Nathalie Phan-Clifford

The famous FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss once said that compromise is like putting a black shoe on one foot and a brown shoe on the other. 

I believe that.

There are few situations where compromising your values prove to be appropriate. That's why voting is such a difficult thing to do. Throwing support behind a candidate that is neither perfect nor a purely compatible reflection of your values is hard, especially when you're doing it in an ever-changing landscape.

People change. Candidates change. Voters change. Politics changes. How do you vote for someone under these imperfect circumstances?

I'd ask for you to consider a seemingly paradoxical belief, a concept popularized by Voltaire: "Best" is the opposite of "good" and "perfect" is the enemy of progress.

I believe this too.

The truth is that voting isn't the only compromising situations we experience in life. Your values are not binary. Some are more important than others. Two opposing beliefs can be true at once, or they may be true only in certain situations. They may serve the world, the country, the community more than they serve you at times, or vice versa.

The litmus test is this: What outcome do you want more when the stakes are high?

When Bernie Sanders ran for president and lost the primary, many of his supporters publicly refused to vote in the general election because their candidate wasn't on the ballot. This wasn't the only factor in how we ended up with a Trump presidency twice, but it did feed into this outcome. 

As we're now deep in the midterms again, a more relevant test of this will be whether progressive voters accept James Talarico's moderate politics or whether conservative ones believe Ken Paxton's mountain of misdeeds can be overlooked. 

Personally, for me, Paxton's history of corruption is the brown shoe, the line in the sand. While I don't agree with all of Talarico's ideas, I do believe that character matters. I believe most Texans will agree. And I believe Talarico holds the key to a better outcome, a better world, a better Texas.

Can you see past your reservations, gauge with clarity which candidate is more imperfect in your eyes, and vote with your conscious?

If multiple members of the Bush family can put country over party, I believe you can too.