America’s last undecided voter

This is the last column I’ll file before the American presidential election, and I’ve dreaded writing it for months. (The next one, filed on election day itself, may prove impossible. Perhaps that’s when I’ll choose to share my recipe for parsley as a side vegetable.) Meanwhile, I’ve watched fellow ‘double haters’ squirm in print. There are two models for wrestling with this dilemma, one exemplified by Andrew Sullivan. The conservative commentator ‘came out’ in a September Substack newsletter – no, not in that dated sense: everyone knows he’s gay – in support of Kamala Harris, only to lavish the overwhelming majority of that column on what a ghastly candidate she is.

The second model for facing down two flagrantly unacceptable electoral choices has been embodied by my friend Bret Stephens, a long-standing Never Trumper whose 2016 opposition to the Donald alienated him from his colleagues at the Wall Street Journal but inspired a job offer from the New York Times. While as committed as ever to opposing his Republican bête noir, Bret announced in an NYT column weeks ago that he couldn’t vote for Kamala Harris. She still hadn’t furnished substantive answers to a range of crucial policy questions. This puristic fence-sitting has driven the Democratic readership insane. It’s provided a running theme for Bret’s weekly public dialogue with the more liberal columnist Gail Collins, who’s never stopped nagging him to man up and back the only halfway level-headed, law-abiding candidate who has a chance of becoming president of the United States.

Academically, I profoundly sympathise with Andrew’s contention that any former president who has hindered the peaceful transfer of power, and any candidate who refuses to commit to accepting the results of the election, has invalidated himself for high office.