(I have a comment nephew to this one that argues against "politics doesn't belong here", but I also wanted to provide a cautionary suggestion...)

I have found it pretty difficult to think in a balanced way about...any election in the last three cycles...but I want to propose that, on the outside view, "candidate seems Obviously Bad" and "candidate would have a negative counterfactual effect on [classical EA cause area]" is nowhere near as correlated as it intuitively feels it should be.

The example that I will keep pointing to, probably forever, is that George W. Bush was almost certainly the best president in the modern era for both Global Health and Welfare^[1] and for GCBRs^[2], based on programs that were very far from what I (still) think of as his major policy positions.

I think that Bush's interest in HIV response in Africa was in theory knowable at the time^[3], but figuring it out would have required digging into some pretty unlikely topics on a candidate that my would-have-been intellectual circles^[4] was pretty strongly convinced was the worse one. (I'm not sure how knowable his proactive interest in pandemic prep was.)

I don't want to claim that it's correct to equivocate this cycle's Republican candidate and W. Bush here, and I don't have any concrete reason to believe that the Republican candidate is good on particular cause areas. I just mean to say, I wouldn't have believed it of W. Bush, either. And in this cycle, I'm not aware of anyone who has really done the reasearch that would convince me one way or another in terms of the shut-up-and-multiply expected counterfactual utility.

So, while I don't oppose making decisions on other-than-consequentialist and/or commonsense grounds here (which is likely what's going to actually sway my ballot as a citizen), I want to argue for a stance of relatively deep epistemic uncertainty on the consequentialist dimension, until I see more focused argument from someone who really has done the homework.

This is just speculation, but I wonder if it's more cost-effective to donate to a Senate candidate who is also running in a Presidential swing state? Maybe Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, or Arizona?

It seems plausible that a strong Senate candidate could inspire voters to get out and vote for a President they're not enthusiastic about - essentially a 'reverse coattails' effect (though I don't think there's particularly strong evidence for this)

I empathize with the desire for the request which is why I’m responding, but yeah, unsure the EA forum is the right place for the presidential election.

I wonder if one were to make an argument for a candidate strictly across causes which are more EA consensus/funded by Open Phil. X candidate is good for animal welfare, global health and development, and pandemic and AI catastrophic/existential risk. And here are the policies and here is the total analysis across these which differentially directs this many GiveDirectly rated dollars/QALYs.

But yeah, seems hard. Also open to just being wrong here.