The Coming Vindication of the Double-Haters

Policy nihilism is consuming the 2024 election.

At the start of the summer, it looked like the 2024 presidential election might come down to the double-haters. Roughly 25 percent of voters told Pew pollsters they had unfavorable views of both Joe Biden and Donald Trump. (And this was before Trump's felony conviction and Biden's disastrous debate performance.)

Some of us are longtime double-haters in good standing. But it's worth putting those numbers in context. In 1988, only 5 percent of voters told pollsters they disapproved of both major party candidates. In 2000, that figure was 6 percent. Even the previous Trump-Biden matchup in 2020 pulled only 13 percent into the double-hater camp. For several months of this election cycle, Americans really were letting the hate flow through them in unprecedented ways.

But after Kamala Harris quickly and dramatically replaced Biden on the Democratic ticket, the double-haters seem to have disappeared into thin air. A bump for the Democrats was perhaps to be expected; Harris showed 48 percent favorability against 48 percent unfavorability in an August New York Times/Siena poll. But Trump also got a bump; his favorability number was the same as Harris', with 51 percent unfavorable.

Under different circumstances, one might assume the favorables increased as voters learned more about what the candidates would do as president. It's true that after an extended period with very little in the way of meaningful policy proposals, we're now entering a phase where both candidates are debuting bold new initiatives on a weekly or even daily basis. Unfortunately, these policy promises amount to little more than words that feel good in the candidates' mouths and the voters' ears.

In 2024 it's hard to shake the feeling that, from a policy perspective, the presidential contest offers less real substance than ever before. Rather than being a contest over policy, ideology, and principle, the race has descended into a spectacle of empty gestures, culture-war posturing, and a dizzying rush to outdo the opposition in meaningless rhetoric. It's the era of total policy nihilism.

In a race between Trump and Biden, policy nihilism was in some ways less consequential, because voters had the records of what both men had already done in their first terms as president, and actions speak louder than words. But Harris has a thin policy portfolio, little more than a series of missteps and abortive efforts in her role as vice president. As Elizabeth Nolan Brown explains in this month's cover story, Harris is currently trending away from some of her more extreme progressive policy stances. There's something heartening about the fact that mouthing platitudes about freedom remains a winning electoral strategy. Americans like freedom, and the GOP has mostly abandoned the field when it comes to liberty-promoting policy proposals and rhetoric.

There's no reason to believe Harris has had a change of heart, though. She's flopping toward freedom in order to win an election, and she's just as likely to flip back in office. In fact, Harris' policy stances are changing so rapidly it's difficult to say where she stands on much of anything, much less how that relates to the current administration's plans and goals.

Trump has long made policy on the fly, and in 2024 he can be more serenely confident than ever that the Republican intellectual and political apparatus will contort itself to conform with whatever he says. His recent notion to eliminate taxes on tips, for example—which seems to have come to him on the golf course or perhaps in the shower—went from being a casual remark to one of the central themes of the Republican National Convention in a matter of days. This, despite near-universal condemnation from economists and tax policy analysts of all ideological stripes.

The proposal tapped into a real yearning for a reduction of Americans' tax burden, especially for the working class. It felt good to say it, people liked to hear it—and implementing it would be a counterproductive nightmare. Naturally, it also became a Harris campaign pledge days later.

It's not just economic issues. Foreign policy also became an afterthought. Today, foreign policy functions downstream from domestic electoral politics and the culture war. The complexities of global power balances, human rights, and trade relations are flattened into caricatures and sound bites. Biden was already teetering on this line, changing his rhetoric in an attempt to meet the electoral moment, but his long record on Israel and other matters signaled strongly to voters what he would actually do. Not so with Harris.

Instead of being leaders who take seriously their obligation to govern, politicians are little more than symbols in a rhetorical war that's largely disconnected from day-to-day policy. They will literally say anything to get elected.

In election season, there's a certain dark freedom in policy nihilism. It allows candidates to campaign without accountability. If their policy proposals are flimsy and changeable, they reduce their own risk of being held to their promises. Knowing that the policy talk is meaningless allows voters to gloss over the difficult details of proposals, since the candidates are unlikely to pursue the policies they are discussing in a recognizable way once in office anyway. We're left with elections where the stakes feel apocalyptic, even as the substance hollows out.

But policy nihilism is only tenable for as long as the campaign lasts. Someone will win, and that person must govern—at which point the double-haters will almost certainly be proven right.