Election night. After weeks of hearing from almost every major pollster that this election would be unprecedently close and maybe wouldn’t be called for days, it just…wasn’t. It wasn’t close at all. Harris supporters are reeling, and it’s probably no surprise to you that college campuses are a rough place to be right now. That’s why we turned to our ERI Affiliate Groups—local pro-life clubs, many on college campuses—to brainstorm: how should we pro-lifers be handling conversations with pro-choice people in the aftermath?

So yes, Rebecca Carlson and Emily Geiger co-wrote this article, but our incredibly thoughtful students deserve to be in the byline too. They’re out there every day, on the front lines engaging directly with thousands of pro-choice people, and this article came out of their experience and ideas.

Photo by The Now Time

Estimated reading time: 19 minutes

Last week, I wrote an article about the election (always a fraught thing to do). I argued that who pro-lifers should vote for is an important question and that not all answers are equally correct, but I also argued that how we think of and treat fellow pro-lifers who vote differently from us is even more important.

The responses I got were pretty much exactly what I expected. Some people loved the article, some people engaged thoughtfully with particular claims it made, and some people I lost completely as soon as I said that it’s possible to both be pro-life and vote for Harris.

If that’s you, I have immense empathy with where you’re coming from. I think Harris is very, very terrible—both her personal character and her policies, especially her policy goals on abortion, which are to make it federally illegal for states to impose restrictions on abortion at any time, for any reason. If she’s elected and she gets the congressional support she needs to succeed at passing that law, it will cost the lives of thousands and thousands of babies, including babies late enough in pregnancy that they can certainly feel pain and will die in agony. I’m not voting for Harris, and I think voting for Harris is the wrong choice.

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

If you don’t vote for THIS CANDIDATE, you’re not really pro-life.

Just kidding.

I have good friends whom I know to be thoughtful, intelligent, caring, and passionately pro-life people who have all of the following plans in November. In random order (I literally used a list randomizer):

• Planning to vote for Harris. They see the way Trump handled the transition of power in 2021, and they are deeply concerned about how he would use power and what he might be willing to do to hold onto it. They also abhor the ways Trump has spoken about immigrants, women, and other groups of people. They see that Trump has promised to veto a federal abortion ban and explicitly opposed even some state-level abortion restrictions. They’re deeply concerned that if pro-lifers vote for Trump en masse, we’ll be communicating that Republicans get the pro-life vote no matter what they do, and cementing the GOP as a pro-choice party.
• Planning to vote for Trump. They see that Harris is making legal abortion at any time for any reason the center of her campaign. They may think many of Trump’s actions and his recent statements about abortion are really, really bad, but they would rather have a president like Trump who has said he would veto federal abortion restrictions than a president like Harris who has said she’ll do everything in her power to make sure there can’t be abortion restrictions even at a state level. Some also think that when both presidential candidates are horrible, we should vote based on the broader worldview of the parties, and they see the Republican party more broadly as in line with their values.
• Planning to vote for Peter Sonski (American Solidarity Party), or another pro-life third-party candidate. They see that their single vote is statistically certain not to determine whether Trump or Harris wins. They think that they still have strong reasons to vote, but they also think that, because their vote isn’t going to determine who wins, they do not have strong reasons to restrict their vote to one of the two major party candidates, especially when they detest the directions both parties are going to the point that they think it would be morally wrong for them to vote for either. With the current Republican party’s pro-choice party platform and full-throttled support for Trump, they don’t see either major party as in line with their values. They believe voting for a third party sends that message of active rejection to the major parties more strongly than not voting.

Sidenote: Regardless of who you vote for, you should check out Sonski’s fantastic work winsomely advocating for pro-life policies. He’s taken ERI’s Equipped for Life course and sought us out for individual advanced messaging consulting, and he’s one of the most intentional, clear, and effective pro-life politicians out there at communicating about abortion. We at ERI have diverse views about who to vote for, but we’re unanimous that Sonski is awesome.¹

• Planning not to vote in the presidential election. They see that their single vote is statistically certain not to determine whether Trump or Harris wins the election. They don’t believe we have a duty to vote, and they view both Trump and Harris as too morally evil to vote for without compromising oneself. And even in races where there are morally acceptable candidates, they also think it’s more appropriate not to vote unless you’re sufficiently read up on what you’re voting about to understand the best arguments on both sides, instead of letting your vote be determined by the one side you happen to have heard.

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes