Since I said I will not vote for Mike Collins for the United States Senate, the incoming fire has been intense. Listeners have called the show to tell me I have lost my mind. Readers have emailed to cancel their subscriptions. People I have known for years have told me, with a straight face, that I will be personally responsible for handing Georgia — and maybe the Senate — to the Democrats.
Side note — please disabuse yourself that I do stuff for money. Taking this position, like many other positions I’ve taken in the past few years, has cost me financially. There is no real incentive to defy the tribe. But I continue to think it is the right thing to do and the day I start looking at a ledger to decide right and wrong will be the day I hope someone takes me out back.
I want to answer my critics on this because many of them are good people who love this country, and because I think they have the blame pointed in exactly the wrong direction.
On Friday, a caller named Joy made the case better than most of my critics have. In 2016, she said, she thought Hillary Clinton was the devil and Donald Trump was the head demon, but one of them was going to win, so she voted. Who wins matters. Judges matter. Iran matters. Vote now, she said, and put up a better candidate next time.
I do not truly disagree with Joy, and most of my friends are where she is. I respect it. The problem is that “next time” never comes. Every time we say we will get a better candidate next time, we get a worse one.
In January of 2021, I showed up in a Senate runoff in Georgia and I voted for two Republican candidates. But over 524,000 of my fellow Republicans refused to show up because the President of the United States, a handful of members of Congress, and leaders in the Georgia Republican Party insisted the runoff would be stolen, so there was no reason to vote. The result was two Democrats getting elected to the Senate. I showed up, and many of the very same people now mad at me for refusing to vote for Mike Collins never showed up.
And, by the way, a friend pulled the voter files of identifiable people who are attacking me, and it is absolutely true that a majority of them never bothered to show up in the 2021 runoff where we got Warnock and Ossoff in the first place.
In 2022, I held my nose and voted for Herschel Walker. He had held a gun to his ex-wife’s head, and he had a long history of mental health struggles, both of which he acknowledged. Women came up to me at church and asked what we had done. They had no idea until the negative ads started hitting. I’d been telling people this exact scenario would play out. Still, I told them it was in the past, not the present, and that we would do better next time. Walker lost the runoff. A lot of those Republican white ladies in churches across Georgia were the ones who refused to show up in the runoff.
Candidate quality and candidate character still matter.
This time, Georgia Republicans nominated a man who has surrounded himself with people no decent campaign or congressman should tolerate. Kip Talley, his chief of staff in the House, sat in a group chat with Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer and wanted to get a Holocaust denier out of jail. Collins replaced him only in July. Brandon Phillips ran Collins’s House office, and then his campaign, despite a 2008 guilty plea for vandalizing a man’s tires and a woman’s property and a 2022 arrest for kicking a dog, and Collins cut him loose only after the campaign mocked a woman who had accused Matt Lauer of rape. Preston Parra, who interned for Collins and later worked for his leadership PAC, called himself a racist, posted “White Power,” and drew swastikas. Collins’s son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II, lives on Collins’s property, was featured on the campaign website, shared Nazi imagery, and promoted Patriot Front. When reporters asked about him, Collins walked out of his own press conference. A senator does not just cast votes. He brings a staff to Washington for six years, and Collins has shown no discernment at all in whom he hires.
Georgia Republicans are asking voters to choose between a candidate who props up the communists and a candidate who props up the white supremacists, the Holocaust deniers, and the Nazi sympathizers. That is the actual choice on the Senate line in Georgia. I do not want either of them, and I am not going to pretend otherwise because one has an R next to his name.
If we keep doing this, 100 years from now, we will be arguing about whether we have to vote for the rapist because at least he is not the murderer. Every cycle, we rationalize a worse candidate because the other side is supposedly worse still, and every cycle our standards decline further. At some point, someone has to say enough.
What my critics keep missing is that I have spent more than a month telling people to go vote anyway.
I know what the data shows.
A whole lot of Republicans are not planning to vote at all this year. They are angry about the economy, they are disgusted with some of the candidates, and they are inclined to stay home. That would be a disaster for a lot of good Republicans down the ballot who deserve to win. In my weekend conversations with Republican strategists in Texas and Georgia, they all believe a wipe out is coming for the GOP largely because Republicans themselves are not showing up to vote and Republican-leaning independent voters are voting Democrat.
So my message has been simple and consistent: show up. Vote for the good candidates. If there is a candidate you cannot stomach, leave that one line blank — but do not punish every other Republican on the ballot by staying home. I followed my own advice. I voted for every Republican on my ballot except one.
If you cannot tell the difference between a person staying home and a person showing up and voting for the entire Republican ticket except one line on the ballot, then you are a bigger part of the problem than I am. I am trying to get disaffected Republicans to the polls. The people screaming at me are giving those same voters one more reason to stay home.
I am not alone, either. More than a dozen pastors have texted me to say they did exactly what I did. They voted for everyone except that one race in Georgia because they could not bring themselves to support him. I have heard the same from pastors in Texas about the race there. The Republican Party should pay very close attention to the undervote on Tuesday, because it will be telling them something.
To be clear, I think Republicans will show up tomorrow. And I’ve been pounding the drum loudly that I both will not vote for certain candidates, but will not punish the whole of the GOP and my state by staying home.
The deeper problem is not one Senate race. It is that Republicans broke the economy and then defended breaking it while refusing to exercise accountability internally.
I am a Christian conservative. I will not vote for anyone who supports abortion rights, no matter the letter next to the name. Every one of us has a line in the sand we will not cross at the ballot box. I care about the culture war — about boys in girls’ sports, about the rise of socialism, about antisemitism on the left and the right. However, I have said for years that voters will give you a license to fight the culture war only if you give them a good economy. It is always the economy before it is anything else.
Many of the people now screaming that the trans crowd and the socialists will take over if Republicans lose said nothing about the tariffs. Worse, they defended them. They bought, hook, line, and sinker, the promise that tariffs would bring manufacturing home and save America. The tariffs hurt far more people than they helped, and they raised prices across the board. We have data from the United States Government, run by Donald Trump, and a host of private businesses that verify this, even as some still refuse to believe it.
The response now is that it was the war and only the war — that the war with Iran drove up diesel and gas prices. The war did drive up fuel prices, and I supported that war. It is not the whole story, though, and the data shows it. Ask a farmer.
Farmers in South Georgia have watched crops rot because they could not sell them after China did not buy what Washington promised China would buy. Many of you believed the President when he said he had struck a deal with China for them to buy the crops. China lied. The purchases never came.
Ask a truck driver. It is about diesel now, but it was about tariffs first. Farmers are furious, small businesses are furious, and they are in open rebellion against a policy the Republican base cheered. The President and his sycophants cheered on tariffs that raised consumer prices, hurt farmers’ ability to sell crops, and now, at fall harvest and planting season, have driven up diesel prices and fertilizer prices to record highs.
You cannot blame Joe Biden for a broken economy when President Trump imposed the tariffs and started a war that he has not finished. The combination of the two is what is driving voters away from the GOP this year.
The middle-class independent voters who decide elections do not care about our fight with the woke left. They do not care about my pro-life convictions or our opposition to gender ideology in schools. They care about their grocery bill and their 401(k). That is basic politics.
It is a basic politics the Republican Party, from the President to his base, have forgotten. And none of this even gets into the corruption issue, which has become one of the top concerns of voters — for the first time since Bill Clinton was President. Even a plurality of Republicans have concerns about President Trump, his family, and his associates getting rich off his Administration, and the congressional GOP that went after the “Biden Crime Family” has stayed remarkably silent.
When I warned about this, I was told to shut up and get in line. I was told I hated the president. I was told I was disloyal. Too much of the Republican base has decided its job is to defend every policy the president adopts and to beat up anyone who points out that the policy made things worse.
You should have gotten mad at the people in Washington who imposed the tariffs and told you they would help. Instead, you got mad at the people who told you the truth. You should have gotten mad at the war planners who half-assed a war and at a President who bluffed more than bombed.
If a blue wave comes on Tuesday and wipes out good Republicans who would have fought the very cultural battles you care about, it will not be because I left one line blank. It will be because the party broke the economy, got rich off their power, and nominated candidates voters could not trust. But you can stifle that blue wave by showing up and voting for the good Republicans at the congressional, state, and local levels while leaving other lines blank.
I know my sins all too well, and I fall short every day. I am also not a Democrat, I do not want to think like one, and I will not vote like one. I have convictions, and one of them is that Christians should not let anyone — a party, a president, or even a pastor — talk them into perpetually choosing the lesser of two evils as the evils keep getting worse.
Joy, if you are reading this, I am glad you voted. I am glad you are voting Republican, and I want everyone to show up. Go vote on Tuesday. Vote for the good candidates. If there is one you cannot stomach, leave that line blank and let the party see it — just do not take it out on everyone else on the ballot.
There really is a lot on the line tomorrow. The solution is not to yell at those of us who cannot stomach choosing between the Nazi lovers and Commie lovers. The solution is to stop nominating bad candidates and stop cheering on the policies that wrecked the economy.
Now, go vote for the good candidates instead of staying home.
