We have reached that point in the election cycle where people begin to tell us it is conservative to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris or express astonishment that Republicans are voting for the former President Donald Trump—even Republicans who are aware of his flaws, given the options that are actually on the ballot this year.

There was an extended period of time when I stopped voting for Republican presidential candidates because I thought they increased the risk of disastrous, no-win wars in the Middle East. Even Trump heightens the chances of war with Iran more than I’m entirely comfortable with, but my sense is that he would prefer to go down in history as an international dealmaker and his instincts, in this area at least, are less bellicose than the available alternatives.

But I was never one to pretend that increasingly progressive Democrats were actually conservative. Occasionally, a Jim Webb would come around who combined some latent conservative tendencies with sensible foreign-policy views. More often, Democrats would give us candidates who voted for the Iraq War, as did then-Senator Joe Biden and both senators on the ticket they ran against George W. Bush in 2004.

January 6 was a national disgrace and embarrassment, a dangerous event even if not quite for the reasons many of those who make it central to their political identity claim. Yet my view is that the Iraq War represents the nadir of American political leadership in the last quarter century, which leads me to see both the stakes of the election and international conflicts like the Russia-Ukraine war differently than the small but vocal group of Harris-voting conservatives. 

But anything Trump attempts will be opposed by major national institutions—from the press, to the courts, to the people with the biggest media megaphones—with a ferocity and near-unanimity that nothing Harris does will come close to eliciting.

Let’s start with a perfectly benign example. When Trump proposes an end to the taxation of tips, there is a rush of news stories about the lost revenue and unintended consequences. When Harris copies him, with the support of the Biden White House, sometimes even the same media outlets treat it as just another policy proposal.

What little we know of Harris’s platform is hostile to constitutional government as it presently exists. She has endorsed Biden’s proposed Supreme Court reforms and may be even more committed to them than he is. Taken together, they are a naked attempt to gut judicial review and constitutional checks on what a future Democratic administration would do.

Anything Trump would try to do to make an unelected federal bureaucracy accountable to the elected constitutional officeholders will receive far more scrutiny. More attention will be paid to what a discarded Heritage Foundation whitepaper might mean for Trump’s power than what these reforms would do to enhance Harris’s.

Democrats have been inattentive, if not outright hostile, to enumerated powers for decades. This is often justified by arguing they want to defy constitutional strictures for the public benefit, not Trumpian self-dealing. But you don’t have to worry as much about presidential immunity if presidents are limited to their enumerated powers.

Sometimes the Democrats’ small-d democratic rhetoric is itself at odds with the Constitution. What they want to do is replace the current system, which requires broad consensus for most major changes to the frustration of both parties, with the ability to ram things through with the barest majorities. They can justify it in terms of one human, one vote, but it rather suspiciously maximizes the amount of power they can wield with the narrow margins by which they can actually win elections.

If Harris is elected president alongside Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, there is a good chance the Senate filibuster will be eliminated. This would allow 50 or 51 Democratic senators to deal conservatives long-term defeats on issues ranging from abortion to immigration, further consolidating their own power through a bigger federal role in elections and statehood for ultra-blue jurisdictions like Washington, D.C.

All of this could have happened under Biden, but the Democratic majorities were too small. Perhaps some other Democrats in the Senate would take up the role played by Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Their absence from the next Congress, however, suggests probably not.

The real consequences of any election result can be hard to predict. Recessions, terrorism, and pandemics can disrupt the best-laid plans. That’s why people should vote as they please.