It’s official: Hell has frozen over.
A friend called me today. He lives in Gray County, Texas. He’s a long-standing Republican. He then warned me about what was about to come out of his mouth.
“I’m going to vote for Hillary,” he said.
To say I was taken aback would be to commit a profound understatement.
He’s getting ahead of himself just a little bit. My friend presumes that Donald J. Trump will be the Republican Party’s presidential nominee and that Hillary Rodham Clinton will be the Democratic Party’s choice.
He doesn’t like Clinton. My friend said she lies too much and that he doesn’t trust her.
Still, according to my friend, she remains preferable to who he believes — and so do I — is the probable GOP nominee.
“I am not a Trump guy,” my pal said.
There was another element that drove my friend over to the other side. It was the non-aggression pact agreed to by Sen. Ted Cruz and Gov. John Kasich. My friend doesn’t think much of Kasich and he said he voted for Cruz in the Texas GOP primary at the beginning of March. He said he liked Cruz’s claim of being an “outsider.”
Then Cruz struck the deal with Kasich in this last-chance bid to derail Trump. To my friend, that smacked of “establishment politics.” So, his support for Cruz disappeared when he teamed up with Kasich in this stop-Trump gamble.
At one level, his acknowledgement surprises me. At another level, my friend seems to symbolize the national mood about the upcoming contest for the presidency.
He vowed to vote for one of the major-party nominees. He said he didn’t want to “waste my vote” on a fringe candidate; he also said he didn’t want to sit this election out.
Trump’s candidacy has produced this kind of impact with Republicans all over the country. They don’t buy his newfound “conservative values.” They don’t trust him. They are horrified at the things that he has uttered along the campaign trail.
With that, Hillary Rodham Clinton has gained at least one vote from someone in the Texas Panhandle where she likely never thought she would.
Go figure.