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Matthew Gagnon of Yarmouth is the chief executive officer of the Maine Policy Institute, a free market policy think tank based in Portland. A Hampden native, he previously served as a senior strategist for the Republican Governors Association in Washington, D.C.
It is unpopular to say this now, but the world is not going to end because your candidate didn’t win Tuesday night.
I actually wrote two different versions of this column: one in the event that Donald Trump won and one in the event that Kamala Harris won. I know that I’m almost entirely alone on this, but I wasn’t even remotely apprehensive about who would and would not win. If Trump won, my life would go on and I would be fine, and if Harris won, my life would go on and I would be fine.
Why do I think that? Experience, for one.
Any time there is a major political win for one side or the other, particularly in the modern era, chances are that the pendulum will soon swing in the other direction, and the American voting public will reverse things sooner rather than later. In other words, if you don’t like who won a race and think they’re bad for the country, just wait a little while, and that group will probably lose (often lose big), and your favorite candidate or party will win.
In 1972, Richard Nixon won a crushing victory in that year’s presidential race, winning 49 states, and reaching an unheard of 60 percent share of the popular vote. Two years later as the Watergate scandal dragged down Republicans everywhere, the Democrats roared back by flipping almost 50 seats in Congress. Two years after that, Jimmy Carter won the presidency.
Bill Clinton and the Democrats, after 12 years of political domination by Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush charted a new path — a third way, as he called it — and assembled a powerful political coalition that sent him to the White House in 1992 in a landslide of his own.
Yet it was only two years in 1994 later that the Republicans were able to win a historic victory in Congress, which is still to this day called the “Republican Revolution.”
George W. Bush won a bruising and controversial presidential race in 2000, and then in 2004 was able to strengthen his position by winning the popular vote and a fairly comfortable Electoral College win, while also taking with him huge majorities in both houses of Congress. At the time, if felt like everyone was a Republican and Democrats would have a hard time ever winning again.
Except they did only two years later, as Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats crushed the Republicans everywhere, retaking Congress.
I could go on listing other examples. Barack Obama won a huge victory in 2008, and in 2010 the Tea Party wave clawed back power for Republicans all across the country. Donald Trump won a shocking victory in 2016, and in 2018 the anti-Trump sentiment across the country gave Pelosi the U.S. House gavel once again.
But the point isn’t just that the pendulum swings, and your favored candidates will win again sooner than you think. It is that the “other side” being in control is not going to be as bad as you have convinced yourself that it will be.
I’m not suggesting you shouldn’t care about issues, have your preferences, and vote accordingly. I’m not asking you to pretend that “they’re all the same” when you think that they aren’t.
What I am suggesting is that you recognize that the American system of government, for all its faults and flaws, is built in such a way that permanent, radical change is very difficult to accomplish, and that the damage that the “wrong people” can do is much less than you think it is.
In the leadup to this year’s presidential race, both Democrats and Republicans had catastrophized things to an absurd level. “This is the most important election of my lifetime,” a phrase that is uttered literally every single election cycle, was accompanied by a real belief that if the wrong person won, the country was finished.
Part of that belief comes from a disturbing reality where half of Americans actively believe that people on the other side of the aisle are “actually evil.” If you really believe that, it is easy to also believe that if evil won, that everything is over.
We all need to step back from the ledge, and quick. We have to start recognizing that our tendency to overreact to everything, especially politics, is the very reason our political culture has become so toxic.
Donald Trump won Tuesday night, and I believe everything is going to be OK. It would’ve been OK, too, if Kamala Harris had won. Let this be a moment for us to take a breath and try to abandon the feelings of constant crisis that constantly plague us.