Donald Trump

Daniel Hannan | 1.22.2026 9:49 AM

Pollsters have long understood that the act of casting a ballot creates a bond. Once we have voted for a candidate, we feel invested in him. We don't want to admit to ourselves that we might have made a mistake.

Psychologists have lots of terms for the cognitive glitches that make us think this way: post-decision rationalization, dissonance reduction, commitment escalation, choice-supportive bias. But these phrases don't do justice to the sheer intensity of what happened in red states in November 2016. Voters who detested Hillary Clinton were emotionally fused to the man who defeated her. Something similar happened eight years later with Kamala Harris, soldering the attachment more firmly.

I understand it. On three successive occasions, the Democrats put up terrible candidates—a curiously self-indulgent thing to do, given how high the stakes were, but that's another story.

I don't get a vote, obviously—that was settled at Yorktown—but if I had had one, my candidate in 2016 would have been Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico. Still, let's be honest: Reason is perhaps the only serious publication where I can mention a Libertarian Party candidate and expect more than the tiniest flicker of recognition. For most Americans in most states, there were only two plausible candidates,........

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