Some people who don't want to see Trump re-elected have taken offense at Bolton's statement that he won't be voting for Joe Biden. For example:
Then not only is he lying when he is saying he wants Trump to be a 'one term president' (at best he doesn't really care, at worst he's outright lying), he's also an idiot.
No, Bolton's refusal to vote for Joe Biden does not mean he's lying about wanting Trump to be a one-term president, nor does it mean he's an idiot. Voting is actually one of the least effective actions Bolton could take to help keep Trump from getting re-elected.
Keep in mind that John Bolton only has
one vote. (Well, assuming he doesn't engage in massive voter fraud, he himself only has one vote.) Whether he casts that vote for Trump, for Biden, for someone else, or doesn't vote at all, that one vote is unlikely to determine the election outcome.
But, you may be thinking,
if Hillary Clinton had gotten 11,000 more votes in Michigan she'd have won Michigan's electoral votes.
If she'd gotten 23,000 more votes in Wisconsin she'd have won Wisconsin's electoral votes. If she'd gotten 50,000 more votes in Pennsylvania she'd have won Pennsylvania's electoral votes. So anyone in those states who didn't vote for her in 2016 contributed to Trump's getting elected, and anyone who doesn't vote for Biden in 2020 is contributing to Trump's getting re-elected.
Except someone living in Michigan (or Wisconsin, or Pennsylvania, or any other state) only directly controls one vote. Changing that one vote doesn't change the outcome in that state, let alone in the electoral college. So if you want to call not voting, or voting third party, a contribution to Trump's victory you're free to do so, but it's a pretty insignificant contribution. To change the outcome a person needs to change at least tens of thousands of votes, and simply casting one's own ballot does not do that.
Now, there are right-wing religious folks who believe that if they cast a ballot for the candidate God prefers God will reward their faithfulness by bringing enough other people to the polls to make that candidate the winner. (They're wrong about that, but that shared belief does make them more inclined to go to the polls and vote thereby increasing the number of people voting for their candidate. Sometimes being irrational actually pays off!) And there may be New Agers with a similar belief that if they make the effort to go to the polls to vote for their preferred candidate that Karma or Gaia or some other mystical force will cause thousands and thousands of others to do the same and cause their candidate to win. But in reality, that's not how the universe works. By the time election day rolls around, whether you cast a ballot or not is not going to significantly effect the decision other people make about whether to vote and about whom to vote for.
Indeed, if a person wanted to help Biden win (or help Trump lose) a much more effective way to do that would be to spend the entire day finding people who are willing to vote for Biden and shuttling them to the polling place to make it easier for them to get there and to make sure they get there. In the hour or two it might take you to get through a line and vote -- adding a single vote to Biden's total -- you might be able instead to add dozens of votes to Biden's total. And if you did that all day, from the moment the polls opened until the moment the polls closed, you might be able to add hundreds of votes to Biden's total.
But that's almost certainly still not enough to change the outcome.
What would be much more helpful would be working months ahead of the election on effective efforts to persuade people to vote for Biden. That way you might be able to reach thousands of people -- maybe even tens of thousands if you have an effective online presence or if you have a few million dollars on hand to buy their votes. Or you might be able to reach lots of people, convince them of the importance of electing Biden and the value of reaching out to persuade others, and many of them follow your example and reach out in a friendly and persuasive manner to other people, and the people they reach likewise reach out in a friendly and persuasive manner to yet other people...
My point is that efforts at persuading people to vote for your candidate are a much more important and effective way of helping a candidate than voting for the candidate. Your single vote really won't have any significant effect on the outcome, but your efforts at winning votes for the candidate you support or convincing people not to vote for the candidate you oppose could conceivably have a much larger impact.
Whether Bolton personally votes for Biden won't significantly improve Biden's chance of winning and Trump's chance of losing. But if Bolton takes actions which convince people not to vote for Donald Trump -- such as, say, writing a book revealing bad things Trump has said and done and doing as much as he can to see that people read and consider the contents of that book -- that could significantly improve Biden's chance of winning and Trump's chance of losing. And that does appear to be what Bolton is doing.
Now, the people he's trying to reach aren't people who already dislike Trump and are planning to vote for Biden. The people he needs to reach if he hopes to effect the election outcome are people who might otherwise vote for Trump. And he doesn't even need to convince them to vote for Biden; he just needs to convince them not to vote for Trump.
Question: will these people, who are leaning toward Trump and might vote for him unless they're persuaded not to do that, be more likely to listen to someone who comes off as Democrat-lover, or are they more likely to listen to someone who comes off as disliking Democrats and what they stand for but totally disgusted by all the horrible things about Trump which he's going to tell them about? I suspect the latter. So saying he'd vote for Biden would likely weaken his message in relation to the people he needs to reach, and saying he's not going to vote for Biden would likely strengthen his message in relation to those people.
Which means it's quite possible Bolton is telling the truth when he says he wants Trump to be a one-term president, regardless of the fact he has said he won't be voting for Biden.
And since Bolton seems to understand that his simply voting for Biden wouldn't significantly improve the odds that Trump loses but speaking out publicly about what a bad and unfit president Trump is might significantly improve the odds that Trump loses, that indicates Bolton may not be an idiot either.
[There are many other things Bolton has said and done over the years which could lead someone like me to believe Bolton is not especially truthful and is not especially intelligent. All I'm saying is that this particular action of saying he's not personally going to vote for Biden doesn't provide evidence for either of those assertions.]
