Trump and Third Parties, Politics and Culture

I won't vote for Donald Trump in November.  I certainly will not vote for Trump out of fear of Hillary Clinton. I don't think people who will are immoral, but I cannot do so in good conscience and therefore will not vote for him. I will vote third party. 

I'd like to explain why I'm at peace with my decision to vote third party, because I've been told a third-party vote is a vote for Clinton, and I strongly disagree.

The first reason why I will vote third party for President is because of Trump’s flaws.

I'm not going to list all of Trump's flaws - I'm assuming most serious Catholic voters know them and in all likelihood share my concerns. He was pro-choice before lately becoming pro-life; he’s considering shutting down mosques that "preach hate;" he wants to ban all members of an entire religion from entering our country; he constantly changes position on policy issues...assuming he's taken a position. His personal life raises issues from his extramarital trysts and multiple marriages; there's the shady business deals; he has no problem with biological men using women's bathrooms; he’s made millions off gambling; he seems to have no problem lying about or denying things he's previously said; the fact that he feels he’s a man who doesn’t need forgiveness because he’s already a good person. Just like Clinton’s flaws, Trump’s flaws are grave enough to make me concerned about what kind of president he would be. Concerned enough that I will not vote for Donald Trump.

The second reason I will vote third party for President is because I don’t want to waste my vote.

You may laugh, but a quick civics refresher: The next president of the United States of America does NOT need to win the majority of votes in the country to become president. They only need to win the majority of the 538 electors in the electoral college; one elector for each member of Congress. That means that the winning candidate for president needs to win 270 electoral votes.

The minimum number of electors a state can have is three - remember the Constitution guarantees every state at least one representative in the House, apportioned on population, and two Senators. California is the largest state with 55 electors, Texas has 38 and Florida and New York have 29 apiece.

Alaska, the Dakotas, Delaware, DC, Montana, Vermont and Wyoming are the smallest memebers, each with three electors. In general the candidate who wins the most votes in that state wins all of the electoral votes in that state.

Thus for us in North Dakota, the candidate who wins the most votes in the state will take all three of our electors. When Mitt Romney won North Dakota in 2012 with 188,000 votes and 60% of the vote, his take-home were three electors.

Now part of the reason why I'm so willing to vote for a third party candidate is because I do live in deep-red North Dakota. I know with a gosh-darn (h/t Coen Brothers' Fargo) good amount of certainty that my electoral votes are going to Donald Trump. I'm being realistic here.

I've been cautioned that if enough Catholics across the country think like I do, then people like me could in fact sway the vote to Hillary Clinton. Again, I'm being realistic here. Even in little old North Dakota (47th of 50 states in population) such a sway would require me convincing tens of thousands of people (approximately 64,000 if 2012's numbers hold up) to vote like I plan to. That's not going to happen.

In early May, CatholicVote released the results of a poll it conducted of 18,000 respondents where it found that 40% of Catholics will hold their nose and vote for Trump and another 21% support Trump without reservation. That means at least 61 percent of (politically conservative) Catholics in CV’s poll will be voting for Trump this fall. That number is astounding to me, especially for a  group of people who have spent a good amount of time the last two decades chiding (politically liberal) Catholics who voted under the “seamless garment” theory where all political issues should be considered equally, with pro-life issues not being determinative. “It doesn’t matter where they stand on the economy and jobs and taxes for the working poor and the death penalty” we used to say, “there are certain non-negotiables.” Apparently not?

Anyway, the CV poll showed that only 6% of respondents would vote third party. I think part of it has to the psychology of voting and winning. Donald Trump gets this very well:  we want to pick winners; only losers vote for losers. Well, guilty as charged. I voted for McCain in 08, after being Mike Huckabee’s point person in the 08 caucuses; I was Rick Santorum’s precinct captain in my community in 2012. But how about you all who voted for Romney in 2012? Were those votes for losing candidates wasted? If so, then I guess we’re a bunch of losers. But hey, I’m a Minnesota Vikings fan and a guy who once won $1200 on a $6 bet on a horse race where the horse I picked to win had 28:1 odds of winning (I boxed the trifecta, btw); so maybe I just like the underdog.

