It’s Time to End the Election Wishcasting

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After Super Tuesday, all of the pointless wishing for a lightning strike to change the 2024 race should end: The contest is once again an existential test of American democracy.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• The Houthis are very, very pleased.
• The Alabama embryo opinion is about more than Christian nationalism.
• The science behind Ozempic was wrong.

Facing the World as It Is

In previous and more normal elections, Super Tuesday was a big deal. With so many states holding primaries and caucuses, the results would clarify who would likely advance to the general election in the fall. Sometimes, front-runners fell behind, underdogs raced to the front of the pack, or a surprise changed the course of the race. Fluke results from one-off contests in Iowa or New Hampshire were quickly swept away in a broader test of popularity.

Such clarity was the whole point of Super Tuesday. As dramatic and fascinating as it was to have messy floor fights and multiple ballots at the conventions, by the 1980s, both parties wanted less drama and smoother, glossier coronations of a beloved nominee. The primaries soon took the place of arm-wrestling matches in classic, smoke-filled rooms. (As an occasional cigar smoker who thinks primaries are now dysfunctional, I would like to go back to those rooms, but that’s a discussion for another day.)

Tonight, there will be almost no tension at all. Donald Trump will emerge as the numerically prohibitive front-runner for the Republican nomination; President Joe Biden will cruise to a Democratic renomination, as incumbents almost always do. We know the result already: 2024 will feature Biden versus Trump, an ordinary career politician facing off, one more time, against a would-be dictator.

No one needed Super Tuesday to predict the shape of the fall general election. Biden is an incumbent running on a good record—despite what Republicans think, Biden’s had as consequential and solid a first term as any president since Ronald Reagan—and there was virtually no chance his party was going to deny him renomination, because no sensible party would do that with a successful first-term president. (Even Jimmy Carter eventually swatted away the supposedly indestructible Ted Kennedy in 1980.)

Trump was the Republican favorite from the moment former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy went to Mar-a-Lago in 2021 to rehabilitate Trump’s standing in the GOP. His nomination was inevitable the night most of his primary opponents raised their hand on a debate stage—one from which he was absent—and said they’d vote for him if he beat them, even if he was convicted in a court of law. Even Nikki Haley is still dithering to this very moment about whether she’d support a man who calls her “Birdbrain” and whom she has passionately argued is unfit for office.

And yet, for months now, many voters, including both Democrats and dissident Republicans, have engaged in childlike wishcasting about how the 2024 election might be different.

Some of them put their hopes in the courts, longing in vain for Trump to be disqualified from the ballot or for Special Counsel Jack Smith to clap Trump in irons before Election Day. The idea that Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas—who are now behaving as right-wing activists from the bench—would join hands with three Trump appointees to stop Trump was always some industrial-strength psychedelia.

The decision to leave Trump on state ballots seems (at least to me, as a non-lawyer) sensible enough, which is probably why all nine justices affirmed it. But the Court’s conservative majority is clearly playing games. If hurrying helps Trump, they move with alacrity: They decided the Colorado ballot case in 25 days. If dawdling helps Trump, they slow down: The presidential-immunity case (a crackpot theory they should not have even taken up) won’t be heard until late April. The conservative effort to seize the Court by hook or by crook—one of Mitch McConnell’s greatest and most shameful legacies—has paid off just when Trump needed it most.

Others entertained the fantasy that a Republican could knock out Trump in a primary. You may remember Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who was supposed to arrive in the primaries in a flash of light that would turn Trump’s campaign to ash and leave nothing of the former president’s candidacy but a chalk outline on a sidewalk. Instead, DeSantis folded early, and I assume it is only a matter of time before he appears on a stage shaking Trump’s hand in the name of “supporting the nominee.”

Meanwhile, Democrats have been panicking for at least a year about Joe Biden, because Biden is old. As a former Republican, I find this astonishing; if you stripped Biden’s name off his record and handed it to a voter, he’d be as formidable a candidate as either party could field. But we live in a time of vibes and optics: Biden sounds old, he walks like an older man, and his occasional gaffes and mistakes are more numerous than they used to be. (Trump seems younger because he bellows and gyrates as he howls red-faced into microphones at rallies; despite the fact that much of what he says is slurred nonsense and autocratic threats, he seems more vital and active.)

