I was a clerk for two years for a Republican judge and voted for him, and one other Republican on the bench at the time. I know them personally, know how they view the law, and trust both of them to act with integrity.
When the judge hired me, he hired me knowing that my faith does not permit me to participate in carrying out the death penalty. Although he does not share my feelings, he respected my conscientious objection to the death penalty and agreed to accommodate me on that issue, by assigning his other clerk the responsibility of writing the few death penalty opinions our particular court heard.
Due to the unusual circumstance that our second parent adoption case was decided against us within a week after I was hired, the loss meant our case would be heard on appeal by the court I'd just been hired into. We either had to forego an appeal, or had to come out to the judge before my first day of work. There is absolutely no protection for LGBT individuals in my state. He could have fired me on the spot, but he chose not to.
As for his judicial integrity, the way he worked was to suggest how he thought the case ought to turn out (based on oral arguments and his preliminary read of the briefs). Then he turned me loose to research and draft the opinion. If I reported to him that the law didn't support his initial opinion, we discussed it. He never once asked me to go against the law when the law did not support the outcome he preferred.
That isn't to say I agreed with all of the decisions I drafted on his behalf. There were times when the law allows a decision to go either way - and if it was a criminal matter, most of the time I would have preferred a different outcome.
The other Republican judge I voted for (on the bench of the same court) was a surprise to me. Before I worked with him at the court, I would never in a million years have predicted I would ever vote for him. After working with him - and seeing his respect for the law, even when it did not fall the way he would have wanted, I voted for him each time he ran for office after that.
As for the rest of the R's on the bench - still not in a million years. I watched each of them insist that their clerks find the most obscure cases, from outside of our jurisdiction when there were none in our jurisdiction, to justify the outcome they wanted- even when there was clear law in our jurisdiction to the contrary (and I drafted dissents or opinions on behalf of my judge pointing that out - often signed by the other Republican judge I have voted for).
So - for me the integrity of the law is important enough that my strongest concern in a judicial race is electing judges who respect it. Most of those are Democrats, but there are occasional D stinkers who also put end results above integrity - and no one who does that will get my vote. And there are occasional R judges who similarly value integrity.
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