On Voting for Terrible People

By Dan McLaughlin

Tuesday, June 02, 2026

 

With the victory of Ken Paxton in the Texas Republican Senate primary and a torrent of bad press about the misbehavior of Graham Platner ahead of his presumptive victory in the Maine Democratic Senate primary next week, a question that has bedeviled our politics since Bill Clinton, and especially in the era of Donald Trump, has resurfaced: how to approach voting when at least one of the major-party candidates is a terrible, immoral person.

 

I’ve written variations on this topic many times by now, from retrospectives on Clinton to the relative character of the 2008 candidates to Trump, Roy Moore, Herschel Walker, and David Vitter. Some of those lessons apply as well to confirmation votes, as with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Pete Hegseth.

 

The Platner revelations coming so swiftly on the heels of the Paxton nomination is what makes this fresh, because it has caught Democratic partisans on the horns of their own rhetorical fictions. The argument about the moral limits of voting for candidates of bad character has almost always been either an intra-Republican debate or a mere posture wielded against Republican partisans. Now, Democrats who have ducked the issue for years have to face the music.

 

That’s not due to any shortage of Democrats of bad character. Quite the contrary. Just looking at statewide candidates in the past decade: Bob Menendez barely survived a hung jury on his first corruption indictment before his 2018 reelection. Sherrod Brown beat his then-wife. Mike Espy was rotten with corruption that got him indicted. Richard Blumenthal lied about serving in Vietnam. Cal Cunningham cheated on his wife in the middle of his campaign. Andrew Gillum was trailed by a string of corruption investigations, before his even sleazier side emerged into public view. Terry McAuliffe’s long, sordid history as a bagman was exceeded by his thirst for stolen-election theories — and both of those go double for Stacey Abrams. Then there’s Jay Jones, now Virginia’s attorney general and the legal point man on the state’s redistricting litigation, who texted a Republican to defend his view that his political opponents’ children should be murdered, and who did “community service” — by doing work for his own PAC — for being caught driving 116 miles an hour.

 

And that list is aside from the ethical baggage train of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, or the whole era of the Clinton presidency, or Ted Kennedy being the most powerful figure in the party for decades, or the House Democrats, or the morass of corruption and vice that is the governance of so many blue-run cities. Look at how many decades they let Michael Madigan run Illinois like his own personal crime family.

 

Yet, the class of public Democratic partisans — pundits, intellectuals, flacks — never argues against voting for these cretins when the alternative could be the loss of an office to a Republican. Something like the Never Trump movement, or House Republicans voting to expel fellow Republican George Santos when that cost them a seat, is simply inconceivable on the Democratic side. At most, you get Democrats dumping blue-state officeholders when they are sure to be replaced by their own party, or shivving somebody like Eric Swalwell in a primary when it was in their partisan and ideological interests to do so. Nobody ever argued against reelecting Andrew Cuomo. Maybe when the opponent was David Duke, there was righteousness to the slogan of convicted felon Edwin Edwards: “Vote for the crook. It’s important.” But if you never have a problem voting for the crook, that’s a choice.

 

For those of us who take seriously the idea that politics and government should be about something besides pure partisan lust for power, it’s worth thinking through these questions seriously. Over the years, I’ve developed some principles for doing so.

 

First: It’s important to have principles. If you change your tune on a dime on the same questions depending upon which party a particular creep belongs to, people will notice. As well they should. “Character doesn’t matter, only issues do” is a principle, if not a great one. But if that’s your guiding principle, then you probably should sit out debates about the duty of the other side to vote down people you dislike on character grounds — at least, if you expect anybody to take you seriously as an advocate rather than an activist. The people who this week are singing a tune on backing Platner that’s diametrically opposite the tune they were singing last week about supporting Paxton? They’re shills, and everyone can see it.

 

Second, and relatedly: Be honest. If you’re going to make the case for voting for a bad person, at least be candid with your audience that the candidate is, in fact, a bad person. Ken Paxton is an awful human being and a crooked public official. The evidence of this is copious and wide-ranging. Any discussion of supporting him should begin by respecting your audience enough to acknowledge this reality. At the same time, if you are persuaded that a candidate is so personally bad that you have a duty to vote against your own party, own the full consequences of that choice. If you’re a Republican voting for Talarico, don’t try to whitewash him into something other than a left-wing radical who has declared himself open to Court-packing and other revolutionary stances. On the other hand, if you’re a Democrat sticking with Platner, don’t pretend away the fact that Susan Collins has the most moderate and least partisan voting record of anyone left in the Senate.

