For a lot of candidates, winning is a secondary consideration. That’s bad for American politics.
For a lot of candidates, winning is a secondary consideration. That’s bad for American politics.
T he day after the 2006 midterm elections, a small group of advisers gathered on the north side of Chicago to plan a potential presidential run by a young U.S. senator named Barack Obama. During the meeting, the senator’s wife, Michelle, expressed concern about how grueling the race promised to be, at one point asking if Barack could have Sundays off.
Obama’s nonplussed future campaign manager, David Plouffe, quickly disabused the future first couple of that notion. “You have two choices,” Plouffe said. “You can stay in the Senate, enjoy your weekends at home, take regular vacations, and have a lovely time with your family. Or you can run for president, have your whole life poked at and pried into, almost never see your family, travel incessantly, bang your tin cup for donations like some street-corner beggar, lead a lonely, miserable life.”
Since 2008, the number of candidates choosing to live that “miserable life” has increased, primarily because the incentives for running a presidential campaign have completely changed.
For one thing, winning is now a secondary consideration. The most important currency in America is attention, and there is no better way of garnering it than pretending to run for the nation’s highest office.
Just look at the recent blockchain of buffoonery that has befallen American politics over the past two cycles. The 2016 Republican presidential primary saw 17 candidates, so widening the field that a fringe candidate managed to walk right through and swipe the nomination. (The 2016 race was also full of off-ballot candidates with colorful names, the presence of one of whom gifted us the greatest polling question of all time: “Do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of Deez Nuts?”)
Not to be outdone in 2020, Democrats saw no fewer than 29 candidates announce presidential campaigns to take down Trump. The race was so ludicrous, it featured Oprah Winfrey’s spiritual adviser, a congressman who had a relationship with a promiscuous Chinese spy, a senator who spent years lying about her Native American ancestry, and most embarrassing of all, Beto O’Rourke.
Any system that produces Donald Trump and Joe Biden as successive presidents (and has them favored to meet again in 2024) has to be irreparably broken. But Republicans appear unwilling to learn any lessons in 2024, as six candidates have announced, with probably another eight to ten waiting in the wings.
Among the cabal of future non-presidents is millionaire biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, whom you almost certainly had not heard of before he started running his pretend campaign. Ramaswamy, who one assumes must be a serious person given his financial success, has learned to speak Republican by using Donald Trump as his personal Duolingo. For instance, in a recent speech to the NRA, Ramaswamy suggested that the solution to staving off a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be to open an NRA chapter in the country and give every family there an AR-15 firearm.
Ramaswamy — who is definitely not just a Republican Andrew Yang, no sir — speaks only in anti-woke bromides culled during the MAGA era. His public comments are simply a bouillabaisse of empty catchphrases meant to move books. In his announcement of his candidacy, for instance, he accused conservatives of “trying to stamp out the poison” of wokeness “without actually addressing the real problem.” The solution, he advised, is to “fill that identity void with a vision of American national identity that runs so deep, that it dilutes the secular agendas to irrelevance.”
Um . . . got it?
And, of course, there is talk-show host Larry Elder, who has graduated from being an unserious candidate for governor of California to being an unserious candidate for president. Does he believe that national politics has been afflicted with a yearslong epidemic of thoughtful, sober debate for which he has the cure?
Get out there, Larry! Those election results aren’t going to deny themselves!
And what awaits at the end of the journey, after you inevitably exit the race and your remaining competitors absorb your 3 percent of voters? If you’re part of the right demographic, maybe you get to vault from being the mayor of a middle-sized city in Indiana to heading up a federal department with lax paternity-leave policies. Or you get to spend your time as vice president confirming why members of your own party thought so little of you during the primaries.
Or maybe you just move on and pretend the wholesale rejection of what you had to offer voters never happened. Gone are the days when a failed presidential campaign was followed by despondency and deep soul-searching. Now, running a losing a campaign can be a stepping stone to another campaign, to your own cable-news show, or to a fruitful life in politics for your children. (Or if you’re Mike Huckabee, all three!)
And then, if all else fails, you just pretend you won.
On top of all this, running for president is no longer the exhausting grind it once was for candidates. Sure, there is some travel involved, but candidates of varying plausibilities can now micro-target voters in all the crucial states without ever leaving the East Coast. YouTube video messages can be sent to farmers in Wisconsin, office workers in suburban Atlanta, and garbage collectors in Pittsburgh with the push of a button. If you want to denigrate the looks of your opponent’s wife, for instance, there is no need to travel to an Iowa corn roast; you can just fire up Twitter!
In fact, the relative ease of running may have actually made the difference in 2020; Joe Biden ran an almost entirely virtual campaign, saving his elderly body both the risk of Covid-19 and the day-to-day wear of travel. The Democratic National Convention, slated for Milwaukee, was held entirely online, saving the Democrats money and time.
So how do we make sure candidates aren’t using their presidential campaigns to build their public brand à la failed contestants on The Bachelor(ette)?
For one, if there were living, breathing political parties in America, they would modernize the primary process to weed out the pretenders early in the process. I have previously suggested a five-week, NCAA Tournament–style system in which ten states hold their primaries every week. The first week, the field is cut to five, eliminating all the attention-seekers who would otherwise cling to the race like toilet paper stuck to a shoe. Then every week after that, the candidate getting the least number of votes from the ten states voting that week gets eliminated. Finally, in the last week, it comes down to a national championship of partisan politics, winner takes all.
Further, it makes sense for the candidates to have more skin in the game. The parties should institute a formal rule that if you run for president and lose, you must relinquish the office you already hold. Or in the case of Ramaswamy, you must be barred from running for any political office as a Republican for ten years. (Or, if parties can’t enforce such an edict, at least withhold any party support during the candidate’s term of banishment.)
If you’re going to lose, it has to hurt.
And for the candidates who are just rich guys running as a vanity project, make them pay to run. Entry fee to the race is $2 million from your personal funds; if you lose, then that money goes to the winning candidate. Show us you are serious about your candidacy — invest as much personal money in running to be the leader of the free world as you would in starting a single Applebee’s franchise.
For the attention-hungry, running a phony campaign suddenly purchases you all the gravitas you couldn’t earn on your own. But with the growth of wannabe-influencer candidates, it is now harder to get tickets to a Taylor Swift concert than it is to enter the presidential race. And it is distorting the options voters have, ultimately determining who earns party nominations.
Until this situation is fixed, the best thing about American politics — that anyone can run for president — will also be the worst thing about American politics: that anyone can run for president.