After all, the whole argument for voting for one of the major-party candidates instead of for a third party is that only the major-party candidates are viable alternatives to one another. But, in a safe state, there is no viable alternative to the winner, so you can feel free to vote for anyone. Even if there were a dramatic upset, enough states would already have been carried by the underdog to ensure that candidate’s victory in the Electoral College with or without your state’s help. So, no matter what you do, your vote in a safe state fits the wide definition of a mathematically wasted vote. Therefore, in a safe state, you should just vote for the person you want most to be president, even if that person is a fringe third-party candidate.

So I have carefully watched the list of safe states grow and evolve throughout this election. Sadly, Minnesota never appeared on it. The full list is below.

To those of you who live in safe states, I recommend casting your vote for Mike Maturen of the American Solidarity Party. I have reservations about Maturen (see his often-great, occasionally idiotic platform here), but he is the only candidate besides Darrell Castle with a clear commitment to the protection of fetal life, and I believe Maturen’s party is a serious party with serious future prospects — unlike Castle’s Constitution Party, which is essentially a fringe debating society for conservative purists and always will be. Maturen is an officially registered write-in candidate in most states (full list here). This means that you have to write his name in, but your votes for him will be counted.

In safe states where Maturen is not a registered write-in option, I recommend writing in Evan McMullin.

In the handful of safe states that do not allow write-in votes, I recommend no vote for president. You should still show up to support candidates in down-ballot races.

Here is a full list of safe states — states where there is no plausible chance that your vote will have any impact on the outcome of the election — based on the latest projections from FiveThirtyEight (with my endorsement in parentheses):

• Alabama (Maturen)
• Arkansas (McMullin)
• California (Maturen)
• Connecticut (McMullin)
• District of Columbia (Maturen)
• Hawaii (no vote for president)
• Idaho (Maturen)
• Illinois (McMullin)
• Indiana (Maturen)
• Kansas (Maturen)
• Kentucky (Maturen)
• Louisiana (McMullin)
• Maryland (Maturen)
• Massachusetts (McMullin)
• Mississippi (no vote for president)
• Missouri (McMullin)
• Montana (McMullin)
• Nebraska (3rd District Only) (Maturen)
• New Jersey (Maturen)
• New York (Maturen)
• North Dakota (Maturen)
• Oklahoma (no vote for president)
• South Carolina (McMuffin)
• South Dakota (no vote for president)
• Tennessee (McMullin)
• Texas (Maturen)
• Washington State (Maturen)
• West Virginia (McMullin)
• Wyoming (Maturen)

Congratulations! Your votes don’t matter.* I envy you.

To the rest of you, I have bad news: your vote, plausibly, could decide the election.

This may surprise some of you, especially those of you who live in small, lightly-polled states that are traditionally hardcore Democratic strongholds (like Delaware, which is somehow on this list). There is an enormous amount of uncertainty in this election, because Trump/Clinton has mixed up the electoral and demographic maps in a big way, we just won’t know until Election Day how that shakes out in some states, and in the smallest states, your vote simply has a greater impact more than it does in the big states.

Here is a list of states where your vote matters. In parentheses next to each state, I have given how much your vote matters on a scale of 1-10 (1 is right on the edge of plausibly mattering, while 10 matters a lot). This rating is objective data based on FiveThirtyEight’s Voter Power Index:

• Alaska (5)
• Arizona (2)
• Colorado (5)
• Delaware (1)
• Florida (3)
• Georgia (1)
• Iowa (3)
• Maine (2)
• Michigan (4)
• Minnesota (2)
• Nebraska 1st District (1)
• Nebraska 2nd District (2)
• Nevada (7)
• New Hampshire (9)
• New Mexico (5)
• North Carolina (5)
• Ohio (2)
• Oregon (1)
• Pennsylvania (4)
• Rhode Island (2)
• Utah (*)
• Vermont (1)
• Virginia (2)
• Wisconsin (3)

Utah is a special case, because of Evan McMullin.  In Utah, I recommend voting for McMullin. He is looking like more of a longshot now, but, if he wins, the rewards could be rich.

The rest of us, however, are in a real pickle. How should we vote? That is the subject of my next post. But, spoilers: I’m not going to have any straight answers for you.

UPDATE: Clarified that the swing state race ratings are based on FiveThirtyEight data, not my own guesswork.  I took the 538 VPI, rescaled it so 7 = 10, then rounded to the nearest whole number.

*Admittedly, there are some possible worlds where your vote in these states ends up mattering, but it is profoundly unlikely — at a rough estimate, somewhere down in the “odds of being struck by lightning twice while simultaneously drowning” territory.

One of the things I hear a lot from committed #NeverTrumpers is something like, “I won’t vote for Trump, but, if you decide to, that is okay.”  This has always made sense to me, even though I’m not committed to #NeverTrump.

However, I recently realized that, to those on the #TrumpTrain, it looks like madness at best, moral relativism at worst.  As one of my favorite Facebook friends put it last night:

“It is curious to me when people say ‘I think it is wrong for ME to vote for Trump, but not for others.’ [T]o suggest… that there is no right or wrong choice seems wrong to me. And not to engage that question in a community where we are all struggling to do what we can to stem the tsunami of destructive consequences for this great nation also seems somewhat irresponsible to me.”

In other words, there must be an objectively correct choice among the awful choices we have.  As moral voters, we have an objective duty to discern the correct choice and act accordingly.  Avoiding the question, or answering it indefinitely, is thus a form of moral cowardice.

Fair enough.

I agree with my friend. I think there is an objectively right or wrong choice in this election. God can see the possible world that unfolds if I vote for Trump (and encourage others to do so), and He can see the world that unfolds if I do not vote for Trump (and discourage others from doing so). One of those worlds is objectively better than the other. The choice that leads to that world is therefore objectively the right choice.*

So I agree that there is an objectively best choice. However, I do not know what it is. I am not God. I cannot see both possible future worlds. I have to guess at the future, based on my prudential judgment.

In a typical American election, there’s not a lot of space for prudential judgments. If the Republican candidate is anti-abortion and the Democratic candidate pro-abortion rights, that is typically enough to determine the objectively correct moral choice with a very high degree of confidence.  The evil of legal abortion† is vastly disproportionate to all other issues. Affairs like health care and taxes and religious freedom and even poverty and war are nearly moot in the face of a million babies (babies! killed at a rate faster than Auschwitz!) torn limb from limb for money every year. A voter who does not become (in effect) a single-issue voter in the face of this evil is not acting rationally or charitably. Because legal abortion is very vulnerable in the United States (it is sustained, since 2006, almost exclusively by just five Supreme Court justices, one of them wishy-washy about it), and because creating legal barriers to abortion (including prohibition) is the most effective policy measure for reducing the number of abortions, honest, informed, moral prudence can reach only one conclusion: it would be best to elect the Republican.

Moreover — and I think people miss this too often — the very fact that the pro-abortion candidate is pro-abortion renders the candidate fundamentally unfit to hold authority over anyone. Abortion-rights supporters find their judgement and values fatally undermined on every issue by their willingness to sacrifice an entire class of human beings to Moloch.

(This is but a brief sketch of an argument my father has made more diplomatically and more effectively elsewhere.)

Finally, in a typical election, a vote is unlikely to have repercussions beyond the election.  Your vote for John McCain simply expresses a preference for Mitt Romney over Barack Obama; the vote carries few practical consequences beyond that, and is not widely understood to signify much else.  This closes off one of the few practical avenues of escape for the voter who would rather vote for the abortion-rights candidate with a clean conscience.

I think the argument for voting pro-life in a normal election is so obvious and so overwhelming that doing so is morally compulsory, and that those who support pro-choice candidates will be called to account . I mention this to show, beyond a doubt, that I completely reject moral relativism at the ballot box. I do not treat the phrase “prudential judgement” as an infinitely malleable excuse for any old evil I want to promote; I treat it as a serious burden that must be convincingly answered — and, in most elections, I think there’s only one convincing answer available.

But this election is different in important ways.

Having studied Mr. Trump closely for the past year, I think he is pro-choice. I think he is a liar. I think the odds that he actually appoints good justices to the Supreme Court are around 50/50. I would not be even the tiniest bit surprised to see him get elected on the backs of social conservatives’ votes, then turn around and appoint Peter Thiel to the Court. I think there is strong evidence for all these contentions. Trump has STILL never renounced his support for unrestricted abortion-on-demand throughout the first trimester, which is, y’know, basically indistinguishable from Harry Reid’s position. This casts large chunks of the standard argument for voting Republican into grave doubt.

People of good conscience may disagree about the evidence (though, to be sure, plenty of Trump people are plainly arguing in bad conscience on this), but it must be conceded that, if one judges Trump to be lying through his teeth about the whole abortion-and-religious-freedom thing, it must follow that the clear-cut prudential judgment that obtains in normal elections suddenly becomes really cloudy.

But it gets worse for Mr. Trump. In this election, with the future of the imploding Republican party quite clearly on the November ballot, my vote is going to have consequences beyond the election itself, breaking another of the supports that sustains the clear-cut argument for Republicans in normal elections. By voting for Trump, I appear to validate the new shape of the Republican Party. What long-term effects does this have? How does it shape our politics in 2020 and beyond — particularly if I go ahead and validate TrumpGOP but he still loses (as he very probably will)?

Relatedly, as Rachel Lu often asks, what does this do to the credibility of our movement long-run? Let’s imagine:

I cast my vote for Trump. Months later, I’m at a campus protest, trying to convince a college pro-choicer that I and the rest of the pro-life movement really do care about women. She asks whether I voted for Trump… and stops listening when I honestly admit I did. And I can’t even blame her, because I did actually vote for a candidate who manifestly believes women are objects for his personal use. (This goes double if Trump loses, as he very probably will even with my help.) Multiply by 50,000,000, rinse, and repeat. Was it worth it, casting a vote that might, with considerable luck, elect a man who might, with considerable luck, do what is necessary to reverse Roe vs. Wade?

Maybe so! People can reach different conclusions about this in good conscience. It’s impossibly difficult to predict the future, especially in the middle of a party realignment like the current one. It’s credible for someone to think we can all vote for Trump and everything will work out just peachy. But it’s also credible for someone to think that our personal and collective support for Trump will do more harm than good. Since we’re not God, and can’t look into the worlds where we made different choices to compare them, this is ultimately unprovable and unknowable; we have to take the evidence available and go with our best guess.

In short, this election is full of prudential judgments that are an order of magnitude more difficult than the ones we’re used to dealing with in elections. It is therefore entirely possible for one voter to make one prudential judgment (Trump is a good, honest man who will appoint good judges and not discredit our movement) and for another voter, who shares the exact same principles and has seen the exact same evidence, to make another prudential judgment (Trump is a liar who will appoint Hillary-esque judges and all we’ll have gained by voting for him is deeply undermining ourselves), and thus draw absolutely different conclusions about this election. Each voter must do what he thinks is right, but, since the underlying propositions involve predictions about the future and are thus by their nature unprovable, what is morally right for one voter might not be morally right for another voter.

Thus, a #NeverTrump voter can quite reasonably say, “I think voting for Trump is wrong, but you might reach a different conclusion, and that’s okay.” It’s not moral relativism or cowardice. It is appropriate humility in the face of a bewilderingly cloudy future.

The one good thing about this election is that we’re all going to get a bunch of great papers published on voting ethics in the next two years.

*I think this is an oversimplified model of voting morality, because it reduces voting to an absolutely utilitarian act, and stark utility is almost never the sole measure of morality… but this utilitarian model is how most people think about voting, it’s at least close to how I think about voting, and it will do for our purposes in this post.

† Those who are not regular readers of De Civitate should be aware that “unborn child = person” and “abortion = murder” are generally taken for granted around here. If you disagree, you may reach very very different conclusions about moral voting behavior. Fair enough! Frankly, while I think your pro-abortion position is clearly incorrect, I think your arguments are much stronger than the absurd position I’m arguing against here: that abortion is murder and should be outlawed but it’s still okay to vote for people who support keeping abortion-murder legal.

UPDATE: My Facebook friend — whom I may now reveal as the learned Doctor (and national treasure) Janet E. Smith — has replied to me here.  Take a look!  Weigh the arguments!

There’s another voice in my head that believes everything everyone says about themselves, all the time.  This trusting voice is no less important in politics than the cynical, and should also be consulted from time to time… but, if you want to read “Flattering Assessments of Presidential Candidates,” go read their campaign websites.  Here are the unflattering ones.  Some are certainly accurate, others may not be, but consider them my worst fears for each candidate:

Mike Huckabee
Used to have the desire, skill, and ambition to be a leader, but, as the America he envisions recedes into the past, is content to vent his spleen and be warmly applauded for it by crowds that miss his America as much as he does.

