Some right-leaning voters who oppose Donald Trump are thinking of voting neither for him nor Kamala Harris. I understand how they feel. In 2016, I published an article urging Never Trump conservatives to consider casting their ballot for a third-party candidate.
In the election that year, I did just that. I regret writing that column. I regret casting that vote.
To people like me, Trump represented a repudiation of everything that Ronald Reagan stood for. But as a conservative and former GOP staffer who had never voted for a Democratic presidential candidate, I harbored reservations about Hillary Clinton. Voting for neither Trump nor Clinton seemed to be a “safe” way to express disapproval of both.
Most polls at the time showed her on track to win comfortably. It seemed reasonable to argue that a significant tally for a third-party candidate might check her liberal ambitions. After all, the number of votes for independent candidate Ross Perot in 1992 may have nudged Bill Clinton to accept bigger budget cuts than he wanted.
But the 2016 election did not go according to expectations. Despite losing the national popular vote, Trump squeaked into office by edging out Hillary Clinton in key states where polls were way off the mark. Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson won 3% of the national vote, a high-water mark for that party.
An exit poll asked his supporters whom they would choose in a two-person race. Though many said they would abstain, more picked Clinton than Trump. We .