Meghan McCain wrote in her dead dad, John McCain, in presidential election

Former The View cohost Meghan McCain revealed that, instead of Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, she voted for a dead person — her father, the late Senator John McCain — in the 2024 presidential election.

In a new interview on the iHeart podcast Next Questions With Katie Couric, McCain explained Thursday that she wrote in her father’s name — even after the conservative Republican politician died from brain cancer in 2018.

“I wrote in my dad. Is that cliche? I’m so sorry, I know, I know. It’s so… people are mad at me. People are so mad at me, Katie. I mean, mad that I didn’t vote either way,” the 40-year-old told Couric. “And I was like, I have such Christian guilt at night, and I don’t want anything on my conscience with any of it. I just can never vote for Trump. I can’t do it. I could never explain it to my children.”

When Couric pushed her to address why she couldn’t vote for Harris, despite vocally rejecting Trump in the past, McCain cited “just policy” as her reasoning.

“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 replied. “And look, I’m a pro-life, pretty hardcore conservative woman and Governor [Tim] Walz was way too extreme for me. He actually, like, scared me a lot more than she did.”

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Still, while also speculating that her father wouldn’t have voted for Harris, either, she praised the VP for “getting in the cockpit of a crashing plane and leveling it out the way she did” ahead of the Nov. 5 election. “I don’t know how many other politicians could’ve done that,” she added. “But, I don’t think she’s this cataclysmic disaster that she’s being portrayed as. I actually think it’s pretty unfair.”

That comment comes as a stark contrast to a controversial observation McCain made on her own Citizen McCain podcast in January, when she used Harris’ gender against her in a scathing criticism.

“She sounds like stoner, like a 19-year-old stoner in college who’s high at 3 a.m. She makes me so uncomfortable,” McCain said while speaking about Harris’ 2022 speech about the passage of time. “I don’t like watching her. I don’t like listening to her.”

She added: “If anything, Vice President Harris has proven to me that maybe a woman can’t be Vice President. I actually think she’s setting feminism back 10 years.”

In response to Entertainment Weekly‘s request for comment, a representative for the pundit pointed back to McCain’s comments on Couric’s podcast.

Prior to launching her own mini media circle via her podcast, McCain was a cohost on The View from 2017-2021, after briefly serving as a Fox News contributor before joining the hosting panel of the network’s Outnumbered program in 2016.

Listen to McCain on Couric’s podcast above.