Vote against any candidate who either supports his administration or who lacks the courage to speak against it.
We will lose some good Republican office holders in November not because they are incompetent but because they are silent. As Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense in 1776:
Voters should evaluate their candidates with much greater thought and care this time, more than any time we have experienced. They and the state and the nation will be well-served by allowing their inner Independent to emerge and evaluate each candidate on both sides of the ballot with thought and concern.
We do not advocate wholesale rejection of the Republicans. A Democrat might have less to offer to voters and should not be elected solely because that candidate has a D above their column. Likewise, individual Republicans should not be solely evaluated because of voter hostility toward the President. Think. Evaluate.
At the same time, this is no time to be a summer soldier and a sunshine patriot. There must be a strong message from the citizens of this country that blind loyalty to Donald Trump carries a cost.
We have lived through the completely unnecessary election disaster that his demand for another Republican congressional district has caused with the Secretary of State turning himself into a pretzel trying to defend his actions and his party’s decisions supporting Trump’s wishes.
If I was a Republican candidate for the General Assembly, whether as a new person running for a House seat or a House member hoping move up to the Senate, I would look at the overwhelming rejection of two GOP amendments in August, the dropping survey figures for the President and for our Governor, the furor over congressional districts, and sense that approval of Republican proposals on the November ballot might not go well and I would carefully consider what kind of lawmaker I will promise to be—
—and then hope I get a chance to keep that promise, knowing that in just two years as a State Representative I will have a record no matter what I say I am for in this election.
This is a time for candidates on both sides of the aisle to honestly evaluate who they are. It is not enough for a Democrat to run on the concept that he or she is not a Republican. It is not enough for a Republican to remain silent about current times and issues or to deny what they have done to contribute to them.
This is a time to start over for some, perhaps many, of our lawmakers to convincingly promise not to be who they have been and for others to be specific about what they want to do that will be better than what has been done.
It is not true that in politics a leopard cannot change his spots. Whether that leopard can be convincing in trying to do so is for voters to decide.
It is American to vote back and forth on the ballot. We are living the danger of determining fitness of office only on the basis of an R or a D. Do not be afraid to cross party lines. Your vote is secret. Only you will know. Voters must exercise their conscience when their party’s candidate will not exercise his.
Whether voters realize it or not, the future of our state is very much in their hands in November.
We voters should keep in mind the words of Lincoln in his address to a joint session of Congress in 1862:
“We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us.” What was good advice for Congress at the start of the Civil War is good advice for the electorate today. These are dangerous, historic, times and we must remember, as Lincoln also said 164 years ago, “We cannot escape history.”
For generations we have failed to recognize the value of what we have obtained too cheaply and esteemed too lightly.
A President who has no loyalty to this nation and its people but only to himself is an albatross around the necks of many candidates who have not or will not stand apart from him and in their silence sanction the evil that he is and that he does.
Our preachers tells us it is never to late to repent and it is never too late to respect the truly penitent. That’s a good point to think about in the voting booth.
History will measure us severely by the choices we make in November.
(Image credit: libquotes.com)