VALLEY HILLS, CALIFORNIA — As the Republican Primary winds its way to the party’s convention in Cleveland this summer, Republican rank and file voters like Skip Chesterson are finding themselves increasingly unsure who their nominee should and will be.
Chesterson is a lifelong resident of California, and has been a registered Republican since he was first eligible to vote the year George H.W. Bush won. He says, however, that since then the “quality and substance” of each Republican campaign has “gone way, way downhill” and now he says he’s not at all sure if he should vote for Donald J. Trump or Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) when the California primary is held.
“Honestly,” Skip told us, “I feel like we’re stuck between a douche and another douche. And neither douche is the douche I would prefer to vote for.” Skip said that as a modern Republican, he’s used to voting for “douchebags who know they’re douchebags but also know they should hide their douchey ways from the general public so that they are remotely electable.” Chesterson said that he doesn’t think Ronald Reagan would ever have been elected “if people knew what a douchebag he was about the hostages or that he would prop up illegal wars with arms deals.” But Reagan had the “good sense to hide his doucheyness under a rock.”
When Senator John McCain ran in 2008, Chesterson said he was “disappointed in him for choosing that douche Palin” as his running mate, but still liked that McCain “wasn’t the prime douche on the ticket.” Skip says he saw that McCain was sticking to the “tried and true POTUS and VPOTUS formula of having the Vice President be the biggest douche in the administration, you know, like Dick Cheney.” But, he says, he can’t quite find a way to full support either Cruz or Trump.
“One is a D-grade reality-TV star who says horrible, proto-fascistic stuff — that let’s face it a lot of we Republicans actually kinda like when it’s subtler — and the other is a slimy weasel that literally no one in Washington likes but just happens to be less disgusting and horrifying than Trump so that’s why the establishment is rallying behind him. Neither of these douchebags is who I want to vote for. I want to vote for a douche that’s a douche but can reduce his outward douche factor by at least three or four full notches, like Republicans traditionally could.”
Ultimately, Chesterson said that he will probably “hold [his] nose” and vote for whoever is on the ballot as a Republican in November, whether it’s Cruz or Trump. But our reporter did ask him if he’d considered the other candidate still in the race for the Republican nomination as well — Ohio Governor John Kasich (R).
“I’m sorry, John who?”
There are still more than 150 days left until the General Election decides who will replace President Barack Obama in the White House next year.
