While we wait for the polls to close, take a minute to ponder a question that has received little attention: What kind of election are we going to have four years from now?
For some voters, the election we’re having now is about whether we’ll even have an election four years from now. We’ll proceed, however, under the assumption that we will. What’s that election going to look like?
The generational torch that was passed between candidates in this year’s election will be reflected in the electorate four years down the road. For the millions of young voters who are showing up this year, 2028 will be their second presidential election. Millions more who are watching this election in high school will have joined them. Meanwhile, if you were born in 1968, that touchstone year that every boomer has memories of, you will be turning 60 in 2028.
In four years it’s safe to predict that fewer people will cancel their newspaper subscriptions over political disagreements than have done so this year. That’s because there will be fewer newspapers around to cancel. Also fewer regionally owned radio and television stations. There will probably be many more niche online publications aimed at increasingly smaller slices of the American public.
The convulsive changes taking place in the media have had a big impact on politics this year, but the greater story is the growing silence — the races and the issues that just aren’t being covered anymore across the country. One of the biggest questions hanging over the 2028 election is, who’s going to cover it?
It would be wildly out of line to predict that the next presidential race won’t be between Democrats and Republicans. On the other hand, if you were handicapping the chances the way some pollsters seem to be this year, you’d probably give it no worse than a 10 percent possibility.
It is safe to say that the parties that compete in the next election will have been transformed by this year’s election, but it’s just a little too soon to say what the effects of this election will be. The young people who have been at the grassroots in this election are learning the lessons they will bring into the next one.
Whether Donald Trump wins this election or not, there will still be a MAGA movement, although there’s a good chance it will have another name, just as MAGA used to be the Tea Party movement. Whether Kamala Harris wins or not, there will also be a sizable number of more energized Democratic activists who have taken up politics since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
It’s easy to take a stab at the issues that might be important in the next election because there were so many that didn’t get addressed in this one. Data centers are a great place to start.
It seems everywhere you look these days, there’s a story about some little town somewhere protesting the construction of a data center, yet the current stock market boom hinges on the electronically generated promise of artificial intelligence.
Cryptocurrency interests put a massive bet on Trump in this year’s election and are likely to be big players in the next election as well. These are the ingredients of a stew that may have reached a boiling point by 2028.
Hurricane Helene landed in the middle of this election, but the changing climate hasn’t emerged as an issue in this campaign. The footage from this past weekend of angry crowds throwing mud at the king and queen of Spain in the flood-stricken city of Valencia should serve as a warning that disaster can be the mother of political unrest.
We can safely expect that foreign governments and other international players will continue and probably redouble their efforts to poison the political well and make us more angry at each other.
With the coming of AI, we can expect more provocations like the video, alertly spotlighted as a fake by the secretary of state’s office, showing a Haitian committing voter fraud.
So much for the next election. I’ll come back Wednesday with more about this one.
TRUMP. 2028