On the menu today: It’s Election Day, so if you haven’t voted already, go head out to your local polling place. Reading this newsletter on your phone won’t violate the law, but it is against the law to take a selfie with your ballot in Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Texas. In Arizona, West Virginia, and Florida, you may take a selfie with an absentee ballot but not in the voting booth. And remember that 21 states ban wearing political apparel at polling places. Now, let’s look at the problems for a traditional conservative in this presidential election, the upsides and downsides of each possible electoral outcome, and a proposal to reward early voters and cease the deluge of political commercials once you’ve voted.
Good Luck, America!
The HBO World War II series Band of Brothers has a dramatic scene in which one soldier advises another, “We’re all scared. . . . The only hope you have is to accept the fact that you’re already dead, and the sooner you accept that, the sooner you’ll be able to function.”
If, like me, you’re a limited-government, deficit-and-debt-concerned, entitlement-reform-supporting, Constitution-minded, pro-free-trade, hawkish, Xi Jinping-skeptical, NATO-supporting, Bible-reading traditional conservative who believes that we should not be expanding the list of medical procedures the federal government will pay for and that character matters . . .
. . . Or if you believe that tips are income whether or not you want to win an election in the state of Nevada, that the U.S. doesn’t need a sovereign wealth fund, that Republicans should have more than “concepts of a plan” on America’s health-care system, that the cap on the deduction for state and local taxes is just fine where it is, that we need a simpler tax code and not a more complicated one, and that when it comes to important gubernatorial races, the GOP shouldn’t nominate weirdos like Mark Robinson . . .
. . . We’re all already dead. (Committed pro-lifers have good reason to worry about the drift in the Republican Party and Donald Trump since Roe, too.)
Don’t worry about things getting worse, because you’re already living in the worst-case scenario. As Winston Churchill said, and Rodney Atkins sang, “If you’re going through hell, keep on going.”
(I know, I know. “Jim, you really suck at Election Day pep talks.” Blame my doctor: I’m not allowed to sugarcoat anything anymore.)
We’ve warned about the dangers of unlimited government, blithely ignoring the Constitution, the ticking time bomb of entitlements, how tariffs inevitably increase costs for consumers and trigger retaliatory tariffs on our exports, how interest on the debt now costs more than Medicare or defense spending, the growing threat of the Axis of the Devils overseas and its appetite for massacres, our insufficiently prepared military and our undersized defense-industrial base . . .
. . . and roughly three-quarters of the Republican Party and almost all the rest of the country chose to ignore our warnings.
Good luck, America!
Thus, anything good that comes out of this radioactive and infectious dumpster fire of an election is a gift.
Our Charlie Cooke recently wrote an exemplary piece in the print magazine, summing up the near future for conservatives:
Calvin Coolidge was correct when he remarked that “it is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones,” but one ought not to conclude from this that it is unimportant to pass good bills. The utility of gridlock is that it prevents any situation from getting worse. This, though, is a positive thing only when what is being preserved is desirable. In the 1990s, gridlock served to lock in many of the Reagan-era reforms. Today, gridlock would put Washington, D.C. on autopilot and prevent it from addressing looming disaster. Given the candidates on offer, this may be the best we can aspire to for now. At some point soon, it won’t be enough.
Sure, if Trump wins, conservatives will get at least a handful of policy wins, particularly if there’s a GOP House and Senate. We’ll probably get the tax cuts extended, some defense-spending increases, and much better judges. Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito will be able to retire, resting assured that their seats will be filled by like-minded judges. As discussed on yesterday’s episode of The Editors podcast, the progressive-activist class may never be willing to change, but Democrats who want to be elected statewide may well realize that the turn to the hard left that was triggered by Trump’s election and continued well into the Biden years has cost them dearly and needs to be immediately abandoned, not merely hidden for the last three months before an election.
Of course, all those upsides for conservatives will come with the adjacent albatross of a raging narcissist with the impulse control of a cocaine-addicted ferret, prone to toddler-like tantrums, who once thundered on his personal social-media platform, “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”
Hey, what’s literally the first thing a new president does? He puts his hand on a Bible or other holy book of his choice and pledges, with the whole country watching, “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
You cannot “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” if you have already called for “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”
Compared to his first term, Trump, at age 78 and on pace to finish a prospective second term at age 82 — the age which Joe Biden turns later this month — will be even more erratic, easily distracted, rambling, raging, stubborn, prone to listening to and being convinced by whichever sycophant kisses his derriere the most. He will continue sticking the fork into the electrical socket, just because someone told him he can’t or shouldn’t. Oh, and his election will guarantee a super-energized left, and perhaps some left-wing terrorism.
If Harris wins, there’s no reason to think that she has “moderated” one iota from her 2019 presidential campaign. She’s offered only vague and unconvincing explanations for her newfound centrism on issues like fracking, decriminalizing unauthorized border crossings, border-fencing construction, “Medicare for all,” “defund the police,” mandatory buybacks of so-called “assault weapons,” a federal jobs guarantee, the Green New Deal, etc.
Back in the 2020 presidential cycle, I did a series of reported columns titled “twenty things you probably didn’t know about” a whole bunch of Democratic presidential candidates. I usually could find one or two funny or lighthearted anecdotes from earlier in their careers. Sharp-eyed readers noticed that the one about Harris included no lighter points and was entirely about her exceptionally far-reaching use of her prosecutorial powers.
Perhaps a rare upside to a Harris presidency is that while she’s easily underestimated, she is obviously a terrible communicator prone to word salad, and she’s struggled for four months to convince Americans that they shouldn’t reelect a man whom they have consistently disliked for years. Picking Tim Walz over Josh Shapiro demonstrated terrible political instincts and perhaps deep insecurity, a jaw-dropping overconfidence that she had Pennsylvania in the bag, or, if those rumors are true, an inability to persuade Shapiro that she, the party, and the country needed him to be her running mate. (Her closing ads in Pennsylvania ended up featuring Shapiro anyway.)
A Republican House and Senate would partially mitigate the amount of damage she could do, at least in domestic policy, and with Harris as their standard-bearer, Democrats would likely face a bloodbath in the 2026 midterm elections on par with the 2010 and 2014 GOP waves. I don’t agree that there’s any realistic “conservative case for Kamala Harris.” But I do see the appeal of forcing Democrats to be stuck with her for another four years.
Whichever side loses, its recriminations, finger-pointing, and blame-game will be epic, and perhaps lead to a much-needed, long-overdue course correction. Whichever side wins will be convinced that it did everything right, which is absurd. But that hubris will come back to bite it in the butt at some point in the likely not-so-distant future. It always does.
You get one vote, so you might as well use it. But let’s face it, the country’s future is in the hands of a handful of voters in Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina.
ADDENDUM: One of my favorite proposals of this election cycle, from Clem over at Barstool Sports: “If you get an ‘I Voted’ sticker for voting early, you should be able to scan it on your TV and all political ads should be replaced by normal commercials.”
How about some equivalent system on your phone? Listeners to the Three Martini Lunch podcast know that some poorly organized and mismanaged Democratic group thinks that my co-host Greg Corombos is “Doris,” and another thinks that I am “Diane.”
(Admittedly, thinking that I speak into my phone’s voice recorder and address my messages to “Diane” is not the craziest possible assumption you could make about me.)