But when it comes to elections, I’m tired of holding my nose and voting for the lesser of two evils. I think its wasting your vote to throw it away by voting for someone you find morally repugnant. If you take voting seriously and believe voting to carry moral weight, how can you give it away to someone you don’t trust?  If I can find a third-party candidate that I can vote for in clear conscience, then I will.

If tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of voters all of a sudden jumped ship to a third party, I think that would serve to wake up the major parties and candidates to the fact that people are not happy with them. In this day of advanced data gathering and tracking, the parties will notice a transition of thousands of voters to third parties - and that would be a good thing

But at the end of the day I cannot vote in good conscience for Donald Trump. And so , when my State's electoral votes are already going to a deeply flawed political candidate, to vote against my conscience and in favor of that candidate because I'm scared of another candidate, would be to throw away my vote. 

Or to rephrase that, I know Donald Trump will win North Dakota with or without my vote; so voting for him, against my conscience, is wasting my vote.

The final reason why I will vote third party for President is because I don’t think the next President will do anything to effect meaningful change for our society or our Church.

I've been urged to imagine an America under Hillary - imagine how bad it will be: Mandated sex ed from on high; taxpayer funding of abortion; gun confiscation; death panels. We need to win this election to keep the country from going to hell in a hand basket.

And all I say to that is, look around you right now. We have already lost the culture war.

The Wyoming Commission on Judicial Standards is trying to remove a municipal judge from the bench for saying she wouldn't preside over gay marriage. No one even asked her to preside over a marriage, she simply responded to a hypothetical media question by saying "no, I can't. But others will."

The American Bar Association committee on model rules of professional conduct has a newly proposed Professional Conduct Rule that holds that lawyers who “harass” a person based on sexual orientation or gender identity could be disciplined or suspended. Actions constituting “harassment”  include “verbal conduct manifesting bias or prejudice against someone.”

Big business and the Republicans have turned against traditional morality in Indiana, Georgia, and in every Target store you go into.

The Department of Education may be pulling Title IX funds from North Carolina and any other state that doesn't conform to their norms regarding transgendered students. Mississippi may be next. The Department of Justice is suing North Carolina under the Civil Rights Act because it's illegal discrimination to force men to only use men's bathrooms; and Mississippi faces a Federal suit for its own “bathroom” law.

Texas and Oregon public schools are implementing transgender friendly guidelines so as to not lose title IX funding. St Paul, MN, Public Schools are hedging their bets too.

UPDATE 5/13: The Obama administration just announced this morning that every school district in the nation must “ensure that all students, including transgender students, can attend school in an environment free from discrimination based on sex” or risk running afoul of Title IX.

Second Update 5/16:  I didn't see this on Friday afternoon, but the administration also decided to impose its transgender ideology on the American health system. 

The transgender rights movement we're seeing right now has nothing to do with where people will take a pee, or even about power and discrimination. These issues are about the very nature of humankind - about what it means to be a person. These are cultural problems, not political. We are witnessing a societal collapse.

The presidential election every four years cannot be that upon which we hang the hopes for the salvation of the nation or a restored anthropology of the human person. I remember as a kid being crushed when Clinton beat Bush in 1992 and Dole in ‘96; conversely I was elated and sure that the best days of the country were ahead of us when Bush was awarded the presidency in 2000 and beat Kerry in ‘04. After being downbeat and depressed after Obama won in ‘08, I had come to realize by 2012 that the outcomes of presidential elections are the end result of the work of the culture in between elections - not the starting point for sea change.

