I liken this election to walking into a grocery store and your only choices are a head of cabbage and a week-old, open bag of stale Flaming Hot Cheetos.<p>The dumb part of your brain says "both of these options suck". And your brain naturally wants to say "at least the Flaming Hot Cheetos have flavor and are interesting".<p>Maybe you actually want stale Flaming Hot Cheetos. I will not judge you for that. But for everyone else who is despairing that "both choices are bad", I <i>implore</i> you to reconsider. While both choices are unappealing, that does not mean there's not a substantive difference between the two. Your brain is being tricked.<p>I will not waste your time trying to sell you on how good or exciting a head of cabbage is. You can walk away with the bag of stale Cheetos, telling yourself how much you love it and how anyone who would want to eat a cabbage is stupid. They are stale, they are untrustworthy, they will make you sick and paranoid. Or you can pick up the cabbage, know that you made an adult choice, and walk away with a clean conscious.
Graham correctly flags the one thing about which there should be no disagreement in <i>any</i> democracy: losing the election and then trying to falsify the results after the fact, in order to remain in power, is completely disqualifying.<p>We can disagree and quibble about all the rest of it: policy, character, blah blah blah. There are lots of other things I don't like about Trump, or Harris for that matter, but none of them are anywhere close to the magnitude of that.
According to polling, moderates are voting for Trump because of the economy/inflation and immigration.<p>On inflation/economy: Trump's plans will cause massive inflation and damage the American economy: <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/16-nobel-prize-winning-economists-say-trump-policies-will-fuel-inflation-2024-06-25/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/world/us/16-nobel-prize-winning-econ...</a><p>On immigration: Anybody serious about illegal immigration would clamp down hard on the employers who hire illegal immigrants. Trump had 4 years to prove he was serious, and proved he wasn't.
I am surprised and pleased how civil this conversation is on HN. I am voting Kamala, but against my bettter judgement. I do not approve of the genocide in Gaza, and I see it as a failure of leadership. But Trump offers no alternative path. He's not established any credentials as a fiscally conservative bulwark or isolationist. instead he's established no value system at all. If this was a card game I'd return my hand and start again.
> Both parties’ policies seem a roughly equal mix of good and bad.<p>What? Trump’s tariff policies alone would cause more damage to the US than anything Harris is proposing.
While I agree with this, sadly I feel US Elections are considered "Entertainment" or a "Reality" type show these days.<p>Seems many people want to vote for the "exciting" candidate instead of voting on the issues. So they seem to want the one that mostly one keeps you entertained :(
This endorsement is the weakest I have seen. Paul Graham wanted to enorse the left no matter what because of his silicon valley connections, and then created an exaplanation afterwards (it would be suprising for me if he ever voted republican in the last 20 years).<p>In my experience the best way to stop banana republic from happening is to always give power to the party with less power (which was democrat last time, republic this time), as both parties have a danger of trying to accumulate too much power nowdays.