To Get Through the Election, Smoke a Cigarette

This election is all about pursuing short-term political highs while willfully ignoring long-term problems. What could pair better with that than a cigarette?

Cigarettes are awesome and everyone knows it.

Governments have used every tool in the toolshed to suppress smoking, including punishingly high taxes, advertising restrictions, public smoking bans, gruesome public health messaging (which in some countries comes on the pack itself), strictly enforced and rising age limits, and now flavor bans.

Nevertheless, tens of millions of Americans continue to suck 'em down each day. They're just that good. And 2024 has made cigarettes even better by virtue of being the perfect complement to this year's presidential election.

That's true regardless of what your politics are, who you're going to vote for, or even whether you'll vote at all.

Perhaps you're a proactive partisan who's really enthused about Donald Trump or Kamala Harris.

Now, I can't claim to understand that attitude. In fact, I think it's downright wrong.

The country faces many serious long-term problems, most obviously rising debt and deficits. Yet neither candidate is even offering a remotely credible solution to our fiscal mess, if they bother to mention it at all.

In fact, they're promising a mess of budget-busting tax carve-outs and new benefits that might secure them short-term political advantage but will only make our long-term debt problems worse.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates the campaign plans of Harris and Trump will add $3.5 trillion and $7.5 trillion, respectively, to the debt over the next 10 years.

The longer we keep digging this fiscal hole, the harder it will be to climb our way out of it.

But if that doesn't bother you, and you're still really jazzed about one of the debt-denying major party candidates, I won't try to change your mind here. If anything, I'm happy you found love this election cycle.

And if that is the case, it sounds like the only thing that could make Decision 2024 better for you is smoking a cigarette. Really relish how each inhalation makes your heart beat just a little faster and your head spin with a pleasing nicotine high.

Sure, the joy is fleeting and the long-term consequences dire, but those don't seem to concern you too much. Why try to stick around for social security if it's not going to be there anyway?

Of course, there are lots of Trump and Harris voters who don't really want to see either person in the White House.

About two-thirds of likely voters repeatedly tell pollsters that they think the country is on the wrong track. Meanwhile, neither major party candidate can credibly offer a clean break with the past.

This is Trump's third presidential campaign in a row. It's been over a decade since he wasn't on the top of the Republican ticket.

Harris is a slightly fresher face, but she's also been vice president for the past three and a half years. When asked in a recent interview what she'd have done differently than Joe Biden, she said "there is not a thing that comes to mind."

Nevertheless, almost all the voters who say the country is going to the dogs will still vote for one of the two status quo candidates.

Pulling the lever for the lesser of two evils is just a bad habit they can't quite kick.

Ex-smokers will understand this behavior all too well. We know smoking is bad for us, sure. We know we'd like to move on to something better. If we keep it up, things will only get worse. But in the moment, smoking a cigarette is slightly less bad than not smoking a cigarette, and so smoke we do.

If that's how one is approaching voting this year, I say go ahead and light up. Few things can complement a reluctantly cast ballot quite like a reluctantly smoked cigarette.

There are also lots of people who will vote for neither Harris or Trump. In the last election, almost 80 million eligible voters decided not to cast a ballot for anyone. We'll likely see a similar number opt to stay home again.

Some truly don't care about politics (an enviable disposition). Many have likely decided that there's isn't a massive substantive difference between the two candidates, and therefore no real need to cast a ballot at all. Both Trump and Harris have worked hard to give voters that impression.

It's been a pretty policy-lite campaign on both sides of the aisle.

When the two candidates do talk about policy, they're typically trying either to claim the middle ground or outflank the other's right or left.

Trump has rushed to the center on guns and government spending. Harris is apt to argue that she'll be the toughest border cop, world cop, and cop cop. This posturing rarely brings the candidates closer to small government positions.

That means the most apathetic of all nonvoters will be the libertarian-leaning ones. They can confidently say that regardless of who wins, taxes will continue to be too high, regulation too intrusive, and the political atmosphere increasingly toxic.

And who would understand high taxes, overregulation, and a toxic atmosphere better than the humble cigarette? If libertarian-leaning voters are this outside the mainstream of politics, we might as well go outside and smoke.