THINKING BEYOND THE ELECTION RETURNS.

Irrespective of what transpires in the next few hours, or will it be weeks, government will continue to be the problem.  Reason's Nick Gillespie is unsparing.  "Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are polling terribly because they are terrible people representing terrible parties."

Although I'm in the Trump is your final warning camp, whether he wins or loses and whether the national government is gridlocked or slightly under one party's sway, I align for the most part with Mr Gillespie's rejection of the process.

With a day left before the 2024 polls close, I'd like to say something to the Republicans and the Democrats, the Trump chads and the Harris stans: Don't blame me for not voting for your shitty candidate.

There's a reason why presidential contests have been as tight as they have been for a while, and why control of Congress has flipped back and forth so much over the last couple of decades. It's not because of voters like me, who just want to vote for politicians and policies that won't bankrupt the country or rob me of the ability to make meaningful decisions in my life. It's not too much to ask for candidates who aren't colossal assholes, mental incompetents, or fakers that routinely lie and dissemble about all sorts of stuff. Your parties don't stand for anything consistent or appealing or responsible or responsive. You're not going to win elections easily until you stand for something consistent, productive, and respectful of the people you seek to govern.

The problem is that being modest about what governments, especially large, continental governments can do isn't exactly a way to get elected to office, particularly in a milieu where a career politician is hailed for "a lifetime in public service" and where people who should know better speak of government as "solving collective action problems."  If you sense a rant coming on, dear reader, you're right, but today we'll leave the ranting to Mr Gillespie.

They each threaten free speech in their own ways and traffic in delusion (Trump, for instance, can't admit he lost the popular vote in 2016 and 2020, while Kamala won't say when she knew that President Joe Biden's brain was cooked).

We know what a Trump presidency will look like because he's served already. It wasn't great, considering that most of the new debt he added to the nation's came before COVID-19 tanked the economy. But it wasn't a disaster either, at least until COVID-19 came along and he pushed to shut the country down and put together the very team of awful public health bureaucrats he spends a lot of time railing against now, as if they just showed in the Oval Office one day.

As part of the Biden administration, Harris was co-pilot during an equally mediocre run in the White House, especially when it came to prolonging or intensifying many of the worst COVID-19 policies that started under Trump. But if we're being honest, despite all the best attempts of Biden/Harris to utterly tank the economy, it seems to be doing just fine, just like it was doing under Trump (which is to say, OK but not anywhere close to where it should be). The Dow Jones is doing swell, and for all their bitching and moaning, younger Americans are doing better than previous generations, with Millennials and older Gen Zers accruing more wealth than Gen X. And miracles of miracles: Gen Z is outpacing Millennials when it comes to home ownership. The genius of America is that we survive almost any fool presiding over us.

Whatever else you can say about Trump and Harris, this much is indisputable: They are not popular. Each is pulling under 50 percent of voters the day before the election. And their parties aren't exactly reeling them in, either. Per Gallup's survey during the last two weeks of October, just 29 percent of Americans identify as Republican and just 32 percent as Democrats—figures that are near all-time lows. Let the partisans explain why the rest of us are so misguided in our indifference or hostility to these candidates and their parties. Maybe one of these years, those partisans will get around to figuring out how to appeal to people outside of the shrinking groups who already agree with them.

That, however, would involve reducing the size of the political bundles, and what would ever happen to the so-called public affairs programming, the premise of which is that out of those Excessively Earnest Discussions will come the outlines of (Nonexistent) Solutions to Collective Action Problems.  Or somebody coming out and saying straight away, "I'm running to make my office less intrusive."