The day after every midterm congressional election, conventional wisdom turns to “the presidential campaign starts today.”

In reality, the 2024 presidential campaign has been simmering for quite some time already, with plausible contenders out campaigning for co-partisans, giving “policy speeches” in Iowa and New Hampshire, and trying to raise their national profiles.

I could even make a case that US president Joe Biden has been continuously running for president for 50 years now, and Donald Trump (who, as I write this, is expected to announce for 2024 any minute) for nearly 25.

Biden didn’t formally throw his hat in the Democratic Party’s nomination ring until 1988, but he clearly had the gleam in his eye and was laying the groundwork by the time he entered the Senate in 1973.

Trump “explored” seeking the Reform Party’s 2000 presidential nomination, but dropped out when he realized Pat Buchanan would easily best him … and spent the next 15 years trying to turn himself into Pat Buchanan 2.0 before going all-in.

California governor Gavin Newsom and Florida governor Ron DeSantis are clearly ramping up and watching for an opening to jump in if Biden or Trump retire from the field or look beatable.

And other, darker horses have their eye on the 2028/2032 ball while holding out hope for earlier fumbles they might recover and run into the Oval Office end zone.

Exhausting, isn’t it?

It’s always been this way, but it didn’t used to be this way.

That is, up-and-coming politicians have always seen the presidency in their futures … but until the 20th century they mostly didn’t “campaign” for it in the way they do today.

At one time, prospective presidents denied interest, “reluctantly accepted” their parties’ nominations, and let their supporters do the fighting for them in the nation’s newspapers and debate halls.

In 1896, Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan (one of the first “modern” campaigners) barnstormed around the country by train, delivering more than 600 stump speeches, while Republican nominee William McKinley ran a “front porch” campaign from home, addressing hundreds of thousands of supporters at his house. McKinley won.

These days, we spend two solid years out of every four listening to (or trying to tune out) a herd of hucksters telling us why they or the person they support should be elected president. And it’s always — always! — “the most important election in history.”

And the tuning out gets more and more difficult. You can’t turn on the TV or radio without a dose of Presidential Election Theater. The roadways are awash with signs and bumper stickers. Email inboxes overflow with “send me/us $3 to beat [insert opponent here].”

Why? Because we reward that behavior with our money, our votes, and most of all with our attention.

Maybe we should start punishing it instead, by sending campaign emails to spam and changing the channel when Presidential Election Theater comes on.

If we stop treating every election like it really is “the most important election in history,” maybe we’ll get better candidates, with better ideas, more calmly and persuasively stated.

But I doubt it.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Here we go again. Yet another “third party” candidate has “spoiled” “major party” candidates’ victory party plans by “stealing” votes that rightfully belong to … well, someone else.

Libertarian Chase Oliver garnered a little more than 2% of the vote in Georgia’s US Senate race. His efforts prevented either incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock or Republican challenger Herschel Walker from winning the election with a majority. Georgia’s election laws require such a majority, so now the election goes to a Warnock-Walker runoff.

That’s how democracy works, at least in Georgia. And every time a “major party” candidate loses an election or is forced into a runoff by a Libertarian, Green, or other third party or independent candidate, a festival of tears and butt-hurt ensues.

This is only a “problem” for those who believe that votes inherently “belong” to one of the two “major” parties and their candidates, and that those pesky third party and independent contenders are “stealing” votes from one or the other.

Votes don’t belong to parties or candidates. They belong to voters.

Georgia’s voters didn’t (and don’t) owe their votes to Raphael Warnock or Herschel Walker. It’s a candidate’s job to EARN those votes, and one in 50 decided, for whatever reason, that they hadn’t done so and Chase Oliver had.

To the extent that “spoiling” is a “problem,” there’s an easy solution — a solution which Mr. Oliver himself supports. That solution is Ranked Choice Voting.

If Georgia used RCV, voters would have been able to choose more than one candidate: A first choice, a second choice, and so on.

If no candidate had received a majority of first-choice votes, the second-choice votes of the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes would have been automatically added to the other contenders’ totals, until someone received a majority — an “instant runoff” instead of yet another (expensive to both campaigns and taxpayers) campaign cycle.

Why do Republicans and Democrats hate Ranked Choice Voting?

Because even if it didn’t cost them many elections, they’d be embarrassed by the public revelation that far more than 2% of voters prefer alternatives to fear-based voting for “lesser evil” major party players.

Our “two-party system” is built on the lie that two parties can and do represent all of us. And the “major party”  liars, as liars will do, attempt to shift blame to the “spoilers” who expose them.

As Oliver tells Reason magazine, “you can’t spoil what’s already rotten.”

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

In August, Congress passed and president Joe Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act, a $280 billion corporate welfare bill for US semiconductor manufacturers.

In October, the Biden administration added new restrictions on  semiconductor exports to China, banning not just sales of semiconductors, but of the tools to make them — including by and to companies located in neither the US nor China.

All of this activity is essentially an extension of Donald “Tariff Man” Trump’s trade war with China, waged for the purpose of “protecting” Big Business from foreign competition at the expense of American consumers.

That’s not how its promoters put it, of course. Advocates of “industrial policy” say they just want to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US, reduce American dependence on imports, and of course guard our “national security” from an ever-growing list of Enemies of the Week.

But the two ways of putting it amount to the same thing.

Contrary to what you may have heard from advocates of “industrial policy,” the US manufactures more stuff now than it ever has (apart from the same worldwide dip during the COVID-19 pandemic) — more than half again as much by value than it did 25 years ago.

Yes, there are fewer manufacturing JOBS … but that’s a good thing, not a bad thing.

The less labor required to manufacture a thing, the cheaper it is to make that thing and the more people can afford that thing. More efficient, less labor-intensive manufacturing leaves workers free to put their labor into areas where it offers a greater return — and with historically low unemployment levels, why shouldn’t they?

Instead of welding auto frames or making shoes, more Americans are providing healthcare, information technology services, and other things we need at least as much as cars and shoes.

As for dependence on imports, such dependence promotes peace and friendship between countries. People who need and value each other’s products and services don’t fight, they trade. The recent downturn in US-China military relations is not mere coincidence.

That’s not to say protectionism doesn’t have beneficiaries. It certainly does.

Protectionism’s beneficiaries are politically connected business interests who want to charge you $500 for a laptop computer and so ask the government to keep you from buying a competing Chinese model for $350. And, of course, the politicians who give those business cronies what they want.

American consumers don’t benefit. We pay. Every “new American job” created by protectionist policies costs means that every American consumer — including the workers in those  “new jobs” — pays more for the products or services involved.

Advocates of “industrial policy” want you to believe their ideas make you better off. Unless you’re a large stockholder in a  “protected” corporation, they’re lying to you.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY