Each American who cares about the future of our country and our democracy has only one question they need to answer now regarding the 2024 presidential election: Who do you want to see in the White House in January 2025, Donald Trump or Kamala Harris? Thats it, and those are the only possible answers.
You won’t like everything about a candidate. But the choice is binary, and there is no room for qualifications to your answer.
- You may not like how the candidate got to be the candidate. This is politics, things happen in back rooms, decisions aren’t always clean, people’s ambitions aren’t always as ‘pure’ as you’d like. But that’s reality as opposed to idealism. When you think you have a better solution, get involved in politics and see if you can do things differently.
- You may disagree with a specific policy of your preferred candidate. The president depends on Congress to pass laws, so back a congressperson or a senator who supports that one policy and go become a lawyer so that you can write future policies.
- You may worry that the candidate is unknown or ‘unelectable’. You may be surprised, as so many of us were in 2008 when Obama won. Get out there and convince people to vote for them.
- You may dislike any one of a million things about the candidates voice, hair, family, laugh . Get over it – it’s a distraction from that one singular question.
As Michelle Obama reminded us in her speech at the DNC, these candidates are human, multi-dimensional in their personalities and in their politics. You don’t get to create a mash up of the qualities you like in each, nor a mash-up of qualities you’ve liked in earlier contestants for this position, nor a mash-up of qualities in your imagined perfect candidate.
So stop apologizing for or complaining about the things that you think aren’t perfect in your candidate. Instead, articulate what you DO like about the candidate, whether it’s their policies, character, values, the emotions they evoke in you, or a combination of all these — or maybe it’s your extreme fear of seeing the opposing candidate win the election. Build your talk track around those positive stories and shout it out proudly for the whole world to hear!
You must choose either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. I think the choice is clear.