When in doubt, when there is little choice, always vote against the incumbent. Keep the rascals rotating.
Edward Abbey
Letter to Arizona Republic
22nd October 1982
—Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast, edited by David Petersen (Milkweed Editions, 2006)
People do not vote for presidential candidates in this country; they vote against them. Thus the election is usually the butchery of a villain rather than the exaltation of a hero.
H. L. Mencken
Letter to James Cannon Jr.
22nd October 1935
—The New Mencken Letters, edited by Carl Bode (Dial Press, 1977).
I fear for the U.S. (and the rest of the world since we have too much influence) … The people (the majority) who do not bother to vote will find there is no more voting.
Martha Gellhorn
Letter to Howard Gotlieb
28th December 1994
—Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn, edited by Caroline Moorehead (Henry Holt and Company, 2006).
[W]e are living in such a drama, from day to day. Today was the blackest. I do not expect anything so bad for some time to come... The watchword is November. We have this time to get them out of office, while there are still elections.
William Maxwell
Letter to Eudora Welty
25th February 1954
—What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell, edited by Suzanne Marrs (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011).
In our splendid Republic, where at election time, all are ‘free and equal,’ a few Americans own the rest.
Helen Keller
Letter to an English Suffragist
15th February 1911
—Out of the Dark: Essays, Letters, and Addresses on Physical and Social Vision (Doubleday, Page & Company, 1913).
It will then have been proved that, among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case, and pay the cost.
Abraham Lincoln
Letter to James C. Conkling
26th August 1863
—The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Volume VI, edited by Roy P. Basler, with Marion Dolores Pratt and Lloyd A. Dunlap (Rutgers University Press, 1953).
If they change again the men better quit and let the women take hold of it and run the elections for awhile.1
Betsey Shipman Gates
Letter to Betsey Gates Mills
7th November 1884
—Grandmother’s Letters: The Letters of Betsey Shipman Gates to Her Daughter, Betsey Gates Mills, prepared by Mary Dawes Beach (privately printed by Henry M. Dawes, Chicago, 1926).
You ask what is a Republican to do. The answer is, of course, simple—vote democratic.
E. B. White
Letter to Brooks Beck
12th June 1953
—Letters of E. B. White, collected and edited by Dorothy Lobrano Guth (Harper & Row, 1976).
It seems that politics is becoming a millionaire’s club—Romney, Scranton, Rockefeller, Kennedy—a poor man just doesn’t have a chance these days. It is true that America is becoming more and more anti-revolutionary and anti-democratic—but as long as Americans feel such awe and envy for wealth and power, men like Scranton have a tremendous glamour over any other person no matter how well qualified or intelligent—the symbol of success: money dazzles everyone in America even if it is inherited.
Barbara Chase-Riboud
Letter to her Mother
12th November 1962
—I Always Knew: A Memoir (Princeton University Press, 2022).
In this country laboring men should protect themselves, with their votes. They are largely in the majority. There are a thousand laboring men where there 1s one capitalist, and in a country where the vote of every man is equal to the vote of every other man, the laboring man certainly has the power absolutely to protect himself…
The ballot is the sword and shield of the laboring man, and if he fails to protect himself, he has himself to blame.
Robert G. Ingersoll
Letter to D. W. S. Fero, Esq.
3rd November 1882
—The Letters of Robert G. Ingersoll, edited with a biographical introduction by Eva Ingersoll Wakefield (Philosophical Library, 1951).
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Written three days after the bitterly contested 1884 presidential election, while the result remained uncertain amid disputed vote counts. American women were still largely denied the vote.