Republicans who say Donald Trump should lose in November but insist they won’t vote for Joe Biden aren’t being honest, Carly Fiorina argues.
Fiorina was a Republican candidate for president just four years ago, and was briefly Ted Cruz’s prospective running mate. Trump needs to go, she says—and that means she’s voting for Biden.
Fiorina is not going to keep quiet, write in another candidate, or vote third-party. “I’ve been very clear that I can’t support Donald Trump,” she told me, in an interview that can be heard in full on the latest episode of The Ticket. “And elections are binary choices.” She struggled with the decision, and whether to go public. But she said that this struggle is one Republicans need to have—including those who have rationalized supporting Trump despite their disagreements, because of some of his policies or judicial appointments.
“As citizens, our vote is more than a check on a box. You know, it’s a statement about where we want to go, and I think what we need now actually is real leadership that can unify the country,” she said. “I am encouraged that Joe Biden is a person of humility and empathy and character. I think he’s demonstrated that through his life. And I think we need humility and empathy everywhere in public life right now. And I think character counts.”
Of course, Trump diehards will dismiss her. She has said over the years that Trump isn’t a real businessman, that he lacks character, that he is the definition of an autocrat, that impeachment was “vital.” But she’s not the stereotype of a Republican squish: Before her 2016 run, she was a Tea Party–type candidate for Senate in 2010 and the CEO of Hewlett-Packard. Four years ago, she voted for Trump—even after he’d been caught saying about her, “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?”
Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who said she agrees with former Defense Secretary James Mattis that Trump is a threat to the Constitution, but is “struggling” with whether to vote for him, is putting politics over principle, Fiorina told me. John Bolton, who has said he hopes for America’s sake that Trump loses but that he’ll write in a conservative Republican, looks to Fiorina like he’s “desperately trying to preserve some position in the Republican Party as a conservative Republican.” As for Cruz, who’s turned into an avid Trump defender—she said she hasn’t spoken with him in years. And Trump, she told me, can tweet whatever he wants about her.
It hasn’t been an easy journey to backing a Democrat, especially when she thinks about issues that she cares deeply about, such as limiting government spending and restricting abortion. But as she’s been working with her Unlocking Potential Foundation, which focuses on increasing diversity among corporate leadership, she’s also been watching how the coronavirus pandemic has exposed inequality in America. She needed to speak up, too. Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are right, she said: The structures of power have been bent too far toward corporate control. But if conservatives really want to do anything about it, she said, they need to start by standing up for their principles.
What follows is an edited and condensed transcript:
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