Thus I don't think that Trump winning the presidency means anything more for the future of our nation than Clinton – either way, we’re going to get the President we deserve and the underlying cultural problems will still persist. Four years with Chris Christie as Attorney General may slow the DOJ's march toward "the right side of history"; a lifetime of Ted Cruz on SCOTUS may counteract a lifetime of Sonya Sotomayor. Yet law schools are employing professors who think that conservatives in the profession (especially those who believe in “religious liberty”) ought to be marginalized, silenced and purged. The next Attorney General's staff will consist of attorneys formed by this thinking even if he isn't; SCOTUS clerks will be coming from this background, even if the judges aren't - and those clerkships are tickets to the bench in the future. Similarly the schools educating our future teachers are becoming increasingly hostile to traditional norms, which leave local schools susceptible to outside agendas. 

To those of you concerned about these things, do you really think Trump, or his judges or any politician, will stop this? Trump won't stop this. In fact, Trump hasn't said a word about these issues. For being so anti-PC, he sure hasn't stuck his neck out on these issues. Even if Trump wins in November, there will be another election in four years and another, four years after that.

I don't say that to say, "don't vote."  Politics do matter and it does matter to be involved. But its much more important at a local level now.

What will our Superintendent of Public Instruction do when the Federal government threatens to pull Title IX funding from our schools if the state doesn't submit transgender guidelines to the Dept of Ed for their approval?

What will our local schools do when the first transgender volleyball player wants to dress in the girls locker room? What if that student comes to play a game against St. Mary's in Bismarck or plays for another private school? Who supports biological truth when it comes to the bathroom? How about the locker room?

What will our next governor do when the federal government says the mere absence of a state SOGI/Employment Nondiscrimination statute, such as the one attempted in ND’s last session, puts our federal highway, law enforcement, military, and flood protection funding at risk?

 Who will support local schools, churches, and businesses when the Feds come down on them for "discrimination" or "harassment." Who will stand against government-coerced behavior or association when comes to sexual identity or orientation?

These are important questions that need to be asked of our candidates. These will impact us. If you don't believe it, did you ever think Wyoming would be looking to remove a municipal judge for a comment made to a reporter? That the Fort Worth school district would be mandating that transgendered student guidelines be implemented? Oregon and St. Paul – ok, they're "progressive" locales already. But Cheyenne and Fort Worth?

I said above that "we have already lost the culture war" but I don't say this to be fatalistic. I say it to be realistic and to get us thinking about "what next?" Winning the next election is not going to be how we move forward. How does the Church build a culture behind enemy lines? The Polish Church produced one of the greatest saints of the 20th Century and tore open a breach that led to the collapse of one of the most diabolical regimes in human history - and did so while under occupation. There's a lesson to be learned there.

I've said it twice, and now thrice, "'we've lost the culture war" but there is one glaring battle in the culture war where I'm wrong in that statement. After years and years of waging losing battles in the courts and legislatures, the pro-life movement is now winning and having so much winning, it’s become yyyuge! (I couldn't resist.)

Those pro-life victories take place in hearts and minds. They're winning in places like the pregnancy resource clinics, in maternity homes across the country where women in crisis can go and have a safe place to live while pregnant and raising young children, as well as at post-abortion retreats where women are learning how to grieve for their aborted babies and forgive themselves and others for their abortions. They're winning in towns like College Station, Texas where a Planned Parenthood director felt the only place she could turn to were the protestors who peacefully and quietly prayed outside her clinic every day and then welcomed her with open arms the day she resigned from her job.

After more prayer, more pregnancy resource centers and more maternity homes opening, we're seeing a historic decline in the number of abortions, and abortion clinics, and abortion clinic employees. But none of this has happened because of legislation or litigation – rather of lack of demand, lack of desire and changes of heart. Yes, legislators across the nation have advanced abortion regulations. But more so than abortion regulation, we need to work for the day where - God willing - we won't need to overturn Roe v Wade because no one will even want to have an abortion. That’s a culture of life!

