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There’s no mystery about this site’s political leanings, and probably somewhat less public interest in who we’re voting for. Despite that, we thought it would be worthwhile on principle to follow our friends at Reason and Slate and go on record with our voting preferences, partly because it’s a worthwhile thing to let readers know where we’re coming from and partly because the more publications do this, the less excuse those who don’t have for hiding their reporters’ opinions behind a lot of disingenuous handwaving about objectivity. Everyone is coming from somewhere, we figure; best to just admit it as part of trying to be fair, if not scrupulously neutral. (Those Deadspinners not represented below either weren’t around or declined to say who they were voting for.)




Drew Magary

I am voting for Clinton, which makes me the most conservative staffer on this goddamn site.


Billy Haisley

Voting’s for squares.

Hamilton Nolan

I’m going to take the N.Y. “lefty but realistic” route of voting for Hillary on the Working Families Party ticket. This is a good way to signal support for an alternative left wing party—which is what a lot of people who cast third party votes want to do—while also doing my bit to hedge against Trump (not that NY is really in question).

Also by doing this I can lend more force to my future bitching by saying “I voted for you” when Hillary inevitably starts doing bad things.



Kevin Draper

I am a resident of the District of Columbia, which voted 91 percent for Barack Obama in 2012, only has three electoral votes, and doesn’t have representation in the House or Senate. There is no vote less consequential than my vote, and thus I don’t have to seriously grapple with voting for Hillary Clinton despite the facts that her economic beliefs are essentially neoliberal, that she is a foreign policy hawk who is for bombing many peoples, and that she surrounds herself three-deep with grifters.


If I lived in a swing state I would hold my nose and do so; since I do not, I’ll write in Piggy Poop Balls or something. I will, however, be proudly voting yes on D.C.’s statehood referendum.

Patrick Redford

I will not be voting for one of the candidates for president, since I don’t live in a swing state and I don’t agree with any of the platforms and policies of anyone on the ballot. My vote doesn’t exactly matter in this particular election thanks to the dumb-as-dogshit electoral college and our perverse lack of a proportional representation system. I’ve put most of my time into researching the various ballot initiatives that California’s busted-ass proposition system has on offer. With regards to California-only matters, I will be voting against the cigarette tax, for the abolition of the death penalty, for the legalization of weed, and for a series of higher taxes designed to fund schools and the healthcare system.


Barry Petchesky

I’ll vote for Hillary Clinton, and I’ll do so with more enthusiasm than I previously thought I might. My own positions on the issues more closely resemble Bernie Sanders’s than they do Clinton’s, but the time to act to usher in Democratic Socialism is not on Election Day when there are just two centrist candidates with realistic chances of winning, and the way to act is not a protest vote, not when a few electoral votes could swing this thing toward a true planetary-level threat. It’s all relative given our two options, but I’ll always vote for the candidate that will push and/or keep this country to the left, however incrementally, in the belief that to the left lies a more humane and more effective government. More people will be better off under Clinton than they would be under Trump, and maybe, hopefully, the electorate gradually realizes that things would be even better with even more progressive politicians.


Albert Burneko

I’m gonna hold my nose and vote for Hillary Clinton, a center-right corporatist and war hawk whose record and allegiances, where they are not actively hostile to most of what I care about most deeply in my capacity as a citizen, at best only happen here and there upon a fitful, accidental, momentary quasi-agreement both sides find distasteful. Then I will tell myself that this act of fearful ad-hoc cooperative dam-plugging purchases for me some accountability from either her administration or her broader brand of wan un-Republicanism that I may cash in at some later date, like a Good Little Leftist, when actually all it will have accomplished is assuring the Democratic Party establishment that they can continue winning my vote in the smallest possible margin between themselves and a Republican Party Nazifying at warp speed unto eternity. And then at some point in the future I will die. The American experiment is going great.


Ashley Feinberg

I’m voting for Hillary Clinton because, for me, any other choice is unconscionable. I voted for Bernie Sanders in the primaries, and while Hillary isn’t necessarily my ideal candidate, she’s also not a racist, egotistical demagogue with an inability to feel anything other than self-love and spite. Hillary Clinton is a competent, experienced leader, and she will make a fine president. Please clap.


Tim Burke

I voted for Hillary Clinton. This is despite the fact that a Trump presidency would most certainly be the more profitable and lucrative outcome for everyone in the media business; despite the GOP candidate’s claims, this industry would benefit greatly from his being elected. I voted for Clinton anyway, because a year or two of massive revenues isn’t worth the part where Trump starts a nuclear war because someone insulted the size of his dick.


Lindsey Adler

Hillary Clinton & Tim Kaine.

I vote in California, so my vote means very little, except for when it comes to the 900 ballot initiatives (Jesus Christ, California voters, please vote against the death penalty). However, my reasons for voting for Hillary Clinton are pretty straightforward: Clinton will defend women’s rights to essential reproductive healthcare, there is an open Supreme Court seat (and could be more during this upcoming term), and Donald Trump is an inexperienced egoist with no impulse control. I also believe it is important for young women and girls to see a woman in the highest position of power in our country, and hope many of them will take it for granted and think of it as the norm as we go forward. I want young girls to eventually be shocked when they learn how many barriers were left to be broken for women in 2016.




