One Vote

 This primary season, a familiar debate is playing out: should liberals and moderates cross party lines to vote in the Republican primary, just so we can do our part to minimize the risk of a second Trump presidency? 

If I lived in a state that permitted independents to participate in the GOP primary, and which held a conventional primary with secret ballots, this would be an easier choice. I am no fan of Nikki Haley, to be sure, and disagree with all of her policies (apart from her robust support of Ukraine and our other democratic allies); but I have no trouble at all seeing that the country would be better off with her in the White House than Donald Trump. 

After all, politics is often a matter of choosing between imperfect options. And no one needs to convince me of the principle that just about anyone is better than Trump. I was prepared all the way back in 2016 to cross party lines to vote for Marco Rubio (odious man), if it meant keeping Trump out of the White House. Now, eight years later, after Trump tried to stage a coup and overturn our democracy, the choice is even simpler. 

Plus, there was an appealing kind of nobility to the gesture. To vote for Haley even while despising Haley, but to do it because the alternative would be even worse—it was something like the priest in Silence choosing to trample on the holy image rather than expose the peasants to further persecution. I take the transgression upon myself so that others might be spared! A vote worthy of Isaiah's suffering servant. 

I was therefore fully prepared in principle to take Jamie Dimon's recent advice to liberal Democrats: namely, that they should try to ensure that someone—anyone—other that Trump is running as the alternative to Biden this fall. I would have done it, too, had I lived in New Hampshire, say. 

But I do not live in New Hampshire, or any other rational state. I live in Iowa, where the primaries are not held in an ordinary polling place, or by means of an ordinary ballot. I live in Iowa, where they happen by the still-inscrutable and opaque (at least to me) process of caucusing. 

Plus, the Iowa caucuses, unlike the New Hampshire primaries, are not open to independents. To participate, you have to actually register as a Republican. This was in theory possible. They even allow same-day changes of party affiliation in Iowa. But the thought of not just voting for Haley, but of actually becoming an official Republican to do so, was too much of a sin even for a suffering servant to take on his shoulders. That was a stain too large for me to accept. 

All of this was rendered moot anyways, because on my drive back to Iowa, I was waylaid by a car accident that kept me stranded for two days in Indiana. It was therefore late in the evening on the 15th when I arrived back in Iowa City, so there was no chance of me getting to a caucus site while they were still open—still less of changing my party affiliation to do so. The question of whether to vote for Haley would have to remain for me purely academic. 

But I wasn't too worried about this. I thought: other people will decide her fate. After all, in any given election, so many people participate that almost every outcome is determined by a lead of at least a thousand votes or so. The odds of any one person casting the deciding ballot, therefore, are practically nil. In a statistical sense, then, one person's vote really doesn't matter. This, at least, is what I told myself, in order to ease my conscience for having missed the opportunity. 

Then the results from my county, Johnson County, came in. It turns out that it was the only county in the state that Trump did not win. And, according to Politico, this result came down to only a single vote. This means that one person in Johnson County really did cast the deciding ballot. 

My heart utterly quailed within me when I saw this. My first impulse was to pretend I hadn't read it, and to hope none of my friends ever saw it. One friend in particular had been pressuring me for weeks to go in and pull the lever for Haley. How would I ever live it down, if he found out how nearly my neglect of his advice came to rewriting political history? 

Obviously, Trump still lost the county, even without my assistance. But it was solely due to that one person. Can you imagine if that one other person—blessed may they be—had not been there? If I had opened the results the next morning, and seen that Trump had won—or at least tied—in the county by a single vote instead? And I would have to live with the knowledge that I could have averted that outcome? 

To be sure, Trump is still on track to win the overall 2024 nomination. But if he had won every county in Iowa, he would be entering the next primary with even more wind at his back, and the other candidates would have even less of a plausible case to make that they pose a realistic alternative to him. In a real sense, then, my non-participation in the caucus came within just a squeak of utterly remaking and unsettling American political history. 

"That's astonishing," as a character says in Donald Barthelme's novella The King: "Not doing a thing of this magnitude? I don't think there's been a king in the history of the world who's not done something on this scale." 

I guess my case at least offers a final and sobering answer to that perennial question of our political life: will it really make any difference if I vote? Does one person's vote actually matter? Apparently, it can matter a great deal! For my absence, my simple omission to be present at the caucuses, came one vote shy of potentially destroying American democracy. I, who have done nothing but oppose Trump for the last nine years, since his first election campaign started, was very nearly responsible for re-electing him. 

There is a frightening sort of "All for want of a nail" logic, then, to the events of the last few days—starting with that car accident in Indiana. If I hadn't skidded on that ice; or if that one other person hadn't shown up that day.... It certainly offers an object lesson in unintended consequences! "Small was the debt I thought"—to quote Paul Laurence Dunbar—"God! but the interest!"