Bad policies and bad ideas can’t be fixed by bad candidates.

We are officially in the final hours of the 2024 presidential election, and the only thing we can say for sure is that most people are upset and unhappy with the options available to them.

Supermajority voters consistently say the country is on the wrong track. None of the major party candidates viewed favorable by the majority of voters.

Consequently, polls show that the elections are going hand in hand. Last-minute candidates’ proposals mostly come down to Why the other side deserves to lose. Reluctant voters’ last-minute explanations of who they are voting for also largely describe what they are voting against.

Conservative David French, “Never Trump” used its Sunday New York Times column arguing that Harris’ victory offers a chance to destroy the “unique influence over Republican hearts and minds” that Donald Trump wields.

On the other hand, vaguely conservative comedian and political commentator Bridget Phetasi explained that she is “not voting for Donald Trump. I vote against the left” and their “anti-civilization” views on crime, transgenderism and cancel culture.

This is not a unique opinion. People who have never voted for Trump before say they plan to vote for him in 2024. protest against the party that “closed playgrounds and schools but opened dog parks and liquor stores.”

No matter who you support, there is a palpable sense that the best this election has to offer is a chance to save the country from the worst cultural and political trends of the last decade.

In a Monday Substack essay, sociologist Kristen Soltis Anderson summed it up: collective attitude like the “stop the madness” elections.

In the focus groups she conducted, few voters focused on specific policies, Anderson said. Instead, they said that their vote was intended to “return this country to a place that all citizens can be proud of,” that the election represented “a turning point in whether our democracy will live or die,” and that they were most concerned about “my right to exist, to live and to be free.”

“You might think from these responses that you know which party someone votes for. I assure you this is not the case,” Anderson writes. “For all our differences, I am struck by how many Trump and Harris voters alike talk about the election in these terms.”

All of these voters will likely be disappointed. The only thing we can say for sure about the 2024 election results is that the madness will not stop.

We know this because we have already experienced both outcomes that the election offers.

We know what a Trump victory means for defeating the “anti-civilization” tendencies of the left. We know what Trump’s defeat means for closing the book on toxic Trumpian populism.

On a insightful weekend column, New York TimesRoss Douthat details how liberals failed to deliver on their post-2016 promise that “they would avoid the madness, maintain stability, and demonstrate far greater intelligence and competence than Trump and his hangers-on.”

Instead, he argues, they complemented Trump’s madness with their own madness; by pursuing authoritarian COVID policies, pushing untested treatments for gender dysphoria on children, and abandoning the very concepts of law enforcement and border security.

As a result, what liberals wanted to believe would be the “obvious” choice between Trump and the adults in the room is, in fact, a tight contest in which the “reasonable” option is far from clear.

You don’t have to agree with every diagnosis of liberalism’s failures to understand why many Trump-skeptic conservative and moderate voters still think he can be a bulwark against stubborn leftist unreason.

Yet anyone who thinks that by voting for Trump they will reduce the excesses of Trump-era liberalism is mistaken.

The left’s supposed “anti-civilization” sentiments were not defeated during Trump’s first term. Rather, they accelerated in opposing him. Cancel culture, political correctness, “wake-ism,” and “follow the science” bigotry have all reached their zenith under his administration.

Trump’s control of the White House failed to stem the broad cultural forces that often played out in state, local and corporate policies beyond the control of the executive branch. Trump’s polarizing command of the bully pulpit has only encouraged the liberal excesses that his voters (both diehards and resisters) so abhor.

The Biden administration has been exclusively left-wing. However, over the past four years we have seen wakeism relax as a political force and identity politics begin to lose control of speech.

Trump’s return to the White House will reverse this trend. His uncanny ability to irritate his opponents will once again excite the most ardent and most absurd elements of the democratic “resistance.” Under a second Trump, expect more cancel culture, not less.

Meanwhile, a Harris victory cannot hope to cleanse politics of Trump’s populism, or even the man himself. We have already conducted such an experiment.

Biden won the White House in large part because the electorate was tired of Trump and the daily chaos he created.

Instead of accepting this limited mandate to govern as a moderate, Biden turned his administration to the left-wing weirdos in the room, who subsequently aggressively regulated spending, spent with inflationary vigor, and pushed a hardline progressive agenda on social and environmental issues.

The electorate largely hated the results. By the end of the night, they may well decide to punish the Democrats by returning Trump to power.

As a last-ditch effort to head off that possibility and offset the apparent unpopularity of the Biden-Harris administration, Democrats tried to make as much use out of January 6 as possible. solution hold his final high-profile rally at the same site where years earlier Trump encouraged his supporters to march on the capital.

This attack also failed, predictably.

That’s because Democrats can only point to Jan. 6 as a cudgel, not an olive branch.

Their message to Trump-skeptic moderates, conservatives, libertarians and everyone else is not that they will run a moderate and inclusive administration. The last four years prove that this will not happen. Rather, the Democrats’ message is: “No matter how much you hate our politics, Trump is worse, so you’ll have to suck it up and vote for us.”

Perhaps the best distillation of this disgusting idea was made a few weeks ago by US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. “Libertarians: If that’s not a five-alarm fire to you, what is?” He published to X in response to Washington Post article about how Trump’s former advisers warn he will use the military against American citizens.

Apparently it didn’t occur to Buttigieg and his boss that libertarian-leaning voters would be a little more receptive to this message if their last four years in office had been even remotely libertarian.

Indeed, during the 2024 campaign, neither Trump nor Harris spent much time pretending they were going to reduce the size and scope of government. Libertarians can expect few policy victories over the next four years.

Voters of all stripes shouldn’t expect our politics to improve either.

There is a lot that is destructive and toxic in American public life right now. No wonder everyone is unhappy, most people vote for the lesser of two evils (if they feel motivated to vote at all), and we continue to bounce back and forth between unpopular and failed administrations.

Breaking this sad status quo will require talented, transformational candidates. Nothing found on the ballot today.

Bad policies and bad ideas cannot be fixed by bad candidates. But in this election we will only have to choose from bad candidates.