Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 09:30 pm
Republican strategist and commentator Ana Navarro voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton, saying that Florida is too close for her to cast a symbolic protest vote. She said she voted “AGAINST Trump, and FOR Hillary.”
In an opinion piece for CNN, Navarro wrote of her struggle that she didn’t want to do this but, “I had hoped that a week before the election, Trump would be losing Florida by a large enough margin that my vote wouldn’t matter. But darn it, my home state is too close to call. Florida could be the decisive state (again) as to who ultimately becomes the next president of the United States. I thought back to the 2000 election, which was decided by 537 votes in Florida. I thought about how I would feel if the same thing happened in 2016. I thought and I thought and I thought….
Then I cast my vote for Hillary Clinton. Let me rephrase that. I cast my vote against Donald Trump. I did it without joy or enthusiasm. I did it out of civic duty and love for our country.”
Navarro, who was the national Hispanic campaign chairwoman for Senator John McCain in 2008 and was supporting Jeb Bush’s candidacy for 2016, listed her many reasons for voting against the Republican nominee,– among them the way he speaks about immigrants and trashed Republican Senator John McCain and a Gold Star family. She wrote about Trump bragging about sexual assault. She included Trump’s attacks on the free press and freedom of expression, and Trump supporters so often hurling anti-Semitic insults at the press.
Navarro listed many reasons why she thinks Hillary Clinton has demonstrated poor judgment, but says that she is more concerned about Donald Trump’s bad character.
“I worry that Trump brings out the worst in America. Division. Hostility. Racism. Bigotry. Misogyny. Things we used to hide,” Navarro wrote in CNN. “Feelings we used to try to overcome. Under the guise of not cowing to political correctness, some people are no longer embarrassed or ashamed to show the warts on their souls.”
She wrote that the president has to lift us up and serve as a role model. “A person supported by the Ku Klux Klan and its former Grand Wizard David Duke can never represent me. He can never be a role model for me.”
In closing, Navarro made a chilling case that we “each have a right and a duty to make a personal choice based on those things that are most important to us, that we value most. My conscience compels me to do every little thing I can to make sure a bad person is not our next president… One vote is our right. One vote is our weapon. I am exercising mine against Donald Trump.”
It has to be so difficult for Republicans who don’t support their party’s nominee to break with their party in order to follow their conscience. History will hopefully be kind to them, but certainly their professional reputations should be elevated as they try to lead their party to put principle and country ahead of party.
Republicans like Ana Navarro give us hope that our country is not lost, and that Republicans and Democrats can work together to shut down hate. It’s okay to disagree on ideology, while standing firmly together bracing against division and intolerance.
It’s called patriotism.
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