Every election cycle, some jokers try to sell the public on the idea that this is the most important election in history to boost television ratings or (now) clicks. Every cycle, they turn out to be wrong. In the United States, at least, elections — and the governments they produce — are not leading indicators of public sentiment; they are lagging indicators.
Elections simply provide a quantitative measure of what the voters believe and preserve. The governments that emerge from elections merely establish order and discipline in those areas that the American people have emotionally and intellectually pioneered. John Adams captured this relationship between sentiments and action when he said, “The Revolution was effected before the war commenced.
The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people” long before the first shot at Lexington. The country was already divided by the time the shooting started at Fort Sumter. The majority of the people had already made up their minds about civil rights long before President John F.
Kennedy’s assassination closed the question (in the affirmative) for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In practice, this means that elections in and of themselves aren’t really that important; they simply measure extant sentiment. Moreover, the fortunate reality in the United States is that any single election — no matter how freighted with import by the contestants and observers — is rarely dispositive.
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