Many Republicans would say that it is one thing, and quite an awful thing, to withhold a vote from Donald Trump—but that voting for Kamala Harris, a “San Francisco Democrat,” is nothing short of a betrayal, an act of apostasy, impossible for any true conservative to justify.

They’re wrong, though in one respect it’s understandable why they’re wrong. Harris is hardly an avatar of conservatism. She is, after all, a lifelong Democrat who, in her ill-fated campaign for president in 2019, positioned herself as a progressive champion. She embraced positions that I believe ranged from silly to harmful. But it’s a more complicated story than that.

During Harris’s pre-Senate career, when she served as district attorney in San Francisco and then as attorney general of California, her record was generally pragmatic and moderate. In those roles, according to Don Kusler, the national director of Americans for Democratic Action, her record was one “that would have many liberals, particularly our California colleagues, angered or at least rolling their eyes.” Progressives had a much deeper relationship with President Joe Biden than with Vice President Harris; according to The Washington Post, “They fear that under Harris they would lose the unique access they had to the West Wing.” The New Democrat Coalition, a moderate faction in the House, says it’s the part of the caucus most closely aligned with Harris.

[Read: This is Trump’s message]

Nor are progressives particularly happy that during the 2024 campaign, Harris has broken with some of her previous liberal stances, such as opposing fracking, decriminalizing border crossing, and ending private health insurance. Harris has spent the closing stretch of the campaign appearing with the likes of Liz Cheney, not Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She has emphasized her support for Ukraine in its war of survival against Russia, and risks losing Michigan because she is viewed by some in her party as too supportive of Israel. During the campaign, Harris has shared that she owns a Glock, said she’d appoint a Republican to her Cabinet, and declared that she’s a “capitalist” who wants “pragmatic” solutions. Her economic focus is on tax breaks for the middle class and on creating opportunities for small businesses. Her economic plan, the Post points out, contained few items on the liberal wish list. Progressive groups say they are finding a “significant enthusiasm deficit” among left-wing voters.

It would be an affectation to say that Harris is a conservative champion, just as it would be a caricature to portray her now as a far-left liberal. She is neither, and if she’s elected president, she is likely to govern from the center-left, at least on most things.

BUT THE STRONGEST CONSERVATIVE CASE for voting for Harris doesn’t have nearly as much to do with her as it has to do with her opponent. Trump remains a far more fundamental threat to conservatism than Harris. Trump has, in a way no Democrat ever could, changed the GOP from within and broken with the most important tenets of conservatism. That’s no surprise, because his desire isn’t to conserve; it is to burn things to the ground. In that respect and others, Trump is temperamentally much more of a Jacobin than a Burkean. He has transformed the Republican Party in his image in ways that exceed what any other American politician has done in modern times.

Start with character. The GOP once championed the central importance of character in political leaders, and especially presidents. It believed that serious personal misconduct was disqualifying, in part because of the example it would send to the young and its corrosive effects on our culture. It lamented that America was slouching towards Gomorrah.  

In 1998, when a Democrat, Bill Clinton, was president and embroiled in a sexual scandal, the Southern Baptist Convention—whose membership is overwhelmingly conservative —passed the “Resolution on Moral Character of Public Officials,” which said, “Tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God’s judgment.” It added, “We urge all Americans to embrace and act on the conviction that character does count in public office, and to elect those officials and candidates who, although imperfect, demonstrate consistent honesty, moral purity and the highest character.”

Yet for a decade now, Republicans, and in particular white evangelicals, have celebrated as their leader a felon and pathological liar; a person whose companies have committed bank, insurance, tax, and charity fraud; a sexual predator who paid hush money to a porn star; a person of uncommon cruelty and crudity who has mocked the war dead, POWs, Gold Star families, and people with disabilities. Under Trump, the party of “family values” has become a moral freak show.