Jeb Bush
A “compassionate conservative” who still kinda knows how to talk to Republicans, but is secretly seething that they have abandoned so much of what “his” party stood for. Sort of the Mike Huckabee of establishment Republicans.

Ben Carson
A once-rising star who let the plaudits go to his head and will now burn like Icarus.

Chris Christie
An intensely ambitious, furious man, with no particular principles beyond a vague affection for balanced budgets and low taxes, who’s willing to say anything to win… as long as it fits the elaborate superhero character he’s woven for himself, the Bombastic Budget-Cutter. Willing to play dirty in a state where dirty is part of the tradition.

Hillary Clinton
The opportunist’s opportunist. While an intense progressive at heart — a soulmate for Sanders — she has sold out so many times and so hard (even standing by a husband she secretly despises) it’s impossible not to see her as Claire from House of Cards every time she opens her mouth. The real tragedy of Hillary Clinton is that, unlike her husband, she’s no good at selling out.  Her many betrayals have bought her nothing but a truckload of distrust from all sides; her resume has lots of glitzy titles but none of the accomplishments she sacrificed her principles for.

Ted Cruz
The embodiment of conservatism’s worst instinct: the overwhelming desire to rend the flesh of insufficiently conservative conservatives, even at the cost of ceding power to progressives. Justifies this with an elaborate mythology wherein “energizing the base” matters more than persuading persuadables. The scariest thing is he might be right.

Carly Fiorina
An articulate, believing, even inspiring conservative who keeps looking at her resume and can’t understand why she never wins any elections or runs any successful businesses. Has not yet realized that a good chunk of it is not about belief, but managerial talent and luck, neither of which she has enough of.

Lindsey Graham
Half-Chafee, half-troll, Graham is running to ensure that an increasingly anti-establishment GOP stands for the same values he has stood for his entire career: corporate welfare and the military-industrial complex. Vain enough to think he might make a difference.

Bobby Jindal
Infinitely frustrated by the fact that his political career was torpedoed by bad timing, bad luck, and a single bad State of the Union rebuttal, Jindal refuses to give up, and is thrashing out, looking for the attention he desperately needs wherever he can get it.

John Kasich
Smuggy McSmugSmug.

George Pataki, Lincoln Chaffee, Martin O’Malley
Vain, highly insulated men with no sense of proportion. Just astonishingly vain.

Rand Paul
A man of principle who made a conscious decision to compromise a little of what he believed in for the sake of attaining power, but, when that didn’t seem to be enough, kept going, and got lost somewhere along the way.

Rick Perry
I can’t bring myself anymore to care about Rick Perry enough to write something mean about him. (Never mind, I just did.)

Marco Rubio
Drastically inexperienced (no more experienced than Sen. Obama was!) young’un who is so scared of making missteps that he makes missteps by trying to avoid making missteps.

Rick Santorum
A principled, intelligent, and consistent conservative, who has genuinely synthesized the social, economic, and foreign policy legs of late-20th-century conservatism into a single, cohesive, plausible platform… which is precisely what makes him so scary to so many. The Bernie Sanders of the Right.

Bernie Sanders
A principled, intelligent, and consistent progressive, who has genuinely synthesized the social, economic, and foreign policy legs of late-20th-century progressivism into a single, cohesive, plausible platform… which is precisely what makes him so scary to so many. The Rick Santorum of the Left.

Donald Trump
If you need me to explain the problems with Donald Trump, you are one of the problems.

Scott Walker
An intensely ambitious man with an attachment to conservatism that runs deep only because he has lived with it for so long that its convenience has become conviction, not because he has any particularly clear basis for it, intellectual or otherwise. Fortunately for him, he has learned expertly the art of following The Conservative Script and only answering questions when it serves his purposes, so it’s easy not to notice.

Jim Webb
The Lindsey Graham of the Democrats, with perhaps a little bit of the Jeb Bush “why can’t my party believe in all the things it believed in the ’90s?” to go along with it… with the important difference that establishment Democrats (unlike establishment Republicans) do not actually miss the days when economic conservatism and social moderation reigned supreme in Washington, leaving Webb without an audience.

Well, that was grim.  I think I’m going to go back to deciding who to vote for based on who has the best 404 page.