I admit, it was tricky for me, a white male swing-state voter, to decide who deserved my vote in this election. But in the end, I cast my ballot for Donald Trump along with over seventy million other Americans. And I promise you that decision has nothing to do with my hating women, or Black people, or even Black women. Just yesterday, a Black woman made me my Blonde Vanilla Latte, and I politely thanked her.

Kamala Harris was an okay candidate, I guess. She never said anything about wind turbines causing cancer, but even though Trump may have been wrong about that, at least he has the guts to express an opinion about it. Also, I never heard Harris talk about herself as the only person who could fix the economy, the borders, and all the wars, whereas Trump said he could do all those things. And Harris never attended a confused town hall where she swayed to the music for forty minutes instead of taking questions or pretended to fellate a microphone. She was a flawed candidate, for sure.

Still, there was nothing glaringly wrong with Harris. Back in 2016, I had no such conflict in deciding which candidate would get my vote because I hated Hillary Clinton with a seething rage. However, looking back all these years later, it’s hard for me to remember why. Was it Benghazi? Emails? All those Trump rallies with the mob screaming, “Lock her up”?

Anyway, it was definitely something.

The important thing is that my Hillary antipathy can never be traced to some unconscious bias I have against the ladies. And the same thing was true in this election cycle. There was definitely no unexplored resentment towards women that made it impossible for me to cast my vote for Kamala. Once I looked logically and dispassionately at the candidates, I saw that each had their pros and cons. For example, Donald Trump took away abortion rights, built an $8.4 trillion debt, and incited an insurrection when he lost to Joe Biden. Still, Kamala Harris’s economic plan needed a little more detail. It really was a toss-up.

Believe me — no one supports the idea of a female president more than me. It’s so sad we haven’t had one yet. But what can we do about it? I blame Democrats for choosing such bad candidates. Everyone knows Hillary lost because she was so unlikeable and didn’t go to Wisconsin enough. Meanwhile, Kamala is likable, and she went to Wisconsin plenty of times. Yet there was still something not quite right about her, and when it came time for me to choose, I had to go with my gut.

I remember the first time I voted for Trump in 2016. He was kind of an unknown back then. Unless you’d grown up in New York and knew about his bankruptcies, or had heard him brag about sexual assault, or you’d read anything about him at all, then you thought, “Gee. Maybe we should give this reality TV show host and beauty pageant owner a chance to be president.” And that’s what we did!

But going into the voting booth eight years later, we knew everything there was to know about Trump. We’d seen him botch the pandemic, get impeached, steal documents, get convicted for fraud, deny the election results, and install a frat boy handmaiden Supreme Court that took away women’s rights and ensured rich people can do whatever they want, including buy elections. In 2024, we were definitely aware that he lies quite a bit. We knew all this about him, yet when he called Kamala Harris a DEI hire, it made you think, “Hmm. That accusation sure pushes my buttons.” And once those buttons are pushed, there’s nothing any one of us can really do except react without thinking too hard.

Anyway, I’ll probably spend the next four years explaining how she should have answered questions differently, like with forty-minute rants about sharks or Hannibal Lecter or Arnold Palmer’s penis, for example. Maybe Kamala should have explained the merits of Bidenomics better, or gone on Joe Rogan, or done one other thing that would have convinced me to vote for her over a climate denier who’s going to put a vaccine denier in charge of healthcare. Just so long as we can all agree that the fault was hers, and not tens of millions of American voters who willingly elected a man who said that immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country.

And who knows, if Trump gets what he wants and does what he said he would do, then maybe we won’t even need elections anymore. Certainly, the rich will get richer, and all that wealth is sure to trickle down to the rest of us, right? Or perhaps they’ll even take the vote away from women, just like so many in the Trump world want.

I just hope that if my daughters are paying attention to all this, they don’t reach the wrong conclusion and think that millions of people must secretly hate women. When they witness their country choose an erratic, indolent, and vindictive man who was found liable for sexual assault over an appealing, competent, and qualified woman, I hope they don’t lose all their faith. And when they learn that I voted for Donald Trump, I hope they won’t look at me with a devastated sense of betrayal. I hope they’ll understand that I had many good and logical reasons for not voting for Kamala Harris.

Although looking back all these hours later, it’s hard for me to remember why. But I’m sure it was something.