Meghan McCain Issues 2024 Voting Update as Brother Backs Harris

Meghan McCain, daughter of the late Republican senator and presidential candidate John McCain, says she will not vote for Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump this year.

McCain did not say who she might vote for in November or whether she would cast a ballot at all in a Tuesday afternoon post to X, formerly Twitter, regarding the presidential election.

The conservative commentator said that she remained a “proud member of the Republican Party” and would not follow in the footsteps of her younger brother, Jimmy McCain, who had told CNN that he would be 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. “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)”

While McCain did not mention support for any presidential candidates other than Trump or Harris, she did interview independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on her podcast earlier this year and warned Democrats that Kennedy could still “make a real difference” after he suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump last month.

Newsweek reached out for comment to McCain’s representatives via email for comment on Tuesday evening.

During a CNN appearance a short time before the post, Meghan’s brother Jimmy, a U.S. Army intelligence officer, said he had changed his voter registration from independent to Democrat and “would get involved in any way I could” to help the Harris campaign.

The younger McCain denounced Trump for his recent controversial visit to Arlington National Cemetery during a wreath-laying ceremony to mark the third anniversary of a terror attack that killed 13 U.S. service members as American forces were withdrawing from Afghanistan.

During the visit, the former president’s campaign staff had a physical altercation with a cemetery staff member attempting to prevent them from taking videos at a grave site due to federal laws prohibiting partisan political campaigning at military cemeteries.

Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said that the staff member was “suffering from a mental health episode” in comments to Newsweek. Campaign adviser Chris LaCivita called the staff member a “despicable individual” who “does not deserve to represent the [hallowed] grounds of Arlington National Cemetery” after challenging the campaign.

“The point of Arlington Cemetery is to go and show respect for the men and women who have given their lives for this country,” Jimmy McCain told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “When you make it political, you take away the respect of the people who are there.”

John McCain, the 2008 Republican nominee for president, was frequently a target of Trump during the last years of his political career. Trump infamously said during a 2015 campaign stop that McCain, a Navy veteran who was a prisoner of war for over five years in Vietnam, was “not a hero” because Trump prefers “people that weren’t captured.”

Multiple members of the McCain family have repeatedly hit out at Trump for his disparaging comments about the late senator, with Meghan McCain calling the former president “a piece of s***, election-denying huckster whose own wife won’t campaign with him” in an X post earlier this year.

Update 9/3/24, 6:54 p.m. ET: This article was updated with additional information.