Let me tell you a story.

Eight years ago, in September 2016, I was on the editorial board of The Detroit News. During our endorsements that presidential election year, we made a decision that surprised a lot of our readers – and others around the country.

For the first time in the newspaper’s storied history, we chose not to endorse the Republican candidate.

As we wrote then: “The 2016 nominee offered by the Republican Party rubs hard against the editorial board’s values as conservatives and Americans. Donald Trump is unprincipled, unstable and quite possibly dangerous. He can not be president.”

So what did we do instead? As a conservative editorial board, we couldn’t bring ourselves to endorse the Democrat, Hillary Clinton, for her far-left stances and character challenges.

Rather than just write a non-endorsement, we wanted to be for somebody. We chose Libertarian Gary Johnson, the former two-term Republican governor of New Mexico. (Unluckily for us, the night before our endorsement ran, Johnson had a brain freeze on national TV when he couldn’t think of the name of a single foreign leader he admired – an “Aleppo moment,” as Johnson called it, referring to a former flub.) The next day, when local and national media outlets wanted to talk to us about our choice, was interesting to say the least.

I tell this story to say I understand and share the concerns many conservatives........

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