Diana Moskovitz

This year I will be voting for Hillary Clinton. The reasons Trump must be defeated have been laid out again and again and again. The reasons I’m voting for Clinton have already been explained by others here and here and here. So let’s not waste time pretending that I have a policy point you haven’t seen slingshot around the Internet for months already. I will say, as the granddaughter of Ashkenazi Jews who fled various shtetls before the Holocaust, defeating Trump has felt incredibly important to me this year. Over and over I found myself feeling a gnawing in the pit of my stomach, finally understanding why our bubbes and zaydes told us all the stories they did. They told us we needed to know the signs for when fascism came to America, and then we laughed and asked if we could watch cartoons on TV instead. Trump might not have come first for the Jews (but he got there, eventually, as if that was a surprise) but that doesn’t make his rise on a platform of, essentially, blaming the other any less frightful. And the other candidate is qualified, capable, and might get some good stuff accomplished. I’ll be voting for her.


Alex Pareene

I guess I’m one of the mythical “undecided voters,” in that I am undecided as to whether I will vote at all. There are surely more undecided voters like me than of the other type, those civic-minded numbskulls who populate televised town halls and Frank Luntz focus groups because they are positive they will vote, but are somehow unable to choose between the two major-party candidates. If the Democrats needed my vote I’d cast it, but they don’t, and so I don’t really know why I’d bother, except possibly to affirm my support for New York state’s mostly useless but well-intentioned fusion voting system by supporting Clinton on the Working Families Party line. But after the WFP endorsed the rotten and corrupt Andrew Cuomo in his gubernatorial reelection campaign, I don’t even really know why I’d want to support them, either.


This is not an adolescent rebellion against the concept of voting, or a Naderite rejection of lesser-evilism. It does sound very self-indulgent and “I don’t have a TV”-ish to announce that I’m not sure if I’ll vote, but Marchman asked, and it’s the truth. It may be even more self-indulgent to cast a pointless symbolic vote, either for or against Clinton, than to not bother either way. I have no problem with Hillary Clinton’s personality, disposition, or temperament. I just don’t support her, mostly because I don’t like or trust the Democratic Party, I think her foreign policy will be very bad, and I try to make it a rule not to vote for Iraq War supporters unless I absolutely have to, which, this time, I don’t. As for the alternatives, the Greens are incompetent and actively harmful to the cause of the left, so I don’t want to add to their pathetic total, and I will not vote for the Libertarian candidate because I don’t think “maximizing liberty by unshackling the free market, plus weed” is a very sound political philosophy.

I’m aware that if everyone else in safe Democratic states thought like me, Democrats would lose every election. Thankfully, most people in safe Democratic states don’t think like me, giving me the luxury to do so.


(I will do some cursory research on the various judges on the ballot though, just in case there’s anyone particularly horrible I need to make sure to vote against. This is not the optimal system for selecting judges.)

Tom Ley

I’m voting for Hillary Clinton and feeling pretty okay about it. There are all sorts of reasons to dislike her, but I foresee the next few decades of my participation in American politics amounting to having to choose between increasingly maniaical Republican demagogues and lifeless, wooden Democrats. It’s not as if Clinton totally skirts that latter category, but I get the sense she’s a more decent candidate than we are likely to see in the future.


Also, if you’ll permit me to be a Performatively Woke Man for a second, there is something to be said for participating in the election that leads to the country’s first woman president. Whatever, sue me.

Also, I want to watch Donald Trump lose more than I’ve wanted anything in a long, long time. I’ll feel great on Wednesday morning if I can convince myself that I am even a teensy tiny bit responsible for his destruction.




Hannah Keyser

I am voting for Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine, and not begrudgingly, reluctantly, or via process of elimination. I’m not voting for her strictly in opposition to Donald Trump, either, although I would gladly do so in the absence of better reasons. I worry that criticism and cynicism read as meritedly more intelligent than enthusiasm when dealing with politics, and especially when dealing with politicians. It’s not that I don’t care how unlikable Hillary is; I have no way of knowing whether or not she’s likable or genuine or unrepentant opportunist who knows how to read the room and is strategically pushing a socially liberal agenda to reflect the changing demographics of this country and remain on the right side of history. But I believe that she has experience, and that she understands policy better than anyone else, and that her value as the first woman president is far more than symbolic. And even if all she does is toe the party line of progressive values and appoint a Supreme Court justice who won’t actively set the country back several decades? That seems fine, too.


Tim Marchman

I’m voting for Hillary Clinton even though I view her as the candidate of a discredited and exhaustingly long-lived center-right faction that literally wants to kill and immiserate people to build political capital for the purpose of profiting by making incremental—if meaningful!—improvements within an antiquated political system. My vote doesn’t matter, especially because I live in Pennsylvania, a safe state that will in no case go for the candidate of misogyny and white ethno-nationalism, but to the extent it symbolizes anything I’m in favor of using it to support stagnation rather than an alternative.


Tom Scocca

I have complicated feelings about the return of Clinton World but there’s no analysis of the internal contradictions of the Democratic Party that makes the least bit of difference toward the question of whether or not to reject Donald Trump. Trump is the metastatic end stage of the cancer of white entitlement and resentment—the standard-bearer for a party so unhinged by eight years of a black president that it demands not only the restoration of a white man as president, but the election of a white man who is visibly degenerate, who has no relevant knowledge or experience, and who is too lazy and dimwitted to do the ordinary work of campaigning. I am voting for Hillary Clinton.


Jordan Sargent

As a New York resident with a vote that is more or less worthless, I have more license than most to cast a symbolic ballot that aligns with my most closely held beliefs. But I’m still gonna vote for Hillary Clinton because I think she’ll make a pretty decent president, and voting for the first woman major party candidate does feel pretty rad.