The Atlantic has endorsed just three presidential candidates in its 159-year history: Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, and now, in 2016, Hillary Clinton.
Clinton, the publication’s endorsement reads, “has more than earned, through her service to the country as first lady, as a senator from New York, and as secretary of state, the right to be taken seriously as a White House contender.”
The rest of the endorsement, or at least its description of Clinton, is similarly understated. The Atlantic’s editors make clear that the rare move was deemed necessary as a response to Clinton’s opponent.
“We are impressed by many of the qualities of the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, even as we are exasperated by others,” it reads, “but we are mainly concerned with the Republican Party’s nominee, Donald J. Trump, who might be the most ostentatiously unqualified major-party candidate in the 227-year history of the American presidency.”
Just as The Atlantic intended its endorsement of Lincoln as a strike against slavery and its endorsement of Johnson as a rebuttal of Barry Goldwater’s nativism, endorsing Clinton is the magazine’s shot across Trump’s bow.
“[O]ur interest here is not to advance the prospects of the Democratic Party, nor to damage those of the Republican Party,” the editorial concludes. “We believe in American democracy, in which individuals from various parties of different ideological stripes can advance their ideas and compete for the affection of voters. But Trump is not a man of ideas. He is a demagogue, a xenophobe, a sexist, a know-nothing, and a liar. He is spectacularly unfit for office, and voters—the statesmen and thinkers of the ballot box—should act in defense of American democracy and elect his opponent.”