Trump has also profoundly reshaped the GOP’s public policy. The GOP is now, at the national level, effectively pro-choice, and, due in part to Trump, the pro-life movement is “in a state of political collapse,” in the words of David French, of The New York Times. The Republican Party, pre-Trump, was pro–free trade; Trump calls himself “Tariff Man” and referred to tariff as “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” (In July, Trump proposed across-the-board tariffs of 10 to 20 percent, and rates of 60 percent or higher on imports from China.) He epitomizes crony capitalism, an economic system in which individuals and businesses with political connections and influence are favored.

For several generations, Republican presidents have, to varying degrees, promoted plans to reform entitlement programs in order to avert fiscal catastrophe. Trump has done the opposite. He has repeatedly said that entitlement programs are off-limits. As president, Trump shredded federalism and made a mockery of our constitutional system of government by his use of executive orders to bypass Congress. He made little effort to shrink government, and lots of efforts to expand it.

On spending, $4.8 trillion in non-COVID-related debt was added during Trump’s single term, while for Biden the figure is $2.2 trillion. Trump added more debt than any other president in history. A Wall Street Journal survey of 50 economists found that 65 percent of them see Trump’s proposed policies putting more upward pressure on the federal deficit than Harris’s, and 68 percent said prices would rise faster under Trump than under Harris. And the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget found that Trump’s policies would increase budget deficits by $7.5 trillion over the next decade, compared with $3.5 trillion for Harris.

Pre-Trump Republican presidents celebrated the diversity that immigrants brought to the nation, and the contributions they made to America. “All of the immigrants who came to us brought their own music, literature, customs, and ideas,” Ronald Reagan said in a speech in Shanghai in 1984. “And the marvelous thing, a thing of which we’re proud, is they did not have to relinquish these things in order to fit in. In fact, what they brought to America became American. And this diversity has more than enriched us; it has literally shaped us.” George W. Bush urged America to be a “welcoming society,” one that assimilates new arrivals and “upholds the great tradition of the melting pot,” which “has made us one nation out of many peoples.”

Trump is cut from a very different cloth. He curtailed legal immigration during his presidency. Temporary visas for highly skilled noncitizen workers were reduced. Refugee admissions were slashed. Trump, who peddled outrageous lies against Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, says he plans to strip them of their legal status. (At his rallies, Trump has whipped the crowds into a frenzy, getting them to chant, “Send them back! Send them back! Send them back!”)

[Read: Under the spell of the crowd]

Edith Olmsted pointed out in The New Republic that during his first term, Trump rescinded Temporary Protective Status orders for immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, Sudan, Nepal, and Honduras, “placing hundreds of thousands of legal residents at risk for deportation.” Trump, who refers to America as an “occupied country” and “a garbage can for the world,” also said he plans to reinstate a ban on travelers from some countries with Muslim-majority populations. And although previous Republicans have attempted to slow illegal border crossings, none has dehumanized those crossing the border by using language from Mein Kampf (“poisoning the blood of our country”). Trump believes American national identity is based not on allegiance to certain ideals but on ethnic and religious background.

It is in foreign policy, though, that Trump may be most antithetical to the policies and approach of modern conservatism. Reagan was a fierce, relentless opponent of the Soviet Union. “The one thing Reagan was more passionate about than anything else was the unsupportable phenomenon of totalitarian power, enslaving a large part of the world’s population,” according to Edmund Morris, a Reagan biographer.

Trump is the opposite. He admires and is enchanted by the world’s most brutal dictators, including Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, and others. Trump is at best indifferent to the fate of Ukraine in its war against Russia; one suspects that deep down, he’s rooting for his friend Putin. Reagan mythologized America; Trump trash-talks it. Reagan was a great champion of NATO; Trump is a reflexive critic who, according to his former national security adviser John Bolton, would withdraw from the alliance in a second term. Reagan made human rights a centerpiece of his foreign policy; during his term, Trump praised China’s forced internment of a million or more Uyghurs as “exactly the right thing to do,” according to Bolton.

