Can you vote against someone you have known for many years? Next week, I will be making this awkward decision. It might seem like my answer was hard to come by, but it came as a no brainer to me.
Because of the candidate’s political platform being in stark contrast to my own, the candidate does not have my vote. However, this election campaign has made me see firsthand that while you can respect people with opposing political views, entering into a competitive political sphere can change people and question the values people hold.
For context, back home in New York, each county or city’s legislators are up for re-election. Due to how my county’s legislators districts are divided, the district I live in is usually a safely Democratic district and has gone blue for as long as I can remember. However, this year, there is a formative challenger who is the spouse of a well-known public figure in my town.
It just so happens that the public figure and their spouse are also people who are pinnacle parts of my Jewish community back home. One of their sons was a good friend of mine in elementary school, and one of their daughters was a grade behind me for 10 years.
I have been welcomed into their house on multiple occasions and have felt that the candidate’s family are people whom I can trust. For example, while at a birthday sleepover at their house, they comforted me after watching Ghostbusters for the first time, which as a 10-year-old scared the hell out of me. As I grew up around them, I saw that the candidate’s kids were being raised with good values and, correspondingly, were being taught how to be good people. While I am no longer particularly close with the candidate’s family, they are still part of my community back home. The candidate’s family has shown me and others respect and a strong devotion to being in community and treating others with respect.
However, while my personal experiences with the candidate might show that they hold moral values, that doesn’t stop me from voting against them.
There are multiple factors going into my vote against the candidate, but the most important one is that their campaign platform is completely antithetical to my political beliefs. Their campaign platform is based on “cut[ting] taxes, fight[ing] hate crimes and antisemitism, stand[ing] with police, and invest[ing] in our roads,” which is a very generic platform for someone from my community to have. However, when digging deeper into their policy positions, it shows that the candidate is more or less running on a Make America Great Again (MAGA) Republican platform.
In an interview with a local newspaper, the candidate said that the Immigrants and Custom Enforcement (ICE) is “doing a good job” and declined to comment on whether the county police should help assist in ICE raids until sworn into office.
The candidate also denounced a project to open a new homeless shelter with the district, and the county’s Republican committee called their opponent “insane” for voting for it in a campaign ad. The candidate is not even hiding their MAGA beliefs. The candidate’s facebook profile picture is from a Trump/Vance rally during the 2024 Presidential Campaign. The candidate is also proudly embellishing their endorsements from other MAGA Republicans, including the County Executive (whom Trump has personally endorsed for re-election this November) who is infamous for fighting the New York State Supreme Court on mask mandates and sparring with the New York Civil Liberties Union in court to bar transgender athletes from using county sporting facilities.
It is not hard for me to come to terms with the candidate’s political positions. I know plenty of people personally who hold points of view that are different from mine. In my view, so long as you respect the value of agreeing to disagree and remaining tolerant of one another, I will respect your opinion. I have friends back home who voted for Trump in this past presidential election, but we have a mutual understanding that we will not see eye to eye on political issues.
In the past I have seen the candidate’s family be tolerant and respectful of other’s political opinions. The campaign that this family is running is showing me quite the opposite. I can reconcile with opposing political positions but not disregard for civility.
So far the candidate’s campaign has shown that they are not holding back on attack ads. The New York State Republican Committee has sent out blatantly disrespectful and unfactual mailers against the incumbent Democratic candidate accusing him of hosting an “unhinged social justice online seminar with extremists where funding cuts were proposed to high-performing school districts…and plays along with extremist radical ideology.” In addition, on the candidate’s official campaign Facebook, the campaign called their opponent out for seemingly sleeping during a county legislative session. This is not the respect that the candidate has demonstrated with me and others who have different political opinions.
What is even more upsetting about the candidate’s campaign is that they recently moved to the district for which she is running to represent. While I do not have enough information to know what caused the move other than “downsizing,” the timing of it all makes me nervous that there were other motives driving it.
According to a local newspaper article, the county Republican Party views this district as vulnerable. This is not that surprising. Compared to the 2020 precinct map, the district trended more Republican in 2024, with precincts near my house going red in a typically blue area.
Either election result will not shock me; the candidate is an important community member with name recognition, and their opponent is an incumbent in an increasingly Republican district. I also do not believe that their opponent is taking their candidacy as a legitimate threat, therefore weakening the opposing candidate’s campaign.
This campaign has made me contemplate my view on them and how to vote in an election where you know the candidate personally. What this experience has taught me is that I shouldn’t take this election to heart. While I believe the candidate’s campaign positions are antithetical to my own and the attacks on their opponent have been excessive and potentially demoralizing, I realize that some of this is just politics. It is a competitive election and sometimes a candidate has to make those hard decisions.