But it took decades of pro-lifers being on the losing side of Roe, the losing side of Casey, the losing side of the Clinton years, Planned Parenthood campaigns and celebrity abortion advocates before the tide changed. Today 58% of Americans think abortion should be illegal in most cases. The legislation we're seeing across the nation didn't change the tide, the change in culture preceded the change in law.  

Voting for Trump, Clinton or a third-party this fall won't do anything to change the culture in America. Changing the culture is up to you and me and our fellow men and women of goodwill. And changing the culture, re-evangelizing the culture, needs to be the focus of our efforts, not just winning the next election. We need to build our local parish communities; we need to focus on forming intentional communities of prayer, charity, education and recreation; our children need to see their parents engaged in and living out the faith, otherwise its just "something we do." If we build the Church, we will bless the community, the state or the nation (h/t Al Kresta).

Look around at the cultural confusion surrounding us and the ever-strengthening arm of the state.  We need to find, build and maintain community if for no other reason than that we be there to support our pastors, our schools, our leaders against the strong arm should it come down upon them.  As the prophet Zechariah foretold in the Song of the Sword, "[I] strike the shepherd that the sheep may be scattered; I will turn my hand against the little ones" (Zec 13:7). We can’t let that be us.

I'm thinking of communities in the vein of Rod Dreher's Benedict Option. The Benedict Option takes it name from Alastair MacIntyre's After Virtue where MacIntyre maintains that a pivotal point in the history of Western Civilization occurred when men and women quit focusing on shoring up the Roman empire and quit believing that civilization was dependent upon the survival of the empire. Instead, they focused on forming communities bent on preserving civility and morality from the dark ages to come.  As John Senior pointed out in the Restoration of Christian Culture, among these men and women was a man named Benedict, who founded a community of men at Nursia. He focused on keeping the faith alive and his community grew into many monasteries over the centuries. In turn, communities grew around the monasteries. Ultimately, one of those communities produced Thomas Aquinas. MacIntyre, Senior and Dreher would say the important thing is not focusing on the here-and-now (i.e. November's election so we can focus on making America great again over the next four years) but rather focusing on the long-term: how do I pass on my faith to my children? How does my church maintain its community for the next generation? What (or Who) will the identity of my Church be for the next generation?

I'm not going to throw away my vote this November by voting for someone who's making hollow promises and is simply the lesser of two evils. Its more important to focus on the long-term building of culture within our own community and, for me, that means voting for leaders that I don’t think will harm those efforts.

I'd like to finish with two quotes from scripture. First Psalm 146 – it is only ten verses long, but offers a lot to meditate on in this election season. I draw your attention to verse three:  "put no trust in princes."  For far too long in my own life, I had put too much trust in the power of politics, and so was incredibly disappointed when things didn’t shake out the way I had hoped or the way the politician had promised.  If only, I’d say, we had one more Justice on the Court; one more vote in the Senate; if that particular law could pass; if that person could be president… That president, or senator or judge  is “powerless to save…breathing his last, [he] returns to earth.” (Ps 146: 3-4)  For those of you willing to hold your nose and vote for Trump, believing that he will stall or stem the cultural slide in our nation – don’t trust that he will do it and don’t feel that he is your only choice.

And finally remember that Christ built his Church upon the rock “and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.”  (Matt 16:18). We know the gates of Hell shall not prevail. But that promise was made to the Church – not to the United States of America. I said earlier that I think we are witnessing the collapse of civilization; you may disagree. But I urge you look around you – at home in the States, in Europe – something is happening; something is changing.

Cling fast to the Church – ever ancient, ever new. Focus on not just preserving, but defending, her for the future; focus on passing her treasures to your children.  Trump or Clinton will come and go, but the Body of Christ remains. Why won’t I vote for Trump (or Clinton) this fall? Because I don’t think he will do anything or offer any means to help build up the Body, in fact I view him as a threat to the Body. As a voting, conservative, Catholic, building, maintaining, defending and growing the Church should be more than our priority – it’s our responsibility and we shouldn’t trust or hope that a candidate who’s merely the lesser of two evils will help us do it.