Bad Candidates Can’t Fix Bad Politics
We are officially in the last hours of the 2024 presidential election and the one thing we can say for sure is that most people are upset and miserable about their available options.
Supermajorities of voters consistently say that the country is on the wrong track. Neither major party candidate is viewed favorably by a majority of voters.
Consequently, the polls show an election that is neck-and-neck. The last-minute pitches from the candidates mostly boil down to why the other side deserves to lose. Reluctant vote-casters’ last-minute explanations of who they’re voting for likewise mostly describe what they’re voting against.
“Never Trump” conservative David French used his Sunday New York Times column to argue a Harris victory offers the chance to break the “unique influence on Republican hearts and minds” that Donald Trump possesses.
On the other side of the aisle, vaguely conservative comedian and political commenter Bridget Phetasy explained she’s “not voting for Donald J. Trump. I’m voting against the left” and its “anti-civilizational” attitudes on crime, transgenderism, and cancel culture.
That’s not a unique opinion. People who have never voted for Trump before say they’re planning on casting a vote for him in 2024 as a protest against the party that “closed playgrounds & schools, but open[ed] dog parks & liquor stores.”
Regardless of who one supports, everyone has a palpable sense that the best this election can offer is a chance to save the country from the worst cultural and political tendencies of the last decade.
In a Monday Substack essay, pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson summed up this collective attitude as the “stop the madness” election.
In focus groups she’s conducted, Anderson says that few voters dwelled much on specific policies. Instead, they said that their vote was all about “getting this country back to a place all citizens can be proud of,” that the election presents “a turning point on whether our democracy lives on or dies,” and that they were most worried about “my right to exist, live, and be free.”
“You may think you know which party someone is voting for from those answers. I assure you, you do not,” writes Anderson. “For all that we are so divided, I am struck by the way in which many Trump and Harris voters alike are talking about the election in these terms.”
All these voters are likely to be disappointed. The one thing we can say for sure about the results of the 2024 election is that the madness won’t stop.
We know this because we’ve already lived through both outcomes that the election offers.
We know what a Trump victory means for defeating the “anti-civilizational” tendencies of the left. We know what a Trump defeat means for closing the book on toxic Trumpian populism.
In a perceptive weekend column, The New York Times‘ Ross Douthat details how liberals failed to deliver on their post-2016 promise that “they would avoid insanity, they w
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