Stop Treating Every Election as Existential

Every election cycle now arrives pre-labeled as the most important of our lifetime. It happened four years ago. It happened again two years ago. It will happen again in November, regardless of what is actually on the ballot.

I understand the impulse. Genuine stakes exist, and campaigns have every incentive to maximize turnout by maximizing dread. But there is a cost to crying wolf on democracy itself every twenty-four months, and I think we are paying it now.

The cost of permanent emergency

When everything is existential, nothing is. Voters who are told every cycle that catastrophe looms, and who then watch the country continue functioning regardless of the outcome, don't conclude the danger was overstated — they conclude that "existential" is just what politicians say. That erosion of credibility is itself a democratic cost, and it falls hardest on the elections where the stakes really are unusual.

A modest proposal

Reserve the vocabulary of emergency for actual emergencies. Most elections are, in fact, ordinary — a chance to adjust course, not a final verdict on the nation's survival. Treating them that way isn't complacency. It's accuracy, and our politics could use more of it.