Here and there, now and then, Trump is conservative—on court appointments, for example—but it’s something that he’s stumbled into, for reasons of political expediency, and that he’s just as liable to stumble away from. (Trump was pro-choice before he was pro-life before he moved once again toward the pro-choice camp.) Trump is fundamentally a populist and a demagogue, a destroyer of institutions and a conspiracy theorist, a champion of right-wing identity politics who stokes grievances and rage. He has an unprecedented capacity to turn people into the darkest versions of themselves. But he is something even beyond that.

IN RECENT WEEKS, Trump has been called a fascist—not by liberal Democratic strategists, but by people who worked closely with him. They include retired General John Kelly, who served as Trump’s chief of staff; retired General Mark Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Trump presidency; and Mark Esper, Trump’s former secretary of defense, who has said that Trump has fascistic “inclinations” and is “unfit for office.” In addition, retired General James Mattis, who also served as Trump’s secretary of defense, has said he agrees with Milley’s assessment. And Dan Coats, Trump’s former director of national intelligence, has said he suspects that Trump is being blackmailed by Putin.

The historian Robert Paxton, one of the nation’s foremost experts on fascism, was initially reluctant to apply the term fascism to Trump. The label is toxic and used too promiscuously, he believed. But January 6, 2021, changed all of that.

“The turn to violence was so explicit and so overt and so intentional, that you had to change what you said about it,” Paxton told Elisabeth Zerofsky, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. “It just seemed to me that a new language was necessary, because a new thing was happening.”

Trump’s “open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line,” Paxton wrote in Newsweek shortly after Trump supporters violently stormed the Capitol. “The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary.”

Paxton could add to the parade of horribles the fact that Trump encouraged the mob to hang his own vice president, came very close to deploying 10,000 active-duty troops to the streets of the nation’s capital to shoot protesters, invited hostile foreign powers to intervene in our election, and extorted an ally to find dirt on his opponents. Paxton could have mentioned that Trump threatened prosecutors, judges, and their families; referred to his political opponents as “vermin” and the “enemy from within”; and called the imprisoned individuals who stormed the Capitol “great patriots.” He could have cited Trump’s call for the “termination” of parts of the Constitution and his insinuation that Milley deserved to be executed for treason.

Trump’s supporters may be enraged by the fascist label, but they cannot erase the words or the deeds of the man to whom the label applies. And the only way for the GOP to become a sane, conservative party again is by ridding itself of Trump, which is why even conservatives who oppose Harris’s policies should vote for her. Harris’s election is the only thing that can break the hold of Trump on his party.

Acquaintances of mine, and acquaintances of friends of mine, say that they find Trump contemptible, but that they can’t vote for Harris, because they disagree with her on policy. My response is simple: The position she once held on fracking may be bad, but fascism is worse. The position she holds on any issue may be bad, but fascism is worse.

[Read: Trump wants you to accept all of this as normal]

A friend told me he won’t vote for either Harris or Trump. If Trump wins a second term, he said, “I suspect he will give more attention to his golf game than to siccing the IRS, FBI, or whoever on his political opponents.” His message to me, in other words, is to relax a bit. Trump may be a moral wreck, but he won’t act on his most outlandish threats.

My view is that when those seeking positions of power promote political violence, have a long record of lawlessness, are nihilistic, and embody a “will to power” ethic; make extralegal attempts to maintain power and stop the peaceful transfer of power; and use the words of fascists to tell the world that they are determined to exact vengeance—it’s probably wise to take them at their word.

If Trump wins the presidency again, conservatism will be homeless, a philosophy without a party, probably for at least a generation. And the damage to America, the nation Republicans claim to love, will be incalculable, perhaps irreversible. The stakes are that high.

Harris becoming president may not be the best thing that could happen to conservatism. But if she becomes president, she will have prevented the worst thing that could happen to conservatism and, much more important, to the country.

