A Pundit's Prayer for Election Day 2024

Please let my job be less interesting from here on in.

Photo by Parker Johnson on Unsplash

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has made no secret of the author’s political preferences for this election day. If it was ranked-choice voting, my rank-order for president would be:

1. Kamala Harris;

2. An inanimate carbon rod;

3. Fifty feet of crap;

4. Another hundred and fifty feet of crap;

5. Donald J. Trump;

6. A tie between Jill Stein and Cornell West.

A lot of this has to do with the objective awfulness of Donald Trump. He was an awful president and he has the temperament of a petulant toddler. His proposed policies this time around would lead to economic catastrophe. In recent weeks both his mental acuity and his fascist tendencies have managed to get worse, which I wouldn’t have believed was possible back in 2015. Trump’s remaining set of staffers are the bottom of the bottom of the barrel. The guy sucks is what I’m saying here.

A lot of it also has to do with Kamala Harris. I do not agree with all of her policy ideas, but they have the advantage of not scaring the living crap out of me even when I disagree. I have always placed a great deal of weight on foreign policy when voting. On that front Harris outclasses Trump and it’s not close. She is the first Democrat in a good long while to stop outbidding Trump on trade protectionism, which is good. Her foreign policy background is robust, and her statements on global affairs during the campaign have been sharp. Plus I think the country has trended in a positive direction over the past few years, and I would like to see that trend continue.¹

So I am pretty close to where John Oliver is right now:

With all that said, however, I always analyze elections as a political scientist as well as a U.S. citizen. And as someone who has been paid to opine about the state of American politics, this has been an exciting but exhausting campaign cycle. And I would like to be… not exhausted for the first time in nine years.

So on this Election Day, let me offer something of a pundit’s prayer for what we will learn over the next 48 hours:

Dear Lord, please let it be an election night in which the winner is decided early. And please let the victory be clear cut for everyone to see.

Please let there be no violence when the race is called.

Please let the transition of power be as smooth and boring as possible.

Please grant me the strength to wade through the rivers of bullshit commentary that so many are going to deliver over the next week.

Please, dear Lord, do not judge me too harshly for the worst of my punditry, and know that the best of my punditry has more to do with dumb luck than anything else.

Please let the more normal, more boring candidate win, and please make American politics dull again.

Please stop having the United States be at the epicenter of geopolitical risk.

Amen.

Everyone go vote!

1. It should also be noted that Harris has run an excellent campaign. A lot of political observers have badly underestimated her politicking skills.