It seems to me that, every four years, the world is inundated by the notion that the upcoming US presidential election is somehow the most important election that will shape the future of the nation and the world.
This can only be true if each successive election is more and more important as time goes by. Which seems unlikely to me. At some point will we ever be able to agree that ‘y’know, this election probably isn’t as crucial as the last few’?
Yep, we’ve heard it since 2004. At some point the boy-crying-wolf effect is going to hit home.
That being said, some elections are indeed, objectively, more important than others - for instance, the same Democrats who predicted horror and ruin if Romney won in 2012 probably now think he wouldn’t have been half as bad as Trump, and in fact might have made a decent-OK president. So yes, 2020 is more important than 2012.
Politics IS uglier today than before. Both sides ARE more diehard and embittered than before. The stakes ARE worse for the losing side than before. So today isn’t 2004 or 2000 anymore.
But that doesn’t change the fact that all these boys-crying-wolf need some consequences for playing this Chicken Little hype year in and year out.
I dont remember hearing that for GWB, nor for Bill, nor for HW, nor for Ronnie. 1996 is particular was a snooze-fest. So was Ronnies second term.
But this one is more important than any since 1860.
1976: moderately important, to underline that the behavior of Nixon while in office was going to have consequences
1980: it had significant impact after the fact but at the time, two candidates with very different flaws. One was an idealistic but occasionally abrasive guy who didn’t know how to do inside deals, the other was a slick Hollywood-produced image of dubious real substance.
1984: Umm, no. The Democratic party was running Carter’s VP, for no discernable reasons other than it was his turn.
1988: Not really. Don’t get me wrong, I was very unhappy with the Republicans by this point and wanted to see them ousted, but I remember acid-tripping on election day and realizing that George H W Bush wasn’t going to destroy the country. He held a lot of policy beliefs I didn’t agree with but he was a responsible politician.
1992: Somewhat. Mostly because the Republicans had come to think of Carter’s one term as an anomaly, caused by Nixon’s arrogant lawbreaking and nothing else, and they were thinking of the White House as permanently their own. Since Johnson they’d had it for Nixon’s + Ford’s 8 years, missed Carter’s 4, then for Reagan’s 8 and Bush’s 4-so-far. But once again, Bush wasn’t evil incarnate or anything.
1996: Somewhat. Mostly because the Republicans had decided that by golly yeah, the White House naturally belonged to them, and had thrown everything including a misbegotten impeachment. But Dole, too, would not have been a menace or anything, it was more that the Republican brand was getting to be worrisome.
2000: Meh. G. W. Bush wanted to withdraw the US from the national stage (and quit firing cruise missiles to hit some camel in the ass), bit of a nonintellectual jerk, but although there were policy issues at stake it didn’t seem at the time to be world-changing.
2004: Oh God yeah. Bush had invaded a country for no good reason and we had to reject that by rejecting him. It was important. He hadn’t just invaded Iraq on pretext, he’d orchestrated it very badly and squandered international good will and was incompetent and needed to be ousted.
2008: Important, to try to undo the damages done by 8 years of Bush. And get someone other than a white male in office, finally.
2012: Meh. Romney didn’t warm me up, but, like George H. W. Bush, was an adult and would not be a menace in office or anything. It didn’t seem likely to happen—Obama was in the lead throughout.
2016: Oh my fucking God. Serious shit. We absolutely can’t elect that knuckle-dragging crass moron. And we can put someone other than a male in office, finally. And she’s very competent and able to do the inside deals thingie.
2020: Oh my fucking God squared to the nth power. Let’s have a referendum on whether there should continue to be a US in any meaningful sense?
I’ve pondered this question before, and 1976 seems like it was probably not a very important one. IMHO this country would be probably be in about the same place we are now had Ford won. My guess is that the list of subsequent presidents and SCOTUS justices would probably be unchanged.
https://www.courant.com/opinion/editorials/hc-ed-presidential-endorsement-2020-20201018-rqapfry7zvejdesonlcwzpwu7a-story.html You probably think you can vote for Donald Trump but not support racism; here’s why you’re wrong:
But Trump’s racism isn’t the same, not even close. The potential damage he could do to the fabric of our nation is profound. So, his candidacy raises a question: Can you really support Trump without supporting the racism that permeates his administration?..So, again, you might be saying to yourself: That’s campaign rhetoric. That’s not who I am. President Trump is doing what white politicians have always done; the election will end, and we will move on. Supporting Trump doesn’t mean I am condoning or facilitating racism.