 

Third: Principles are a compass, not a straitjacket. They don’t relieve us from the hard work of applying them with prudence. Don’t let your slogans do your thinking for you; take the principles as the starting point of every analysis rather than trying to boil all decisions down to single-input syllogisms that disqualify this candidate or compel support for that one. Conservatives are conservatives in good part because we acknowledge that nearly all choices involve tradeoffs. Right is right and wrong is wrong, and these things don’t change — but individual situations frequently involve balancing a range of rights and wrongs. Any decent moral analysis of any hard voting choice will count some factors pointing in one direction and some in another. That’s also why you need not only a set of principles but also some sense of proportion in how to rank them.

 

It’s simply realism to observe that sometimes you can defend one principle only by betraying another. Before you do that, it’s important to consider both the relative priority of principles and the triage questions of which principles are under greater threat at any moment. Abe Lincoln believed in honest government, but he was willing to look the other way at some crooked deals done on his behalf to pass the 13th Amendment and get rid of slavery. Just four years before, he’d been willing to enshrine slavery in the Constitution to keep the Union from shattering. In neither case had his principles changed; he just knew which things mattered more than others, what was possible and what wasn’t, and what was more threatened and what wasn’t.

 

Fourth: Character always matters. The minute you start pretending otherwise, or retailing Clintonesque theories of “compartmentalization,” you are swimming against the tide of everything we know about human beings. Elections are never just about voting records; there will always be more decisions down the road that we can’t foresee when we are pulling the lever. Nobody in 2018 knew that they were voting on pandemic policy; nobody in 2000 knew that they were charting the course of the War on Terror. Voting in a representative constitutional republic is inevitably an act of trust in flesh-and-blood human beings.

 

Fifth: Elections really are binary choices in nearly all cases. One of the two major parties will win, and one will lose. Even independent or seemingly independent candidates for Congress will give control of the chamber to one side or another — or at least will remove support from one of them. I reject the view that this relieves us from all moral analysis. But it also means that there are real costs to not casting your vote in favor of the party that supports the things you believe in, when the choice is one that strongly opposes those things. The more uniformly your views align with one party against the other, the higher the cost in choosing against your own side. That cost will often be measured in human lives lost and ruined and damage to our civic order, our Constitution, our national security, and our civilization. These are not small things.

 

Sixth: The office matters. Executive and judicial offices involve a lot more opportunities for the exercise of unilateral power and judgment than do legislative offices. So there’s nothing hypocritical about applying a lower moral bar to legislators. Similarly, it matters whether — and for how long — a particular legislator’s election is apt to decide partisan control of a chamber. It was easier for conservatives to abstain from supporting Roy Moore in 2017 because Republicans then held a fairly strong position in the Senate, he was running for only a three-year Senate term, and it was highly likely that Doug Jones would lose at the next general election in 2020 (as he did).

 

Seventh: Not all questions of character are the same. Genuinely bad character tends to emerge in repeated patterns and surface in multiple ways, as it has with Clinton and Trump, with Paxton and Platner, and with characters such as Gillum. But character is ultimately the test of the whole person: In evaluating their sins, we should look at their overall record of offsetting virtues and opportunities to learn and clean up their act. Sometimes, that’s borne out by the record, and sometimes, it’s not. But it again defies simple syllogisms that purport to be a substitute for judgment.

 

Eighth: Clean up your own messes. Just because we may feel cornered into backing a bad candidate in this race, or withholding support from one in that race, doesn’t mean that the job is done. There’s always another season of primaries to try to get it right next time. And we have less reason to complain about bad people as our nominees if we didn’t make our stand against them in the primary when we had the chance.

 

I’ve voted for, or supported from afar, some dreadful people. I once voted for a literal blood-drinking pagan for New York City Council, without whom there would have been no Republicans at all outside of Staten Island. That worked out badly: He later got indicted for selling access to the Republican primary to Democrats. On the other hand, while I haven’t voted or urged support for a Democrat in any election in this century, Trump was a bridge too far for me, and if I’d had a vote in Alabama in 2017, Roy Moore would have been, too.

 

I could not vote for Ken Paxton for an executive office such as the one he currently holds as attorney general, but if I had a vote in Texas, based on what we know today, I’d hold my nose and vote for him over Talarico. It’s not the easiest of choices, but Paxton is (unlike a fair number of MAGA populists) a sound conservative on most of the issues, even if I gag at his foolhardy and destructive advocacy for breaking the Senate filibuster. Far more important: Talarico is a radical leftist; he’d be a vote against any Supreme Court nominee in the next two years, especially one devoted to the Constitution; and most important of all, he would hold office for all four years of the next presidential term, a moment of maximum peril for our constitutional order, in which he’d be apt to support every manner of destructive bid by progressives to restructure the American system permanently.

 

Surely, Democratic partisans will make their arguments for Platner. In most cases, the outcome will be predetermined: They’ll do exactly the same thing they do in every situation: whatever it takes to maintain or increase their political power. And then they’ll lecture the rest of us for only sometimes doing what they never do.