Why I Hope Republicans Will Mostly Win on November 8

I vote for Republicans almost all the time, so why should anybody be surprise by the headline of this post?  Probably no reason other than I haven’t voted for a Republican candidate for President since Mitt Romney in 2012¹ and the Republicans have some truly abysmal candidates this year.

Some swing voters are understandably hesitant to vote Republican this year because the Republican Party is in such disarray and, as I said, it has some really bad candidates.  Consider Herschel Walker, running for Senate in Georgia.  And others, including Darren Bailey, Republican candidate for governor here in Illinois.  Many of these people won because of Donald Trump’s endorsement or believe his lie about the 2020 presidential election being stolen – or both.

The problem is, though, if you vote for Democratic candidates because the Republican Party is such a mess, you might not like what you get.  If the Republicans lose, it means some of those really bad candidates won’t get elected.  But it also means, especially if the Republicans lose big, the Democrats will get to do not only the somewhat crazy things they have been talking about in the campaign but also the other really crazy things they haven’t mentioned in the campaign but would love to do if they could. 

Consider Joe Biden.  In 2020, he ran as a moderate, a middle-of-the road alternative to President Trump.  But once President Biden won, he, or his staff, decided to go left and push through the programs of the progressive/left wing of the Democratic Party.²  They didn’t get nearly as much done as they wanted, but with a few more votes, who knows what they might have been able to pass.  

Which is what I worry about happening if too many people decide to vote Democratic because the Republicans are so messed up.  A vote against the Republican Party could wind up in lots of progressive Democratic bills passing, when all those swing voters really wanted to do was to beat bad Republicans, not pass a radical Democratic agenda.

This happened in New Zealand in 2020.  The center-right National Party was so messed up that the Labour Party won an absolute majority even in a MMP system.³  It was the first time that had ever happened during MMP in New Zealand, and the result has been that the Labour Party has proposed and passed all kinds of left-wing legislation that they didn’t even mention in their campaign manifesto.  But they won a big majority, and a public who was voting against the mess in the National Party wound up getting a lot of left-wing programs they didn’t expect – or want.

I don’t know if that would happen in the United States, but I do know I don’t trust the progressive/left wing of Democratic Party.  Therefore, I have to hope the Republicans win, not because the Republicans are all that good, but because some of the progressive/left wing of the Democratic Party are that bad.  And I feel I can do this because, even if the GOP wins, they won’t be do what they want, for a couple of reasons.  First, there are, at least in my opinion, still enough rational Republicans, who have not bought into the crazy ideas of the Trump-wing of the party, that the bad stuff won’t pass.  Second, Joe Biden will still be President, so, even if the crazy ideas get passed, he would be able to stop them (unless, of course, President Biden adopts their bad ideas as his own, which is possible).

Therefore, I am hoping Republicans win on November 8, not because I like the dumb ideas some of them are talking about, but because I am scared of giving the progressive/left wing of the Democratic Party the chance to pass their agenda, both the parts they talk about and, even more so, the parts they don’t talk about.
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¹ A vote I am still proud of.
² They somehow thought they “controlled” the House and Senate and could pass what they wanted with a nine-seat majority in the House and a 50-50 split with the Vice President’s tie-breaker vote in the Senate.    
³ Under New Zealand’s “mixed-member proportional representation” system (“MMP”), voters get two votes, one for their local representative and a second vote for the party of their choice.  Each party gets a number of representatives in Parliament equal to its proportion of the second votes, the “party vote.”  If that number is higher than the number of representatives elected from the various districts, extra representatives for that party are added from the party’s overall national list.