One freezing day this spring, Shammas Malik was slogging through an agenda that would overwhelm anyone. The new mayor of Akron, Ohio, had to meet with a city-council member who was upset over a recent shooting in his ward. The interim police chief stopped by to discuss the incident, which underscored that Malik still had to pick a permanent head for the troubled department. Meanwhile, the council was debating whether to fund his plan—a hallmark promise of his campaign—to open the government up for more direct resident involvement and input. He was planning for his State of the City address, which was due in just a couple of weeks, on his 100th day in office—also his 33rd birthday. Merely contemplating such a schedule exhausted me, and unlike Malik, I had the benefit of sustenance; he was fasting for Ramadan.

Malik, however, was plowing through it with the almost annoying equanimity of an ascendant political star. He is the youngest mayor and the first mayor of color in the city’s history, placing him among a crop of young, ambitious Democratic mayors of color in the Buckeye State, including Cleveland’s Justin Bibb, age 37, and Cincinnati’s Aftab Pureval, who is 42, both of whom were elected in 2021. In an election cycle where the top of the Republican national ticket—including Ohio’s junior senator, J. D. Vance—has offered up wild fabrications about immigrants eating pets in nearby Springfield, they offer a different version of Buckeye State politics.

Barack Obama won Ohio twice, but whether a young brown man with a “funny name” can still win statewide there is unclear. The state’s mix of impoverished rural precincts and aging, decaying Rust Belt bastions have tipped toward Republicans. Senator Sherrod Brown, the most recent Democrat elected statewide, is in the fight of his political life against the Republican Bernie Moreno. Malik, Bibb, and Pureval could represent a new generation of Ohio leaders, not only in their backgrounds and ages but also in their approach. They could, however, find their paths to higher office blocked by the country’s hyperpartisanship—a fate that has shortened the careers of countless promising Republicans in blue states and Democrats in red states, an invisible loss of talent that America pays for in ways immeasurable but profound.

[Stuart Stevens: I thought I understood the GOP. I was wrong.]

Malik, who is biracial, with a Pakistani father and a white mother, is young for the role and looks younger. With a high, reedy voice and a baby face only barely disguised with a beard, he usually wears a suit—“If I’m going to be a 32-year-old mayor, I can at least look the part,” he told me—but that just makes him seem a little like a kid dressed up for a special occasion. In fairness, Malik will always seem like a kid to me: I first met him as a teenager, when he was friends with my little sister. When I told J. Cherie Strachan, a political scientist at the University of Akron, that high-school friends used to joke that he was getting ready to be mayor, she laughed. “And now he's getting ready to be governor,” she said. “I can’t imagine that someone who is as ambitious as he is is going to stop at Akron.”

The real surprise might be that Malik is in Akron at all. Once, the city was the prosperous center of the nation’s tire industry, but its population has shrunk steadily since 1960. Firestone, Goodrich, and General Tire all left town; only Goodyear remains. The weather is bad. Any Akronite can reel off the names of many famous people from the city who left once they had a chance.

Malik could have been one of them. He excelled at Ohio State, graduated from Harvard Law School cum laude, and collected prestigious internships in Washington. He had no remaining family connections in Akron. Regardless, he decided to go home and take a job with the city’s lawyers in 2016, figuring he could always move to D.C. later. He found himself depressed and lonely, and when a friend asked if he’d be happier in the capital, he immediately answered yes. So why don’t you move? she asked.

“I think what I’m doing means something here, and I’m trying to find meaning here,” he said, recounting the conversation to me. “If I’m not [in Washington], probably somebody who thinks very similar to me, who’s going to work kind of the same as me, who’s going to do pretty much the same thing [will be]. If I’m not here, that’s not necessarily the case.”

The answer conveys a lot about Malik: his earnestness, his diligence and sense of responsibility, his openness around topics like mental health. Obama—another biracial, Harvard Law–educated politician—is an obvious model, evident in Malik’s pragmatic approach to politics, his seriousness of purpose, and his speaking style. A shelf in his sparsely decorated office captures the range of his influences: The New Jim Crow, Robert’s Rules of Order, Bill Simmons’s The Book of Basketball, and the Quran.

