The Art of Losing: The 2024 Presidential Election

Is this year's race the worst in modern U.S. history?

2024 is a special occasion. For the first time in 130 years, two presidents are facing off against each other in a rematch, and what presidents they are. None of their predecessors ever served at the age both of them are right now. Few have ever been hated by the public as much as they are, and approximately none have ever been hated as consistently. The greater evil is an unimaginably horrible convicted felon. The lesser evil is willing to risk everything just so he can have a shot at serving until he is 86 years old. Even the no-hope third party candidate has worms in his brain.

In light of all of this, it’s worth considering something dire: that 2024 might, no hyperbole, be the worst election ever.

Like, in a literal sense. For as long as this country has actually been a democracy.

How can one evaluate such a thing? For starters, it’s best to only consider elections that occurred after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which ended this country’s system of electoral apartheid. For as broken as our elections have been over the past several decades, they’re still apples and oranges compared to races where a third of the country was under a herrenvolk regime. If you go back even further than Jim Crow, you quickly end up with elections between two slave owners that only small fractions of the country were able to vote in, with only a superficial resemblance to the current system. So, no, I won’t be comparing Trump v. Biden, 2024 to Henry Clay v. James K. Polk, 1844—at least, not yet.

This helps narrow things down, but it still leaves us with a big question: how does one evaluate whether an election was “good” or not? Are the best races just the times when the best candidates won? That would be pretty boring, and it wouldn’t get to the heart of what we’re asking here. So, to mix things up, I created a three-part criteria for judging presidential-election quality.

• Part One: Public Opinion. Since we live under a democratic system, it’s only right to put the views of voters first. Regardless of whether we think the candidates were good or not, it’s only fair to say that one election was “better” than the other if the voters who participated in it actually liked it. This category examines elections along these lines. How did voters feel about the options presented to them? Were the major candidates popular? Did people feel like their needs were being addressed? Did the atmosphere resemble a spirited debate instead of a low-level civil war? If an election does well in these regards, it will score higher. As long as people are happy, the system is, in some sense, working as intended.

• Part Two: Candidate Quality. Following up the more objective part of the list is the entirely subjective part of it. This category will judge the election based on how good or bad its major-party candidates were. How evil was the greater evil candidate, and how less evil was the lesser evil candidate, relative to their times? Feel free to disagree with some of these evaluations, but it would be impossible to make an article like this without editorializing somewhere.

• Part Three: Missed Opportunities. This category looks squarely at the lesser evil (Democratic) side of the race and asks a simple question: did they underperform like Biden has been underperforming so far, or did they not? If they won, were they the best candidate for that year, and did they win by as much as they could have? If they lost, was their defeat respectable or an unforgivable choke? Given how terrible Biden is and how badly he has been underrunning the rest of his party this year so far, it may appear like he has this category on lock, but be warned. He will face very, very stiff competition.

So, without further ado, let’s begin by comparing 2024 to the election that even the most pessimistic of us still thought would be the hands-down worst of our lifetimes: 2020.

The 2020 Election