For the past decade, our politics has been in the grip of a disease I call “The End Is Near-ism.” It is fueled by Democrats and Republicans (establishments, candidates, activists) declaring the next election the most important of our lifetimes. At least that’s how the fever starts. As the temperature rises in politics, we are told that the election is so important because if the opposition wins, the US as we know it will cease to exist. Lately we have been told that the next elections are more important than any other because there may not be any more elections if the opposition wins.
Paul Sracic, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, calls this phenomenon “Armageddon politics” and explains to me in an email exchange that the danger posed by this attitude “lies not just in the rhetoric, but also in the actions it inspires.”
“When political discourse portrays the opposition as a deadly threat, it creates a moral imperative to act beyond the bounds of traditional governance,” Sracic said. “Once these limits are crossed, the Overton Window shifts, normalizing increasingly extreme actions. Those who warn of such an escalation are dismissed as naive, given what the ‘other side’ has done, and the cycle of retaliation accelerates.”
The other problem…
The other problem with making every election existential is that it is ridiculous and has been proven demonstrably untrue time and time again.
President Donald Trump was viewed through this lens by his opponents on both the right and left in 2016. In the midterm elections that followed, Democrats regained a majority in the House of Representatives in a 41-seat defeat for the Republican Party. The subsequent presidential elections produced a Democratic trifecta: the Democrats defended their majority in the House of Representatives and regained the White House and the Senate. Four years later, it was the Republicans who won a government trifecta.
Not at all what Trump insisted would happen on January 6, 2021, when he urged Republicans in Congress and Vice President Mike Pence to overturn Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory. “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” Trump said during a speech at the Ellipse that day. Meanwhile, the country he insisted wouldn’t exist if he were no longer president is now, by his account, “the hottest country in the world.” Perhaps there is a better example of the existential election canard. I still have to find it.
Elections: Refuting Hyperbole
To be fair, Trump has sometimes undermined my argument.
On Monday, he told political ally and podcaster Dan Bongino that Republicans “need to take over the vote… they need to nationalize the vote.” And as mentioned above, the president attempted to overturn the 2020 election. Moreover, in the more than a year since Trump’s second inauguration, he has expanded executive power in a way that is particularly alarming not only to Democrats, but also to some Republicans. (The president’s approval ratings for independents started falling several months ago.)
But to my point about the election: In 2025, while Trump was turning the Justice Department into his personal team of lawyers, there was a series of off-year elections. They happened on time, as planned, and the Democrats romped.
Heck, in a special election in Texas last weekend, Democrats flipped a Senate district drawn to elect Republicans. Democrat Taylor Rehmet defeated Republican Leigh Wambsgans 57% to 43%, just under 15 months after the district supported Trump by 17 percentage points over Kamala Harris.
This is all demonstrable evidence that neither political party holds power and that the country is not irretrievably lost because “the other side” has won. So what drives our Armageddon mentality – aside from candidates and activists looking for ways to undermine voter turnout?
Hyper-partisanship, winner-take-all mentality
Craig J. Calhoun, a social scientist at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, said the culprit is partly a dynamic where “hyper-partisanship intersects with a winner-take-all mentality, and both modes of thinking are reinforced by divisions in actual social life.” This is a problem among grassroots conservatives and progressives, as Calhoun pointed out. “The left is not immune to similar predictions of impending disaster – and attempts to counter them by ‘winning’ rather than de-escalating.”
Indeed, the fear on the right has a lot to do with the social divisions Calhoun refers to, according to Jack A. Goldstone, a public policy expert at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
“It is the fear that cosmopolitan elites, with WOKE/diversity-driven ideas, as Trump would say, want to open the borders, push white Christians to the sidelines, and create a world without morality in which people of color, Muslims (perhaps Jews too), and perhaps women, are given special rights and privileges,” Goldstone told me via email. “That’s a false story, of course. But there is some truth to Democrats’ past policies — and it’s sufficiently terrifying to cause many ordinary patriotic Americans to treat any election involving Trump as a matter of life and death.”
All this has led to a rather baffling situation in Washington.
Reach, overreach, reach, overreach
This century, as power has ping-ponged between Democrats and Republicans, I have seen each party, newly elected and responsible for new majorities in Congress (and sometimes in the White House), move forward with expansive policy agendas that exceeded the voters’ mandate. Despite winning the ballot box, sometimes impressively, they conclude that politics, or the opposition’s dirty tricks, will keep them from winning another election for years, if ever, and they set out to implement every policy on their wish list. Voters, repulsed by the overreach, respond by throwing them out of office the next chance they get.
Perhaps an enterprising Democrat or Republican will emerge who will show more faith in our constitutional system, govern with the foresight that there will be more elections than just the next one – and reap the rewards.
David M. Drucker is a columnist who covers politics and policy. He is also a senior writer for The Dispatch and the author of “In Trump’s Shadow: The Battle for 2024 and the Future of the GOP.”
#David #Drucker #Problem #Making #Election #Existential #Threat