For voters unhappy with Trump and Clinton, it’s a year of hard choices

For Daniel Abrams, the decision was easy. A millennial Democrat who supported Bernie Sanders, Abrams refuses to vote for Hillary Clinton and plans to cast a write-in vote for Green Party nominee Jill Stein.

Many voters long ago made their choice for president and are probably even satisfied, if not pleased, with their choice. But to some lifelong Republicans who months ago rejected Trump and to Democratic activists who defied Clinton, their November choice is particularly excruciating.

For those “Never Trump” Republicans, it’s a revolt against the plurality of their party that gave Trump a victory in Georgia’s March primary with nearly 39 percent of the vote, 15 percentage points more than the runner-up.

“It’s nothing short of a rebellion against a community — basically a way of life. It’s not something you take lightly. It’s the biggest gut-check vote any Republican has ever had to make,” said Millican, a GOP operative. “And it took me a long time to come to the place where I couldn’t vote for him. But that’s where we are.”

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution interviewed dozens of Republican critics of Trump and Democratic skeptics of Clinton a month before the election. Many on both sides said they will hold their nose and vote for their party’s nominee while some refuse to budge and are looking for alternatives.

‘Principles over politics’

Some of Trump’s GOP skeptics were on the verge of abandoning him long before this month’s release of a 2005 videotape featuring him boasting about forcibly kissing and groping women. But to many, those predatory remarks crystallized their opposition to the New York businessman.

The ensuing civil war — with dozens of high-profile leaders abandoning Trump and pro-Trump loyalists attacking them as traitors — has threatened to sink his November chances. And while each of the Georgia skeptics said they’d never back Clinton, many were contemplating a write-in candidate or a third-party option.

Will Kremer, a former chairman of the Georgia Association of College Republicans, has pledged for months that he won’t support Trump. But he was beginning to hedge a bit a few weeks ago, saying he was back on the fence as Clinton gained traction. The video pushed him over the edge. He has a relative who was sexually abused, and hearing Trump brag about groping women set him off.

“It’s awful that Americans can’t look up to the president — whoever it will be — as a role model,” said Kremer, who is writing in Evan McMullin, an independent candidate running as the true conservative in the race.

“I might be throwing away my vote,” Kremer said, “but I want a candidate I am proud to cast a vote for.”

Baoky Vu, one of 16 Republican electors approved this spring in a state election, made national news when he said in August that he might withhold his Electoral College vote from Trump. He was quickly forced to resign, but months later he said his mind hasn’t changed.

“This thing has turned into an all-out race to the bottom. I’m feeling bad for the country,” Vu said. “I was always on the Never Hillary train, and now I’m not even thinking of getting on the Trump train. It’s a matter of principles over politics in this case.”

While much of the state's elected Republican leadership has stuck by Trump, some saying they're backing him out of fear of a Clinton presidency, state Rep. Allen Peake has teetered for weeks on the edge of defecting from Trump's camp. He said the "last straw" might have been the 2005 video — and Trump's not-so-contrite apology.

“I will again emphasize I will not be voting for Hillary,” said Peake, the highest-profile Republican lawmaker in Georgia to toy with abandoning the GOP candidate’s campaign. “But this latest revelation might very well be the last straw for me to even consider voting for Trump.”

The pressure on Peake, who hasn’t even said he is abandoning Trump, helps explain why many other GOP figures are reluctant to speak out about Trump. Droves of Trump supporters have attacked him on social media and flooded him with angry comments.

Bobby Booth faced some of the same vitriol from Trump supporters who branded him as a traitor when he said he would cast his ballot for Texas U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz at the party’s nominating convention in Cleveland. (The state party ended up giving Trump 42 of its 76 delegates, based on the outcome of the March primary, rather than awarding them all to him.)

Booth, though, has changed his tune since then. And he wanted to make sure nothing was left up to chance. He already voted for Trump, by absentee ballot, since he’ll be out of town on Election Day.

