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 would maintain stability, and they would display far greater intelligence and competence than Trump and his hangers-on.”

Instead, he argues, they supplemented Trump’s insanity with insanity of their own; embracing authoritarian COVID policies, pushing unproven treatments for gender dysphoria on children, and foreswearing the very concepts of law enforcement and border security.

The result is what liberals wanted to believe would be an “obvious” choice between Trump and the adults in the room is in fact a nail-biter contest in which the “sane” option is far from clear.

One needn’t agree with Douthat’s every diagnosis of liberalism’s failures to see why many Trump-skeptical conservative and moderate voters still think he can be a bulwark against persistent left-wing unreason.

And yet, anyone thinking that by voting for Trump, they’ll deflate the excesses of Trump-era liberalism is mistaken.

The left’s alleged “anti-civilizational” attitudes weren’t defeated during Trump’s first term. Rather, they accelerated in opposition to him. Cancel culture, political correctness, “wokeism,” and “follow the science” fanaticism all hit their zenith under his administration.

Trump’s control of the White House couldn’t arrest what are broad cultural forces that often manifested themselves in state, local, and corporate policy outside the control of the executive branch. Trump’s polarizing possession of the bully pulpit only encouraged the liberal excesses his voters (of both the die-hard or reluctant variety) hate so much.

The Biden administration has been a remarkably left-wing one. Yet, it’s during the past four years that we’ve seen wokeism unwind as a political force and identity politics start to lose its grip on the discourse.

Trump’s return to the White House will reverse this trend. His supernatural ability to incense his opponents will agitate the most fervent, most ridiculous elements of the Democratic “resistance” once again. Expect to get more cancel culture, not less, under a second Trump.

Meanwhile, a Harris victory can’t hope to purge politics of Trumpian populism or even the man himself. We’ve already run that experiment too.

Biden won the White House in large part because of the electorate’s exhaustion with Trump and the daily chaos he engendered.

Rather than accept this limited mandate to govern as a moderate, Biden turned his administration over to the most left-wing wonks in the room who subsequently regulated aggressively, spent with inflationary abandon, and pushed a hardline progressive agenda on social and environmental issues.

The electorate has largely hated the results. By the end of the night, it might well choose to punish Democrats by putting Trump back into office.

As a last-ditch effort to forestall that possibility, and to make up for the Biden-Harris administration’s manifest unpopularity, Democrats have tried to make as much hay as they possibly can out of January 6. Witness Harris’ decision to hold her last high-profile rally on the same spot where, several years prior, Trump urged his supporters to march to the capital in force.

This attack has fallen flat as well and predictably so.

That’s because Democrats can only invoke January 6 as a cudgel, not an olive branch.

Their message to Trump-skeptical moderates, conservatives, libertarians, and whoever else isn’t that they’ll run a moderate and inclusive administration. The last four years prove that they won’t. Rather Democrats’ message is “no matter how much you hate our policies, Trump is even worse, so you have to suck it up and vote for us.”

Perhaps the best distillation of this obnoxious pitch came from U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg a few weeks ago. “Libertarians: if this is not a five-alarm fire for you then what is?” he posted on X in response to a Washington Post article about former Trump advisers warning he would use the military against American citizens.

It apparently hasn’t occurred to Buttigieg, or his boss, that libertarian-leaning voters would have been a little more receptive to that pitch if the last four years of their governance had been remotely libertarian.

Indeed, during the 2024 campaign neither Trump nor Harris have spent much time even pretending they’ll shrink the size and scope of government. Libertarians can expect few policy wins over the next four years.

Voters of all stripes shouldn’t expect our politics to get any better either.

There is much that’s destructive and toxic in American public life right now. It’s no surprise that everyone is unhappy, most people are voting for the lesser of two evils (if they feel motivated to vote at all), and we keep ping-ponging between unpopular, unsuccessful administrations.

Transcending this sad status quo will require talented, transformative candidates. None can be found on the ballot today.

Bad politics and bad ideas can’t be fixed by bad candidates. But in this election, bad candidates are all we have to choose from.

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