For President: Abstention. For Congress: Republican.

With about a month before the presidential election, I have made up my mind: I will neither endorse nor vote for Kamala Harris or Donald Trump.

Down Ballot, it’s urgent to give Republicans at least one branch of Congress, especially if Harris wins (as I expect). The odds are that the Senate goes Republican and the House of Representatives goes Democrat. Such an outcome would blunt the worst policies of a Harris Administration and set the stage for further Republican gains in the 2026 midterm elections. Hopefully by then the Republican Party will have begun to recover from the Trump disaster and to swing back to its ideological roots as the party of free markets, individual rights, and limited government.

Regarding the presidential race, I posted the following to Facebook, slightly edited for clarity. A fuller explanation is here. Commenting on the article, Haley’s Voters Size Up a Scrambled Presidential Race, I wrote:

I am a Nikki Haley voter. Since she is not on the ballot, is my only choice Harris or Trump? Hardly. What choice is missing from the article? The choice to vote for neither.

I won’t vote for Trump, even though his policies would likely be less bad. His attempt to overturn a legitimate election spat in the face of every prior president, the Constitution, and the Founding Fathers. This is unforgivable.

But neither will I vote for Harris, an even more reactionary figure. Her CNN interview statement that “The freedom that unlocks all the others [is] the freedom to vote” echoes the reactionary view of her party from Biden (“The fundamental right to vote is the right from which all other rights flow.”) back to its founding in 1828, which held that slavery should be decided by democratic vote. 

Harris, true to her party, rejects the foundational American principle of unalienable individual rights grounded in Natural Rights Theory, which holds that our fundamental rights—beginning with life, liberty, property, pursuit of happiness—are unalienable and precede governments, which “to secure these rights, are instituted among men.” In rejecting Natural Rights, Harris effectively cancels America. The implication of Harris’s view on freedoms is that individual rights come from government, and that any government can grant, create, or rescind anyone’s rights, including the right to life, as long as it is elected. But such a government is a totalitarian state, and that is the consequence of the proposition that all of our rights depend on the right to vote.

But freedom is not the right to vote. Freedom is the right of every individual, as long as they are respectful of the same rights of all others, to live one’s life by one’s own values and choices regardless of anyone else’s vote or of the outcome of any election.

No one is obligated to vote against their conscience. So, for only the second time in my life, I will abstain. I reject both candidates as contrary to my conscience, and I choose to leave the presidential line blank and to vote for neither.

Related Reading:

Why I Will Never Vote for a Democrat

Joe Biden—the Real Protégé of Jefferson Davis

Harris's Unchanged anti-American Values

America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It by C. Bradley Thompson

Voting Rights are Not the ‘Most Fundamental Right’—or Even a Fundamental Right. 

‘God-Given’ or Not, Rights Must be Defended on Rational Grounds

Related Viewing:

What Are Rights and Where Do They Come From? by Harry Binswanger