It’s very late on election night. I just came off a long shift as an election judge. I’m tired. I’m cranky. I had to miss part of hunting season for this.
The results are being tabulated across the country. Some of the candidates I’d hoped would win have already won. Some of the candidates I’d hoped would win have already lost. For many of the races, we won’t know anything meaningful until tomorrow. Or maybe the next day. Hell, it could be weeks before we know who’s going to be in office for some of these states.
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As messy and exhausting as this all is, there’s still a healthy measure of satisfaction in it. Seeing the whole democratic process lurching along inefficiently, working basically like it’s supposed to: it’s inspiring. Sure, you have to sit through seeing a lot of people making very dumb decisions. But at least they’re making their own dumb decisions, for their own dumb reasons, instead of some king or whatever making even dumber decisions for them.
There will be a lot of disappointment in the coming days and weeks. There will be a lot of anger. That’s inevitable in a republic. For a moment here, however, on election night, I want to focus on a way we are all winning from this point forward.
Just think: it is going to be at least a year before you have to sit through another political advertisement.
There will be exceptions to this, I’m sure. Someone is going to die in office (nothing nefarious, let’s hope, we just live in a gerontocracy so it’s bound to happen), or will be forced out for operating a dog-fighting ring, or will turn out to be a Russian agent, or will resign when an old photograph turns up of them doing something that we now consider offensive even though nobody thought it so heinous at the time. We may need a special election here or there. Let’s not naysay right now though. Focus on the magnitude of what we’ve all accomplished.
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With only a few days to go before election day, Republicans and Democrats had already spent close to $10 billion on election ads for the 2022 midterms. That’s more than was spent in either the 2018 or the 2020 election cycle — a lot more. That’s more than twice the gross domestic product of Fiji. That is more than five Kim Kardashians’ worth of money spent on political ads.
What was purchased with all this money was one annoying, pointless, ponderous advertisement after another. If I have to see one more political wannabe on TV sitting in a grassy green field smiling with his family (why are they always in a field with their family? When was the last time you went to a field with your family?), I might vomit.
But now I don’t have to see that anymore! And neither do you! It’s over. It’s finally, finally over. Rejoice.
Really leaves one thinking about all the better things that could have been done with that money. Is anyone’s mind changed by any of these political advertisements? The ads I saw just made me hate the candidates who I knew were lying all the more, and I didn’t feel like I needed 30 more seconds of stump speech repeated every few minutes from the candidates I already liked either.
In fact, let’s do this: if you genuinely believe that a political advertisement you saw changed your mind about who you were voting for, send me an email letting me know who you were originally going to vote for, who you ended up voting for, and what the content of the ad was that changed your mind. If I get zero emails, I’m going to have to conclude that we just flushed $10 billion down the tubes.
Whatever the election results in your particular jurisdiction, I do hope you take a moment this week to listen, and enjoy. Tune in to the radio, switch on the television, and just absorb the sweet white noise of soft drink ads, fast food spots, and local personal injury law firm promotions. I, for one, am excited to get back to advertisements selling us stuff we don’t need, as opposed to people we don’t like.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].