Malik’s character was shaped profoundly by both of his parents—but in very different ways. The greatest influence on his life was his mother, Helen Killory Qammar, a beloved chemical-engineering professor at the University of Akron. She instilled a sense of service, a love of vocation, and a focus on education. “She always was trying to do the right thing,” Malik  told the Akron Beacon Journal. “She was always treating people with kindness and dignity and respect and honesty.” Qammar died of cancer when Malik was 21.

Malik speaks frequently about her, but less so about his father, at least until the mayoral campaign. After Malik’s parents separated when he was 10, his father, Qammar Malik, a Pakistani immigrant, pleaded guilty to wire fraud, extortion, and impersonating a U.S. official in a blackmail scheme. During a mayoral debate in April 2023, Malik was asked how he thought about integrity. He shifted uncomfortably behind his lectern, as though wrestling with himself, then began to speak in a tremulous voice.

“I’m going to talk about something I never talked about in public before,” he said. “I have a father who’s a very dishonest guy, and this impacted me a lot as a kid. I talked to my dad through prison glass, and I don’t talk about it a lot because it’s something that is difficult to talk about, but it has guided my life to live every day with honesty.”

Despite his initial unhappiness upon returning to Akron, Malik stuck it out. When he learned that the city-council seat for the ward he grew up in was opening, he moved there and entered the race. Malik won the 2019 election in a stroll. (Driving around this spring, he was still new enough to his job that he was instinctively doing the work of a city-council member, sighing and making a note when he saw a light-pole banner that had become partially detached.) In June 2022, police shot and killed a 25-year-old Black man named Jayland Walker after a car chase, spurring protests. Three months later, Malik announced that he would run for mayor in 2023, challenging the incumbent Dan Horrigan in the Democratic primary. Within weeks, Horrigan announced that he would not seek reelection.

In Akron, as in many small and midsize cities, the Democratic Party dominates. The city hasn’t elected a Republican mayor since 1979, and the winner of the Democratic primary is a shoo-in for the general election. The city’s Democratic machine, including Horrigan, opposed Malik, which turned out to be a great asset in a city eager for change. Malik looked to Bibb’s successful race—featuring a young candidate who took on far more seasoned figures in Cleveland—as a model for his campaign.

The differences between Malik and other candidates were less about policy than philosophy. He ran down the middle on issues. In a race in which public safety was voters’ central concern, he promised both police reform and greater safety. Where he distinguished himself from the field was on governing style. During the campaign, he knocked on hundreds of doors and showed up at every event he could, leveraging his youth and energy. Wherever he went, he promised that as mayor he’d bring the same transparency and opportunity for public engagement into a city government that hadn’t felt very open or accessible for decades.

Strachan told me that Malik’s campaign was “facilitative, deliberative, inclusive, and focused on process.” These may be the hallmarks of a younger generation; Strachan noted that they’re also traditionally associated with a more feminine leadership style. And it was women who powered Malik’s victory. He won 43 percent of the vote in a seven-person field, and a postelection poll found that Malik won more votes from women than any other candidate won in total.

If anything, getting elected was the easy part. The council—perhaps eager to establish some leverage over an untested mayor—refused to fund a position to implement his public-engagement initiative. (“I don’t have to like it, but I’m gonna respect it,” he told me, paraphrasing the rapper Nipsey Hussle.) His attempt to change the city charter to allow him to seek outside candidates for police chief fell short. A mass shooting at a birthday party this summer shook the city and made national headlines; now some residents are clamoring for the police chief’s firing.

“It’s easy to get beaten down and just overwhelmed by the issues,” Tony O’Leary, a former deputy mayor who advised Malik’s transition into office, told me. “Shit just comes every day, no matter what you do or how well you prepare. It’s always the unexpected. It doesn’t matter what’s on your to-do list.”

