No One Knows How the Election Will Play Out

The last three weeks have been rough for those of us who would like to see this American experiment continue. There was a crushing news cycle about Joe Biden’s bad debate, with a parade of pundits telling us the president can’t win. These commentators—who, I observed, seemed to skew white and male—spoke definitively in columns and cable news hits, as if the results of November’s election were written in stone. Of course, a lot of pundits got it wrong in 2016 by writing off Donald Trump’s chances—and even in this presidential election cycle, some dismissed the former president’s ability to mount a political comeback after the 2022 midterms and a lackluster rollout.

Then things got really scary this weekend, when a gunman attempted to assassinate Trump at a Pennsylvania rally. Almost immediately, Republican lawmakers, including Trump VP contenders J.D. Vance and Tim Scott, seized on the opportunity to blame Democrats and the media for the shooting. “The Republican District Attorney in Butler County, PA, should immediately file charges against Joseph R. Biden for inciting an assassination,” Representative Mike Collins of Georgia wrote on X. Senator Rick Scott of Florida called the shooting an “assassination attempt by a madman inspired by the rhetoric of the radical left.” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, also of Georgia, wrote, “The Democrats and the media are to blame for every drop of blood spilled today.”

All of this incendiary rhetoric came before authorities had even identified the suspected shooter as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was killed on the scene. It also came well before outlets revealed that Crooks was a registered Republican—and that he once gave a small donation to a Democratic-leaning group. Meanwhile, investigators are still trying to determine a motive.

In other words, before any details were clear, Republicans expressed certainty that Democrats and the media were responsible—yet another reminder of how Democrats and Republicans hold themselves to radically different standards. “As always,” my friend and Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley pointed out in an essay for Zeteo, “the rules are different for Democrats than they are for Republicans. Republicans have directed incendiary rhetoric at former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for years. When Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi’s 82-year-old husband, was beaten on the head with a hammer by a far-right extremist, it was a source of amusement and fun for some Republicans, including Trump himself.” Trump allies pushed wild conspiracy theories. Then and now, democratic norms continue to be observed only by one political party.

While it’s clearly unfair to blame the media for stoking Saturday’s shooting, as Republicans have so breathlessly done, lazy punditry can also be corrosive to our political discourse. One of the biggest problems of this dark, weird, and horrible news cycle has been its endless stream of hot takes, even among relatively liberal voices. Just as we were told Biden couldn’t win because he was old and bungled a debate in June, we are now being told that the shooting has emboldened Republicans, rendering Trump’s victory a near-certainty.

“Blood turns to martyrdom as Republicans rally around Trump,” noted Politico. “The incident served to reinforce one of the pillars of Trump’s image: Strength.” Strategist and former Republican Steve Schmidt echoed the same line of reasoning, writing, “The political consequences of this assassination attempt will be immense, and they will benefit Donald Trump, who just responded to being shot in the exact same way that Teddy Roosevelt did.” To Politico, I would say that we may want to pump the brakes on such doomsaying, since we’re still in July. And to Schmidt, I would note that (1) the election to which he’s referring took place 112 years ago, and (2) Roosevelt ultimately lost that year to Woodrow Wilson.

Perhaps the worst hot take came not from any pundit or editorial board, but an unnamed senior House Democrat who told Axios that “we’ve all resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency.” (There is no better way to lose an election—one in which you are statistically tied, boast an incumbent with a booming economy, and are running against a guy who wants to be a “dictator”—than to wave the white flag four months out.)

Assassination attempts have been a terrible phenomenon in American politics—and they should have no place in it. But they also bear no immediate predictive power among political pundits: An attempt does not in fact make a person president again. Yes, Ronald Reagan went on to win a landslide reelection in 1984, three years after being shot, but there wasn’t any clear benefit to the candidacies of Teddy Roosevelt and Gerald Ford (who lost to Jimmy Carter in 1976 after two attempts on his life).

I don’t know what’s going to happen in November; no one knows what’s going to happen in November. After all, we are at an existential moment for our democracy, for climate change, for women’s rights. And while polls are fine indicators of trends, they can drive narratives that ultimately are proven wrong. The electoral landscape may surprise you in November—and, if anything, the events of the past several weeks have shown that there are probably a lot more twists and turns in store.