Meghan McCain Says She Voted For Her Late Father, John McCain, In The 2024 Election

Meghan McCain, who pledged not to support either Vice President Kamala Harris or President-elect Donald Trump in the 2024 election, said this week that she instead cast a vote for her father, the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), for president.

“I wrote in my dad. Is that cliché?” she explained. “People are so mad at me, Katie ― mad that I didn’t vote either way. And I was like, I have such Christian guilt at night, and I don’t want anything on my conscience with any of it. And I just can never vote for Trump. I can’t do it. I could never explain it to my children.”

As for her decision not to vote for Harris, McCain said it came down to matters of “policy.”

“I really wanted her to give me a reason to vote for her, and I just felt like it never happened, and there were some questions that she just couldn’t answer,” she told Couric. “And look, I’m a pro-life, pretty hardcore conservative woman, and Governor [Tim] Walz was way too extreme for me. He actually scared me a lot more than she did. He’s very radical on abortion and his record during 2020, George Floyd protests in Minneapolis. And I felt like he was cosplaying as a Republican to try and get my vote.”

Members of the McCain family have repeatedly spoken out against Trump, who in 2015 made incendiary remarks about John McCain’s military career and his time as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and his daughter, Meghan McCain, in 2017.

Heidi Gutman via Getty Images

After Trump was elected president in 2016, he and John McCain sparred numerous times, most notably in 2017 when the senator sank the GOP’s efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. When McCain died of brain cancer in 2018, Trump was not invited to the funeral.

Meghan McCain’s decision to support neither Trump nor Harris isn’t surprising. In September, she said she wasn’t planning to vote for either one, even after her brother, Jimmy McCain, said he’d changed his voter registration from independent to Democrat with the intention of voting for Harris.

“I greatly respect the wide variety of political opinions of all of my family members and love them all very much,” Meghan McCain wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “I however, remain a proud member of the Republican Party and hope for brighter days ahead. (Not voting for Harris or Trump, hope that clears things up).”

Still, in her “Next Question” interview, she had some mild praise for Harris for offering Democrats a fighting chance at the White House after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race in July.

“She had 100 days to do this, and I think she should be applauded for getting in the cockpit of a crashing plane and leveling it out the way she did,” McCain said. “I don’t know how many other politicians could have done that. And I actually think that there are a lot of genuine criticisms of her that I can give. But I don’t think she’s this cataclysmic disaster that she’s being portrayed as now. I think it’s actually pretty unfair.”

Listen to Meghan McCain’s “Next Question” interview below. Her comments about voting for her father begin at about the 30:25 mark.