Yuval Levin writes at National Review Online to place close electoral contests in perspective.
The sense that things are on a knife’s edge misleads us into heightening our perception of the stakes. And political junkies (especially on the right) often approach close elections with a great deal of unfounded confidence in the outcome, so that if things don’t go their way they can fall into shock and disbelief — and of course also conspiracism. We saw this with many Democrats in 2016 and, in a more far-reaching and dangerous way, with many Republicans in 2020 — including the sitting president.
This conspiracism takes different forms in the more elitist and the more populist of our parties at any given time. The insider party, which at this point means the Democrats, will incline to argue if they lose that organized interlopers invaded the system and disrupted it. The outsider party, the Republicans, will incline to argue that the people in charge of the system and of other key institutions corrupted the outcome to their ends. But it’s worth seeing that both are pretty unlikely at any meaningful scale, neither has actually happened on any such scale in recent memory, and it’s only even possible to think this way because of how close the election is.
In fact, that very closeness should remind us that the question being put to voters is a serious one in the eyes of most Americans, so that neither outcome should be dismissed as so outlandish that it is only possible through fraud. And neither should drive us to the kind of bitterness and cynicism that would lead us to reject the motives of either party’s voters — whatever we might think of their candidates. …
… The very vast majority of the people voting for both candidates in this presidential election are making their choices seriously and in the public interest. They may not love the candidate they’re voting for, but under the circumstances they think that person should be president. They may be wrong, but they are not stupid, cynical, malevolent, or deluded.