When I spoke with Malik again in September, he said he was adjusting to the incrementalism of the job. The mayor has more power than a ward councilor, but also less chance to act unilaterally. His first nine months on the job, he joked, “have been like 54 years.” But Malik’s respect for process can mask a hard resolve.

“Everybody deserves to be treated with dignity and respect, right? But I should be confident in the things that I’m putting forward,” he said. “That doesn’t mean yelling, that doesn’t mean arguing, but it does mean being firm. I’m not going to bring something to someone unless it’s well thought out.”

Mayors don’t always have the luxury, or the burden, of ideology. Many of their most pressing issues aren’t partisan, and they may have to work with state and federal politicians with whom they disagree.

“When you’re dealing with the extreme MAGA-led Republican state legislature that we have in Columbus, I think it’s important to find commonsense, pragmatic Republican lawmakers that I can work with across the aisle who share my vision and love for Cleveland,” Bibb told me.

This fall, Donald Trump and Vance spent weeks fueling a national news cycle based on false, racist claims about legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, and promising to deport them if elected. It fell to Springfield Mayor Rob Rue and Governor Mike DeWine, both Republicans, to refute those claims. Migration has taxed Springfield’s housing supply, but local officials also credit it with helping revitalize the economy.

In September, Malik joined a delegation of Ohio mayors that went to Springfield to meet with Rue, offer support, and compare notes. Back home, he told me that although he had no patience for fearmongering or racism, he understood the tension in Springfield.

“When there is a significant rise in population in a community, especially a city of 60,000 people, certainly there are going to be impacts. There’s going to be positive impact. There’s going to be challenges,” he said.

Akron experienced an influx of several thousand people, including many from Nepal and Bhutan, in the early 2000s. Malik said he was conscious of the concerns of longtime Akronites, but noted that, as in Springfield, population growth can help everyone. “I’m walking around a city that was built for 300,000 people,” he told me. “It’s now a city of 187,000 people. It doesn’t run if the population is 100,000.” (A couple of times, Malik half-jokingly tried to persuade me to move home too.)

Residents of bigger cities, which have more room and more liberal politics, may be receptive to this kind of argument—and to immigrants. Elsewhere, however, many Ohioans have been amenable to Trump’s message, focused on economic protectionism, nativism, and reduced immigration. His success there has taken Ohio out of the swing-state column at the national level. Broad political shifts, weak candidates, and gerrymandering have all but locked Democrats out of power at the state level. According to a count by David Niven, a political scientist at the University of Cincinnati, Democrats have won just one of 32 statewide races over the past decade, though the success last year of a constitutional amendment to protect abortion access has instilled some hope.

“To the extent that there’s a Democratic future, it’s the mayors, but what Ohio has been doing of late has been chewing up and spitting out Democrats with statewide aspirations,” Niven told me. Democrats hope that younger people and greater diversity will improve their statewide fortunes.

If the state ever turns purple again, Democrats will be looking to the people sitting in mayoral offices today and in the years ahead to win at the state level. “We need more mayors from big cities and medium-sized cities and small cities in this state working in the legislature, running for statewide offices,” he told me. (Bibb excluded himself from consideration, at least for the moment: “Right now, I’m just trying to get reelected in 2025.”)

Making the jump to statewide office isn’t easy, though, not only because of party affiliation but also because Ohio is regionally divided such that no mayor has much name recognition or reach across the state. In 2022, Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley ran for governor as a Democrat but was trounced by the incumbent DeWine. Malik told me that he’s heard the optimistic speculation about his future but he’s focused on his current job. “I ran for mayor because I think I can do this job,” he said. “I’m not running for state representative or state senator, because I don’t know state government. I’m not running for Congress. I want to do this job.”

For once, Malik doesn’t seem to be in a hurry. But if he ever wanted to kick the tires, he’d be in the right place.