The difference now, in 2020, is that Donald Trump doesn’t just exploit racism, he revels in it. Trump wears his whiteness like a badge of honor and plays his affinity for groups like the Proud Boys and other agents of racial hatred for applause. Trump doesn’t simply mine the racial divide for political advantage, he treats it like a worldview to be celebrated and adored.
To be clear, I don’t mean ‘in retrospect, which elections were less important’, what I’m wondering is: has any election not been called ‘the most important’ at the time of the election?
For my own context, I’m barely 30, so I have only been paying attention to US elections since about 2004.
I don’t recall any being described that way.
Generally when a Prez cruises to his second term. It is business as usual.
Let us just hope it isnt this time.
“2000 is the most important election in our history.”
“The coming (2004) presidential election may be the most important in generations.”
Prager: “2010 is the most important election since the Civil War.”
“Michael Barone declares 2012 the most important election in ‘everyone’s lifetime.’”
Obama: 2018 midterms may be “the most important election of my lifetime.”
If the definition of ‘recent’ is ‘within the last four years’ then every presidential election is the most important in recent history. Not all that many people have a sense of history longer than that.
I’ve heard someone push that back another 20 years, to 1980. I wasn’t paying attention.
NYT has a pretty good list (with references)
The Most Important Article in Our History - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
Modhat: Moved to P&E from IMHO.
Certainly. This one is not The Most Important Election in our Lifetimes. The last one was.
If Ford won in 1976 there probably would never have been a Reagan presidency.
Ford consolidates the Republican Party as a moderate centre-right party in his image rather than the further rightward turn they made in opposition to Carter on economics and especially social culture. Ford and his wife Betty were pro-choice republicans. The religious right grew as anti-Carter. Reagan wins the nomination as a consequence of what was bubbling up.
1969-1980 being all Republican in the White House with Nixon and Ford would likely have led to a Democrat winning the White House in 1980 and/or Reagan being seen as too old and extreme to run as Ford’s successor rather than Carter’s challenger.
But what if it’s true?
In 2000, nobody was arguing that it was the most important election in history because we were living in one of the longest periods of peace and prosperity, and we knew it. Fun times, those years. I remember when you could go through airport rent-a-cop security checkpoints with some guy who looked like he was working his way part time through community college occasionally checking your computer bag and walk to an airport gate with family and friends.
Between then and now, we’ve had 9/11, a massive foreign war based on lies, two massive recessions, an election tainted with foreign involvement, and a president who is authoritarian and who almost certainly operates as a Russian asset. It’s hard to see how the elections since haven’t become the most important in generations. If you were old enough to remember daily living during the depression and WWII clearly, that would make you about 90 years old. For most people younger than that, it’s hard to see how these are not the most important elections in their entire lives.
Sure, it could be true. But that’s not what the OP is asking. The OP, as he himself said, was only asking if “this is the most important election” was said about prior elections. He wasn’t asking for an objective assessment of whether such elections actually were the most vital or not, he just wanted to know if it was said.
And yes, it was said.
This one. The 2020 election is, by no means, the most important election of recent history. That election was in 2016 and America blew it. We are suffering the consequences of that now and we, and the rest of the world, will continue to suffer from them for decades.
I’ve been voting since 1960 and there was never before a feeling of doom if the “wrong” candidate won. Even in 2016, I have to say. I mean we knew that Trump was bad, but no idea how bad. In 1968, we knew that Nixon was a turd, but that we would survive it. Looking back, I think Reagan was a real turning point. It was when labor unions started to lose power and all the economic increases started going to the 1%, but that is mainly in retrospect.
Maybe this election is the most important of our lifetime and we just don’t know it yet. Or maybe it was Bush v. Gore. This article is interesting in any event. The most important election is always now, from Bush vs. Gore to Trump vs. Biden - Vox