“This year I am not so much voting for the person but rather for the platform of the Republican Party,” he said, adding that the GOP’s opposition to abortion is driving his vote. “I could never vote Democratic and pro-choice. So whoever the Republican nominee is will get my vote.”

‘I would rather die’

Among Democrats, Sanders’ supporters are a determined minority. Clinton won Georgia in the March primary with more than 71 percent of the vote. Some continue to reject calls to fall in line and support Clinton for the good of the party, even as Sanders himself has endorsed Clinton and regularly campaigns on her behalf.

Abrams, the millennial Sanders backer who now plans to vote for the Green Party’s Stein, was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia this past summer. He was part of a group of Sanders supporters who staged a sit-in to protest the party’s efforts to silence them inside the convention hall. He hasn’t forgotten.

“I would rather die than vote for Hillary Clinton,” Abrams said. “I am a man of my morals, and I cannot vote against my conscience.”

Clinton is no progressive, Abrams said, and neither she nor Trump can be trusted. Both, he said, “are pathological liars, have no self-accountability, and have no interest in actually tackling the real issues.”

Abrams said his friends, his family, even his professors have tried to persuade him to vote for Clinton.

“What most people do not understand is that that mentality is a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he said. “Most people agree that we need a third party but then say that this election is too important to risk it.”

“People,” he said, “seem to be more influenced by fear than by hope.”

Nusaiba Baker of Atlanta, an Emory University medical student, was another Sanders delegate who won’t be voting for Clinton.

“As an Iraqi-Mexican woman, I despise Trump,” she said. “But I can’t vote for someone who voted for the Iraq war.”

Baker said she considered not voting at all, but she wants to back the MARTA expansion initiative that’s on the ballot in Atlanta.

Nick Langley is a graduate student at Georgia State University who started the Panthers for Bernie group last year. He will also be voting for Stein.

Clinton’s “hawkish and interventionist foreign policy, her ties to Wall Street and her support of fracking” make her unacceptable, Langley said.

Ted Terry understands his fellow Sanders supporters’ feelings. Now the mayor of Clarkston, Terry said he voted for Green Party nominee David Cobb for president in 2004 over Democrat John Kerry. But this year, Terry said his decision to support Clinton was not difficult.

“Trump is a climate change denier and clearly unprepared for the complex challenges of the presidency,” Terry said. “There are some people who are ‘Bernie or Bust’ to the end or are voting for Jill Stein. I understand, I was there when I was in my college years.”

‘A difficult year’

It’s left many Georgia politicos from both sides of the aisle struggling with what’s next.

Lisa Ring, the chairwoman of the Bryan County Democratic Committee, was a Sanders delegate to the convention. Now, she just sounds exhausted.

“I’ve backed off a bit from politics … not given up,” Ring said on Facebook. “I still see the big picture and I’m willing to do the work, but I think we need to be done with this DT/HRC/JS/GJ nonsense first. This has been a difficult year.”

All those Sanders supporters who fought so hard, she said, “are now reduced to ‘sore losers’ as our detractors continue to control the narrative.”

Ring said she’s not done fighting.

“I will continue my work for social and economic justice after the election … just as I was working for 30 years before the election,” she said. “I am not naive, stupid, hateful, misinformed or unreasonable.”

Millican, for one, tries to work it out in conversations with his friends. The Republican operative says that Trump isn’t the problem with the GOP, but a symptom of the problem — a pivot toward populism and nativism and away from conservative ideas and vision. But ask him what the party will look like by January and he’s at a loss.

“At this point, the conversation has changed to be about the future of the party and the future of the conservative movement,” Millican said. “But I have no idea what that is. I really don’t know. “

And Vu, the spurned Republican elector, sounds relieved to no longer have the burden of casting a ballot for Trump. When he goes to the polls, he’ll take what he calls a “bottoms-up” approach. He’s voting for U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson and down-ticket Republicans, and then writing in either Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, John Kasich or Paul Ryan at the top.

And then? He’s praying.

“I hope for the sake of humanity, we figure out how to move on after this.”