I wrote this note to myself on Election Day 2012. I'd grown sick at the Democratic Party's constant betrayals of my deepest values and swore to myself, as I held my nose and voted against Romney, that it would be the last time I voted defensively. I've kept that note above my writing desk for the past four years, as a reminder.
It never occurred to me that "how bad the guy on the other side is" was a variable without a lower bound.
How bad the guy on the other side is: this is the part of the piece where I might spend a few moments plumbing the depths of my vocabulary to describe just how hideous I find Donald Trump. But there's nothing I can say about him that hasn't been said in furious superlatives elsewhere. I'll leave it at this: he's dangerously unfit to be president.
The idiom that we generally use in this situation is that the Republican Party, particularly their primary voters, "called my bluff." But I wasn't bluffing. I didn't keep that note in my peripheral vision for four years as a bluff. But if we extend the poker analogy (and play a bit with the language), we could say that I went to the river with an exceptionally strong hand, but the other side had the nuts: they had nuts voters supporting a nuts candidate in a completely nuts election. I wasn't bluffing. But you fold when you know you're beat.
So once again this year, I found myself holding my nose as I voted. I'm Not With Her. But I'm sure as hell against him.