Election 2024

Matt Welch | 11.5.2024 10:35 AM

There are three good reasons why Democrats and Republicans alike are using apocalyptic, this-might-be-the-last-election closing arguments in what has been a double-hateworthy 2024 campaign.

First, the hair-on-fire tactic works—at least until it doesn't. Negative framing is naturally stickier in our brains.

Second, it's plausible. Voters are in a persistently glum mood about today's economy (46 percent rate it as "poor," per Gallup), tomorrow's (62 percent say "worse"), and the overall direction of the country (72 percent negative). Many have the understandable suspicion that the biggest public policy decisions—and disasters thereof—are happening regardless of their input.

Finally, it's that age-old fight-or-flight instinct, with the squirrel-in-the-headlights terror of the looming unknown. We fear most what we hear coming but cannot quite see. And all expressed political certitudes notwithstanding, we just cannot know how bad Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will be.

This is an unhelpful state of affairs when pondering who should wield executive control over a $6.8 trillion (and fast-growing) Leviathan with more than 4 million employees, an 89,000-page Federal Register of regulations, a law enforcement division bigger than most countries' standing armies, and the most lethal military in history.

The next president will face life-and-death decisions about the hot wars in Ukraine and Israel, cope with the ugly realities of debt service exceeding already sky-high military spending, continue to drain the Social Security trust fund to within months of triggering a mandatory 20 percent benefits cut for 70 million Americans, and use the presidency's broad authority to reshape both immigration policy and the global tariff system. All in addition to responding to Black Swan challenges we currently cannot foresee, at home and abroad. What will they do, and what effects will those exertions have? Who knows!

From the Harris perspective, such policy ambiguity is by design. Axios reported over the weekend that the vice president and her campaign staff "have refused to detail her position on more than a dozen of her previous stances the past three months in response to........

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