'Existential Choice': I’ve Covered Presidential Elections for Decades. The Stakes of This One Couldn’t Be Higher
Donald Trump may be an unserious man but he is a serious threat to the democratic future of the United States.
American voters next week face a decision so momentous that it almost seems unreal. I can hardly believe it myself.
Pre-election polls show that only millimeters separate the standing of Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, the Democratic and Republican candidates for the White House. But the difference in potential outcomes, for the future of the United States and the world, spans the continent – so vast it could determine whether our 250-year experiment in democratic self-government continues at all.
It’s a night-and-day contrast from anything I’ve seen in a half-century of watching and covering presidential politics. Nothing before even comes close.
As an adolescent, I watched my father, a Washington Post reporter, cover the turbulent 1968 race between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, having earlier borne witness to the assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. As a Wall Street Journal reporter, I covered the 2000 battle between George W. Bush and Al Gore eventually decided by 537 votes in a single state. Contentious as they were, neither of those choices, pitting candidates with deep and even familial roots in the American system of government, posed an existential choice for the United States.
This one does.
That’s not because of the Democratic candidate. With popular vote victories in seven of the last eight presidential elections, Democrats have become America’s normal governing party.
Harris is a normal Democrat who favors what normal 21st-century Democrats favor. That includes modestly higher taxes on high-income Americans to finance more social benefits for those in need, protection of healthcare and retirement programs, economic policies to encourage full employment and higher wages, and a foreign policy that relies on alliances with other free nations to defend our national security from autocratic adversaries.
She has not articulated major differences from President Joe Biden because there aren’t major differences. He’s a normal Democrat, too, who has governed seriously, competently, and effectively.
The existential choice arises from the Republican Party’s decades-long descent from a dominant national majority, winning repeated presidential landslides, to an embittered, aggrieved minority that won’t adapt to the modern world. Its growing extremism allowed its capture by a dark, deeply un-American leader whose own former top aide calls him a fascist.