As a Green Card holder / permanent resident in the US, I can’t vote in the 2024 election.

But if I could vote, I would vote for Kamala Harris.

As you can imagine, I have many reasons for preferring Harris.

One is personal: a win for Harris will mean protecting common sense abortion rights and women’s reproductive rights in general. When my wife and I were first trying to get pregnant, she had an unviable ectopic pregnancy that, to protect her life, required a procedure that many anti-abortion campaigners consider to be an abortion (or at least close enough to require substantial regulation). I consider that the lives of my two children are due, on some level, to us being able to get this procedure in a timely, safe manner as soon as my wife’s doctor recommended it.

Just speaking directly to my fellow men for a moment: when your partner’s life is in danger, you feel this fiery urge to protect, and I don’t know what I would have done or felt had we have to wait until her life was imminently in danger before the doctors could intervene.

Another reason to prefer Harris is connected to my concern for the elderly, and for my readers and customers who are approaching or in retirement. Although the Trump campaign doesn’t say this outright, and for some reason the elite newspapers do a bad job of explaining this, his campaign promises are predicted by all credible economists to considerably reduce the solvency of Social Security. His campaign surrogate Elon Musk has gone further than this, warning that Americans should expect “short term” hardship in return for massive cuts to the government. It is pleasant to imagine that there are “$2 trillion” dollars of savings to make from trimming government inefficiencies and waste, but the reality is that the only way to make such large cuts is to spend less on social security, medicare, and medicaid. I think that is a bad plan.

And as a parent, I want to be able to protect my kids’ health, and in recent weeks, the Trump campaign has embraced a number of anti-scientific stances about wanting to ban vaccines and remove fluoride from the drinking water.

Finally: as an artist and creative person, as I imagine you are too, I find that I tend to believe that life is full of possibility and also endlessly complex. The craft of the novel shows us — I think — that anything is possible if we find the right path to it — and that the world’s complexity rewards study and empathy.

Donald Trump’s appeal to many people is that he promises to simplify life, either by removing huge numbers of people who he says are making the country worse — or by proposing a sudden, extreme, instantly successful policy. During this campaign, you can see this in the former President’s repeated invocation of giving the police freedom to arrest whoever they want — or his claim that he wished he had Hitler’s generals to support whatever he wanted. I find that Harris’s combination of hope and complexity to fit better the world I see around me.

I am aware that many people feel a religious conviction to support Donald Trump, and that others feel disgusted by the administration’s lack of a stance on the massacres in Gaza. But the American system is set up, for better or worse, as a binary choice: you basically have to pick one of the two candidates — or you are rolling a dice and hoping.

So — if I could vote, I would pick Harris.