Una Mullally: Is it okay not to vote?

Last week, in their endorsement of Hillary Clinton, the Denver Post wrote, "a president Hillary Clinton on her worst day would be so superior to a president Donald Trump on any day that we marvel this race was ever competitive."

What’s hard for many people outside (and inside, in fairness) America is how two presidential candidates who are so different can be equated as even vaguely comparable.

On one hand we have the qualified, competent Clinton, who doesn’t brag about sexually assaulting people, has never bought a life-size mural of herself with her charity’s money, and is not intent on building a wall across an entire border.

Then there's the ongoing jaw-dropping embarrassment that is Trump. But one of the most important elements of the American presidential election campaign is how disliked both candidates are. Irish people have a different relationship with the Clintons, especially considering Bill Clinton's presence throughout the peace process in Ireland, so it can be hard to really click into that perspective.

In Los Angeles last week, I met up with a very accomplished and intelligent journalist to chat about the historical context of Trump's ascent, for a mini-documentary on the run up to polling day for the Irish Times Women's Podcast.

We talked a lot about Trump’s rise to a sort of weird power and how that related to the Reconstruction Era of American politics, about the impact of racist rhetoric on minorities, about the polarisation of voters, the rising anger of less well-off white Americans, and so on.

Difficult position

After covering a lot of ground, I asked her who she was voting for, which I thought was obvious from her left-leaning point of view and politics. “You’re putting me in a difficult position”, was the reply. Despite knowing that Trump is a disaster, this person said she could never vote for a Clinton, and knowing that

Los Angeles County

and

California

would go to Clinton, would probably not vote for a presidential candidate.

Not voting provokes a visceral reaction. How many “it’ll-be-grand-ers” are still holding their heads post-Brexit? California, with its 55 electoral votes, will of course go to Clinton. Current polls analysed by FiveThirtyEight suggest that the chance of Trump winning California is 0.1 per cent.

So one person not voting won’t make a realistic impact, although of course plenty of people simultaneously thinking the same thing and acting (or rather, not acting) on that would. But is abstaining from voting a political act or an anti-political one? In a contest with so much at stake, is it ethical at all?

I wondered aloud whether people are right to criticise third party candidates for diverting votes away from the candidates who have an actual chance of winning. Too much democracy is never a bad thing, she rightly said.

Candidate’s problem

On the

Ralph Nader

correlation, whose momentary popularity is often cited as one of the many things that scuppered a victory for Al Gore in 2000 against the disastrous

George W Bush

, the fact is that Al Gore couldn’t win his home state,

Tennessee

. And if a presidential candidate can’t win his or her home state, then that’s not the voters’ problem, that’s very much the candidate’s and the party’s problem. Nobody owns votes, and a vote for a third party candidate is not a vote for Clinton gone awry, it’s a vote for the person the voter wanted to vote for.

There are, of course, valid criticism and misgivings about Clinton, but criticisms of her, as the Denver Post put it, are incomparable to the lunacy of Trump, whose racism, conspiracy theories, and disdain for women are shocking and an embarrassment to America, politics, men, people called Donald, the colour orange, hotels, golf, suits, sentient humans, and so on.

The joy of democracy is that we have the freedom to choose what our vote is actually about. Perhaps it is endorsing one candidate, perhaps it is blocking another, perhaps it is a tactical choice, or a lesser of two evils choice. Within the PR system, we’re told about the importance of voting all the way down the ballot, even if we would never choose many of the candidates we put numbers beside. Voting can be jading. I’m sure most of us have had moments in the polling booth where we look at the ballot and wonder what we have done to deserve such mediocrity.

Bizarre campaign

We can judge candidates individually, but in this bizarre election campaign, they do not exist in a vacuum. America is not just faced with individual candidates, but with a choice that is almost binary in its starkness. Therefore, both major candidates are intrinsically linked to each other by opposing each other; their faults and positive aspects are often measured in each other’s shade.

Humans, predisposed to the structure and pleasant nature of storytelling, also look for broader narratives to project onto seemingly significant moments in history – this election also being one. We zoom out and question what greater meaning this election has, whether it is linked to anti-establishment politics, or Brexit, or machismo, or feminism, or racism, or migration, or the end of history, of the beginning of a new history.

Of course, we can forget that the power of it all rests in the hands of those who are in charge, those individuals with votes. Is there a difference between purposefully abstaining after a great deal of thought and not even considering or thinking about voting?

There certainly is an intellectual one, but whether that could be ethically argued if Trump ever ended up sitting in the Oval Office is another thing.