You stink at game theory.
Probably you do. Most people do. Do you know how a lot of men think they know how to fight or throw a football or … run the executive branch of the U.S. government … without ever having been taught how to do it? You know what those guys sound like when they talk? That’s what I hear when people talk about strategic voting.
Pat Toomey, the admirable conservative and former senator from Pennsylvania, just invited a torrent of bootless attempts to display cleverness when he announced that, come November, he would vote neither for Donald Trump nor for Kamala Harris for president. While I suspect there is some politics-of-cooties at work there—nobody who wants a future in Republican politics wants to be on the record voting for Harris—it is an entirely defensible position. Nonetheless, the harrumphs arose thundering from the Schuylkill Expressway to Crosstown Boulevard, from points in between and from points beyond.
Unlike most of the people who agonize in public about their presidential vote—the 97 percent of public agonizers who reside in New York City, California, or Washington and whose public agonizing thus amounts to something less consequential than a vague rumor of donkey squat—Toomey lives in a battleground state. Pennsylvania could—and very well may—decide the 2024 election.
But, even if it does, Toomey’s vote is unlikely to be a matter of historical significance. It is very, very unlikely that either Trump or Harris will win the Keystone State by a single vote. No single vote, even in the most closely split state, has much consequence in that way.
Votes are aggregate things, and they are expressive things.
Consider the case of Texas: Mitt Romney won Texas in 2012, and Donald Trump won Texas in 2016 and in 2020—but Romney won with 57.2 percent of the vote, while Trump underperformed him by 5 points in 2016 and then underperformed himself, slightly, in 2020, declining from 52.2 percent of the vote to 52.0 percent of the vote. The Republican (or “Republican,” Trump being a literal RINO) won in every case, but Texas voters are sending the GOP a message. If Trump should win Texas by an even smaller margin in 2024, that also will be significant, though it will have no effect on the outcome of the election. Of course it is the case that, at some point, losing 5 points here and a fraction of a point there means losing the state, because states flip Hemingway style: gradually, then suddenly.
“A voter who goes from the GOP to the Libertarians is a loss of one vote, but a voter who goes from the GOP to the Democrats is, in effect, a two-vote loss.”
The sudden part makes the headlines, even though the gradual part is where the real evolution happens. The GOP’s position in Texas in 2020 already was 11.6 points lower than the high-water mark of 1984. (Fun nugget: Ronald Reagan set the benchmark in Texas at a time when the state was Democrat-dominated, having elected only one Republican governor since Reconstruction, nearly two decades before Republicans would finally win control of the statehouse.) Losing another few points would flip the state (Joe Biden took 46.5 percent of the vote in 2020) but would be in absolute terms a smaller decline than the (halting and inconsistent) one the GOP has seen since 1984.
With that in mind, there are a couple of ways of approaching a vote in a presidential election. The first and most obvious—and the one I recommend—is: voting for the candidate you prefer. (A subset of that approach is not voting if you don’t like any of the candidates: That, too, is usefully expressive.) The second is: voting to send a message to one party or the other. If (to stick with the earlier case) Trump’s vote share in Texas declines a bit more in 2024, then that will tell Republicans something. But—and here is where I suppose my Bulwark friends and Joe Scarborough et al. really have their heads—it makes a difference whether Harris’ share of the vote goes up, too, or if Trump simply bleeds votes to the Libertarian Party or to Mitch Daniels or whomever it is my friend in Tarrant County is writing in. A voter who goes from the GOP to the Libertarians is a loss of one vote, but a voter who goes from the GOP to the Democrats is, in effect, a two-vote loss: Minus one for Trump and plus one for Harris. And if that is the message you want to send—or if you are a Democrat who wants to vote for Donald Trump to … I don’t know, maybe punish your party for failing to stage a coup d’état the last time it lost an election?—that’s how you do it. You add your voice to the other voices making the same point or a complementary one.
That’s all good.
But don’t inflict your “binary choice” horsefeathers on your friends and the general public. There are lots of ways to use your vote, many of them effective as political expression and almost none of them likely to be very consequential in determining the outcome.
This isn’t really a time for cleverness. It is, as someone once put it, a time for choosing.
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