Why I'm Voting for Kamala Harris
And I hope you will too
I don’t know if anyone reading this cares about who I’m voting for, but supposedly one of the best things you can do to influence election results is to remind people who you’re voting for and why.
I’m going to vote for Kamala Harris for President.
You don’t need me to make the case against Donald Trump. I find him to be dishonest, selfish, and immoral. He doesn’t appear to have any true close friends. He’s not funny or compassionate. He treats women as objects. I don’t think he has many character traits that are worthy of admiration, let alone of being President of the United States of America. His actions after losing the 2020 elections should be disqualifying.
Instead, I’m going to try to make a positive argument for Kamala Harris. Most importantly, she passes the character test. She is poised and smart and seems like a genuinely nice person. She has friends and close family members. She laughs.
Harris would not have been my top choice for the Democratic nomination, given her 2019 campaign. But she has handled herself admirably. She was handed a tough situation of supporting her boss but also wanting his job, and she’s run a very solid campaign since then. She’s made the race competitive at a time when incumbents all around the world are struggling.
To do that, she’s run a moderate campaign focused on defending the rule of law; protecting a woman’s right to choose; and preserving Social Security, Medicare, and Obamacare.
I spend my professional life working to improve the lives of children, and I think the Harris Administration would be much better for kids and families. She has fought to increase the child tax credit and has made it a staple of her campaign. (To be fair, Trump signed a bill expanding the child tax credit during his Administration, but he would have to buck his party to do it again.)
Kamala Harris knows our immigration system is broken, and it needs fixing. In 2021, she gave a speech in Guatemala telling asylum seekers, “do not come.” She was roundly criticized by leftist Democrats at the time, and the Biden Administration initially backed away from this type of rhetoric, before coming around to her advice and getting the numbers down sharply this year.
On the campaign trail, Harris has mostly pointed out that Trump helped kill a bill that would have improved the situation at the southern border. Trump’s plan on immigration? To round up and deport millions of illegal aliens? Maybe I’m supposed to take this threat seriously but not literally, I dunno. But many of those immigrants are children, parents, grandparents, or uncles or cousins. These are people who came to our shores to work and find good jobs and to support a better life for their children. They pay taxes, start new companies, and enrich our culture. Their children tend to do well in school, work hard, learn English, and go on to lead productive lives that add value to our economy. Immigrants make America better, and we need a way for them to—legally—become citizens.
How about health care? Trump says he has a “concept of a plan” but won’t really tell us what it is. Meanwhile, congressional Republicans want another crack at repealing Obamacare. I think that would be a mistake. Obamacare has helped slow the cost of health care, in education and in the broader economy. And for me personally, as an independent contractor, my family relies on the private health insurance market that Obamacare makes possible. I don’t trust Trump or Republicans to leave it alone.
I’ve spent my career working to improve educational outcomes for our nation’s young people, and Harris hasn’t done much or said much on that front. (Trump hasn’t either.) That’s unfortunate, in my view, and the national Democratic party doesn’t have much to say on K-12 education at the moment. I’m working to change that, but in the meantime I’ll happily vote for Kamala Harris.
Good piece, Chad