Opinion: I'm a non-MAGA conservative. Sanctimonious liberals make me want to vote Trump.

I like voting absentee, and I got my ballot in the mail a couple of weeks ago. I’ve spent a lot of time staring at it, not thrilled about my choices at the top of the ticket.

That is, until lately. 

Vice President Kamala Harris, her surrogate Democrats and the left-leaning legacy media are all making me – a conservative who is not MAGA in any way – actively want to vote for former President Donald Trump.

And I know I’m not alone. 

Harris and her fellow liberals are starting to sound a lot like the Democrats did in 2016, and it’s a huge turnoff to voters like me. 

Many in mainstream media (with few exceptions) have dropped any pretense of covering this election fairly and gone full steam ahead in helping Harris defeat Trump. 

The examples are numerous, but CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell, one of the moderators of the vice presidential debate this month, just offered an excellent example of the pervasive, obnoxious bias in the news media. With a straight face, O’Donnell related the following about the state of the presidential race.

She started with Harris: “The fight for every single last undecided vote in battleground states is intensifying. Vice President Kamala Harris is targeting disaffected Republican voters by hitting the trail with Liz Cheney in the crucial blue wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Cheney was a powerful Republican congresswoman, and today, she called Harris a responsible adult." 

O’Donnell then followed up with this about Trump: “As for former President Donald Trump, he was back in North Carolina again pushing false claims about FEMA and immigrants. That's after he spent the weekend slinging a crude insult at Harris, engaging in lewd locker room talk about the late golfing legend Arnold Palmer, and staging a campaign stunt at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s.”

It would almost be funny if the stakes weren't so high.

Opinion: Republicans for Kamala Harris? A true conservative couldn't vote for her.

Harris supporters sound a lot like Hillary Clinton, and it's not a good thing

Ahead of the 2016 election, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, who was constantly trying to play up what a brute Trump was, said you could put half of his supporters into a “basket of deplorables,” because they must be as “sexist" and "racist” as the Republican nominee himself.  

(It turns out, that wasn’t a smart thing for Clinton to say.) 

Opinion: Why is Trump doing so well in the polls? It's the economy, stupid.

Along those lines, Clinton also played the woman card, making a big deal about how she would be the first woman president in the United States. And she made it clear that all women had a duty to vote for her, regardless of their political views. If they didn’t vote for her, then it must be because of the men in their lives. 

That rhetoric was insulting to women then, and it still is today. Not to mention ineffective. 

Yet, that has not stopped the media and Harris supporters from echoing that sentiment now. 

For instance, Jess Piper, a progressive activist in Missouri, recently opined the following on social media: “White women: your vote is private. I don’t care what kind of sign your husband has put out in your yard, or what your pastor preaches on Sunday, you can vote your conscience. You can vote for your children and grandchildren. No one will know.”

Huh? 

And The New York Times this week devoted a whole “news” story to how gender is one of the pivotal aspects of this election, noting that Harris has the “potential to make history as the country’s first female president.” 

The Times purports that this makes a lot of people (men) uncomfortable: “In quiet conversations, some female Harris supporters can’t shake the uneasy feeling that men in their lives are struggling to support a woman ‒ especially a Black and South Asian woman ‒ even if they don’t want to admit it.”

No men in my life have cared at all about Harris’ sex or race. They do care, however, about her policies – or lack thereof.

So do the women. 

Harris wants this election to be about 'democracy.' Have you heard her talk about it? 

Harris has so poorly defined what her presidency would look like and what she actually believes, she’s resorted to focusing squarely on Trump and what’s happened in the past. 

This week, she and former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney toured several battleground states touting the slogan “Country Over Party.”

Their focus? The threat they believe Trump poses to our democracy, given what happened after he lost the election in 2020 and the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. 

So you may assume that Harris has spent some time thinking about all this. At a event Monday in Royal Oak, Michigan, this is what she had to say on the matter: 

“We cannot despair. You know, the nature of a democracy is such that I think there’s a duality. On the one hand, there’s an incredible strength when our democracy is intact, an incredible strength in what it does to protect the freedoms and rights of its people. Oh, there’s great strength in that.

"And it is very fragile. It is only as strong as our willingness to fight for it. And so that’s the moment we’re in. And I say do not despair because in a democracy, as long as we can keep it, in our democracy, the people, every individual has the power to make a decision about what this will be … so let’s not feel powerless.”

I’ll spare you the rest, which is typical Harris ‒ a word salad that takes a lot of time to say nothing. 

Between Harris’ nonsensical preaching on democracy, the media’s harping against Trump and liberals playing the woman card, I’ve had enough. 

And I may do exactly what they’re hoping people don’t: Vote for Trump. 

Ingrid Jacques is a columnist at USA TODAY. Contact her at ijacques@usatoday.com or on X, formerly Twitter: @Ingrid_Jacques.

You can read diverse opinions from our USA TODAY columnists and other writers on the Opinion front page, on X, formerly Twitter, @usatodayopinion and in our Opinion newsletter.