Democrats have therefore plunged into their own silly wishcasting. Perhaps some magical third-party centrist will emerge from the clouds and unite the country. Why, it could be … Joe Manchin! Or a Democratic candidate will emerge to push both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris out of the picture—maybe someone like Dean Phillips! (Phillips was outperformed in the Michigan primary by the self-help writer Marianne Williamson, who at the time had already suspended her campaign.) Perhaps a reenergized left could offer a new face—how about Cornel West? What if we change the Electoral College? (This last one is a perennial favorite on social media). And of course, there’s always Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who initially ran as a Democrat but whose heart is with conspiracy theorists everywhere.

Much of this eyes-squeezed-tight wishing is linked to the peculiar American belief that presidents are godlike creatures who can make things better by fiat. Too many voters, when they encounter difficulties, create in their mind a superhero president who, if elected, will bring down the price of eggs, make the Russians go home, and end the war and suffering in Gaza. And if the current candidates are too flawed to fit that bill, Americans design one in their head.

All of this wishcasting has to end. The past year has birthed a lot of political nonsense—have I mentioned Cornel West?—but the time for such foolishness is over. Barring an act of God, or the Fickle Finger of Fate coming to rest on one of the candidates, the contest is now between Trump and Biden.

American democracy is on the ballot. Individual freedom, including reproductive rights and civil liberties, is on the ballot. The security of Europe, of the United States, of the world … all of it is on the ballot. It is time for voters to take a deep breath, deal with the world as it is, and decide what they really want when they make one of the most fateful decisions in American history.

Related:

• A wild and dangerous 2024 experiment
• The Supreme Court is not up to the challenge.

Today’s News

1. Kyrsten Sinema, the independent incumbent senior senator in Arizona, announced that she will not seek reelection to the Senate.
2. Polls close tonight on Super Tuesday, as constituents in 15 states and one territory cast their votes for the presidential nominees.
3. In a superseding indictment, Senator Robert Menendez and his wife, Nadine Menendez, were charged with new counts of obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice in the bribery case against them. The senator and his wife previously pleaded not guilty to earlier charges in the case.

Dispatches

• The Trump Trials: The Supreme Court’s ruling in the Colorado case was decided out of fear, not on its merits, George T. Conway III writes.
• Atlantic Intelligence: Matteo Wong interviews Ross Andersen about a developing form of AI that could help us communicate with whales.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Dad Culture Has Nothing to Do With Parenting

By Saul Austerlitz

Americans spend a fair amount of time describing things as “dad.” “Dad rock” is guitar-driven music, typically from the time of the Nixon or Ford administration, with bonus points for extended drum solos or albums that feature double-gatefold illustrations of imaginary planets … “Dad energy” involves being goofy and acting like a 40-something guy, whether or not you actually are a 40-something guy. “Dad jokes” are mostly terrible puns.

These phrases all paint a picture of someone who is uncool, modestly embarrassing, and blissfully unconcerned with others’ judgments. But they have something else in common: They bear little relationship to the actual work of raising children.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

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P.S.

I’ve written about how rock artists can and should age gracefully (including some acts, such as the Tubes, who can just do whatever they want, the old scamps). But sometimes, the realization of time gone by is almost painful, especially when the power of AI helps us bring the past into the present, as it did with John Lennon’s voice in last year’s release from the Beatles, “Now and Then.” (I don’t like that I’ve now aged enough to hear “Now and Then” described with the words “the last Beatles song.”) The video uses digital magic to bring back Lennon and George Harrison to sing beside Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, and it is haunting to see it nearly 62 years since the Beatles issued their first single.

I had the same thought watching the video for Billy Joel’s new song, “Turn the Lights Back On.” It’s a lovely song, an ode to age and regret and renewal, and Joel slyly begins by taking the lyrics for “Famous Last Words” (which was supposed to be the last new song he’d ever record) off his piano’s music desk and putting them aside. The video uses AI to show Joel playing the song as various incarnations of himself from his own past: Today’s elder, bald Joel gives way to the “Piano Man” look from the early ’70s, the leather-clad Billy from the early ’80s, and finally the sunglasses-wearing, middle-aged man who left the studio in the late ’90s.

The video is an astonishing use of AI, but I have mixed feelings about it. If Billy Joel is that old and has gone through that many changes … then so have I. We usually think about such things only when we see photographs or old phone footage of ourselves—but a video like this one takes you on that entire journey in four and a half minutes.

— Tom

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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