; and immediately after the call, Clinton tweeted to her nearly 10 million followers that “Ryan is still endorsing Trump.”
I can appreciate Speaker Ryan’s very public stance against the man who hijacked the Republican party, but only slightly. However, Ryan’s resolve amounts to nothing unless he rescinds his endorsement of Trump and also doesn’t vote for him. But I guess you’re supposed to vote for your party’s nominee when you’re the Speaker of the House. Party unity, and all that.
Others like Senator Ted Cruz can be thrown into this group, too. Cruz doesn’t really like to use the magic word “endorse”. He talks a lot about supporting the nominee, but isn’t fond of saying “I endorse Trump”. It might just be the bad taste of selling out that he gets in his mouth when uttering those words. At the RNC convention, he told the crowd “vote your conscience”, giving the impression that he wasn’t fully behind Republican nominee Trump. Oh, but he is. You see, he’s still voting, aka endorsing him, whether he uses that word or not.
It’s quite difficult to maintain that you’re distancing yourself from a candidate you clearly dislike when, come election day, you jump in to the voting booth to raise your hand and select them. But as we’ve seen this cycle, the pull of that (R) does powerful things to the sheep in the electorate. Unsurprisingly, endorsement-by-voting applies to Republicans who are so fed up with Trump that they choose Hillary. Well, congratulations. You’ve just fully endorsed her and the package that comes along with that.
So please, GOP. Those of you who don’t like Trump can halt the attempt to water down your upcoming vote for him on November 8. It is a full endorsement of him. You can hold your nose all you want and feign inner turmoil, but you’ve no way out of it. We can smell the stench from here.
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