When election season rolls around I always run into a lot of people who are having a pretty bad time. It’s the drumbeat of dire news and last-minute plot twists and scandals. It’s the absurdly close polls. It’s the feeling that we — especially those of us who like me live in California — are approximately powerless while a decision of enormous importance gets made. There’s nothing to do but wait and see what happens — not that that stops me from frequently refreshing all the models and squinting at the internals of all the polls.
So I wanted to talk about how to keep perspective on presidential elections without pretending they don’t matter or letting them become the sole verdict on whether our world is headed in the right direction.
It does matter a great deal who wins on Tuesday, obviously. Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have very different views on Ukraine, on Gaza, on tariffs, on legal immigration, on Latin American coup attempts, on abortion, on whether you should get election boards to discard the results of legitimate elections, and on much more. I’m not here to argue that you should be zen about the election because it doesn’t matter — it matters enormously.
But I do think that when you step back and take some perspective, it’s clear that many of the things that matter the most for our lives, the lives of our loved ones, and the lives of everyone on Earth, don’t get decided in elections. And how those things go are much easier to affect than elections are.
Looking back at what actually mattered
Often the most important gears that turned to affect people’s lives — for better or for worse — did that without a single mention on a debate stage or a campaign platform. Antibiotics. Vaccination. Mass electrification. Contraception. The internet. The nuclear bomb. Factory farming. Most of the ways that we are fortunate to live in the 2020s instead of the 1920s — and most of the ways that the 2020s are far more horrifying than the 1920s — happened despite the lousy presidents and without much aid from the good ones.
Even when an issue is hotly contested, the key thing that ends up driving change is often only tangentially related to the part everyone is arguing about. We’re on a much better footing in the fight against climate change because solar is so cheap — most of the debates over everything else end up being a rounding error compared to that.
One of my colleague Dylan Matthews’s most famous contrarian Future Perfect-flavored takes was that George W. Bush was actually, if you do the math, an awesome president because of PEPFAR, his AIDS program that saved at least a million lives in Africa at a time when no one was giving AIDS the prioritization it deserved. Sure, he also started a couple of unnecessary wars in the Middle East and the pointless expansion of the surveillance state in the name of liberty. Sure, his domestic policy agenda was mostly a flop or got forgotten about in the aftermath of 9/11. But still, he saved a lot of children.
How much to consider this a defense of George W. Bush is mostly a philosophical question, and frankly I don’t care — I’m not the judge of his soul. But I do think that it’s a very important point if you are thinking about how to do good in the world. Things that no one is paying attention to, neglected programs that a dedicated visionary can make happen — these are often where the enormous effects on the world are.
Elections matter. But they are very far from being the only thing that matters. And it’s very hard among the noise and chaos and fury of any given moment to guess which of the many issues contested in an election are the ones that will really matter. (Pandemic prevention, just to take one example, was not much of an issue in 2016, just a few years before Covid hit.)
So if you find yourself feeling paralyzed and helpless about elections, refreshing news sites instead of doing real substantive work toward a better world, my advice — which I have had only mixed success at taking for myself — is to stay oriented to all of the other things that matter just as much and that are much, much easier to change.
Instead of letting every twist and swing of the polls in Wisconsin control your mood, work on something that really matters and that none of our politicians are bothering to solve. This is an important decision you don’t have much control over. But the direction of our country and our world is an important decision you do have an enormous amount of control over.
There are a great many people alive today because of the individual efforts of dedicated people who decided to solve some problem they could no longer bear. There are a great many important scientific projects that need volunteers. There are horrible evils to work on ending, and horrible dilemmas that will become less of a dilemma as advancing technology and human creativity give all of us better options.
So next time you want to hit “refresh” on the polls, think about if you’ll find it more empowering — and the world will find it more useful — for you to pick something else that also really matters, and do that instead.