The Most Important Election of Our Lifetimes, ranked
Does this count as a Short Review?
This is likely to be the most important election of our lifetime. This is not hyperbole. Never have the stakes been higher. But neither has the choice been so easy to make. —LegalEagle, 21 Oct 2024
Every four years it’s the most important election of our lifetime. But you know, this time it’s true. Because America needs change more than ever. After eight long years of lost jobs, lower wages, after eight years of incompetence and neglect, after… the most significant foreign policy mistakes in the history of our great nation, we’re really all in this together. —Sen. Harry Reid, 1 Nov 2008
Most every campaign cycle, it seems, presidential candidates and political pundits claim this election is the most important one ever. It’s become something of a cliché in American politics. This time, however, they just might be correct. Rarely before in modern times has the divide between the two parties been as stark. —Michael Cohen, “The most important election ever,” Politico, 19 Mar 2012
I think this election is one of the most vital in the history of America.
—President Gerald Ford, with a straight face, 22 October 1976
The Republic is approaching what is to be one of the most important elections in its history. —New York Times editorial, 2 July 1888
Today, will be held, the most important election, you have ever been called upon to attend. To-day you are to meet your old and uniform political opponents, the federalists, who are supported by a mongrel faction, destitute of all principles. —Phildelphia Aurora, October 1805
This is the fourth presidential election which Pearl Jam has engaged in as a band, and we feel it's the most important one of our lifetime. —Pearl Jam, 20041
This year marks the tenth presidential election I have lived through,2 and the tenth in which voters have heard that it is “the most important election of our lifetimes.” Unless elections have consistently become incrementally more important ten times in a row, this is impossible. On the other hand, all elections are important, so one of these elections must logically be the most important. Let’s find out which! Let’s rank the presidential elections of my lifetime!
This list is very much a matter of opinion, and you could easily dispute my choices, but the exercise will (I hope) nevertheless help you give your friends a sense of perspective about next Tuesday.
#10 - The Least Important Election of My Lifetime: The Election of 1996
Even at the time, most people thought this was a snooze. (Not Bernie Sanders, though, who called it “the most important election in our lifetimes.”) Certainly I would have preferred that Bob Dole defeat Bill Clinton—all elections are important—but this election appears to have had very little influence on the course of American history.
Had Dole won, the main thing we would have avoided is the Monica Lewinsky scandal and one political party’s consequent rejection of the principle that “character matters” for a president. (The other major political party would follow suit, exactly twenty years later, in the worst way possible.) So much of the 1990s was dominated by a bipartisan consensus on a surprisingly vast range of domestic and foreign policy issues (with the tensest social issues largely bottled up in the courts) that there just wasn’t all that much at stake here.
Dole himself was a classic green-eyeshades Republican who really, in his heart of hearts, just wanted to balance the budget. I suppose that counts as a second consequence: if Dole had won, I suspect he would have been able to pass Social Security reforms that would have averted the looming cuts that Social Security faces in ~7 years when the Trust Fund runs dry.
I’m not going to write this much about all of them. I’m not I’m not I’m not.
#9: The Election of 1988
If Michael Dukakis had beaten George H.W. Bush, what would have changed? What did George H.W. Bush actually accomplish in office? He raised taxes. He won the Persian Gulf War, but the Gulf was the first of our 1990s wars: remote, inexpensive, disproportionate, and (to those of us watching at home) irrelevant.
Bush’s most lasting legacy is probably his nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, but even this is counterbalanced by his disastrous “stealth bomber” nomination of David Souter. (Souter was sold as a conservative with no judicial record, to ensure he could get through the Senate confirmation hearings. Bush’s team gave skittish conservatives many assurances that he really was a conservative. Once on the Court, Souter turned out to be further left than Ruth Bader Ginsburg.)
All presidencies matter, but George H.W. Bush’s presidency mattered about as little as it is possible for a presidency to matter. I don’t say this out of malice for George H.W. Bush. (I have no strong feelings on him; I was 3 when he left office.) I would have almost certainly voted for him in 1988, and I would definitely vote for him over Trump or Harris. Even some of his biggest fans struggle to find meaningful accomplishments in his record.
#8: The Election of 2020
A defender might say that the course of the Biden Administration was dictated by dramatic events beyond its control: the pandemic, pandemic-provoked inflation, the race riots, the Capitol riot, the first conservative Supreme Court in eighty years, the (consequent) fall of Roe, the long failed war in Afghanistan, Hamas’s attack on Israel, and we could go on.
A critic would (correctly) point out that the Biden Administration never had a chance at rising above events because its leader, Joe Biden, was already frail and inadequate to the job when he entered, and that he rapidly declined in office, to the point where he was reduced a gibbering ghost in the biggest defeat in the history of American presidential debates and forced to step down—as the nominee. Somehow, this man who is clearly not competent to serve as President is still serving as President, and one of the women who conspired to deceive the nation about his competence has a tossup chance of being elected President in a week.
Yet, either way you look at it, it’s hard to say that the Biden Administration mattered all that much. Its worst excesses and failures were its decision to accelerate inflation with too much federal stimulus money and its disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan—but it seems likely that a re-elected President Trump would have done exactly the same things in more or less the same way. Biden filled a Supreme Court seat, but that was a deliberately timed retirement on Justice Breyer’s part and the vacancy would not have occurred in a second Trump term. (As we have seen, Breyer would have survived and therefore remained on the court through Biden’s entire term.)
The 2020 election, oft-advertised at the time as the most important election of anybody’s lifetime, turned out to be the most important election only for children under the age of four.
#7: The Election of 2012
Like the election of 1996, this election mattered for its downstream effects: the demonization of Mitt Romney, which often resorted to insane demagoguery and outright lies, taught Republican voters a dangerous lesson: “They’re going to call us ‘Hitler bigot garbage’ even if we nominate Mitt Fricking Romney,3 so it doesn’t really matter if we actually do nominate a reckless demagogue. They can’t call us any worse names than they already are!” And, indeed, we are ending the 2024 election with the Democratic candidates calling the Republican nominee the same things the Democratic candidates called the Republican nominee in 2012.
The fact that the Democrats’ insults are much closer to the mark now doesn’t matter; the Republicans stopped listening after 2012.
On the other side of the aisle, Romney could not bring himself to firmly oppose his conspiracy-ridden “birther” fringe, and he personally kowtowed to the birther-in-chief, a TV personality named Donald Trump. This was less a cause of what was coming and more a foreshadowing of it. But, oh, what a foreshadowing.
However, unlike the election of 1996, this election likely had significant and obvious real-world consequences. I suspect that the 2012 election was our last chance at balancing the budget before the looming fiscal crisis hits. Romney also differed starkly from Obama on his foreign policy views, and Romney—who was deeply concerned about a revanchist Russia and an expansionist China—has been proved decisively correct in recent years. President Obama mocked Romney for it and continued a weak foreign policy that led America into several of its current global predicaments. For these reasons, I think that (even leaving the Trump Era aside) the world where Mitt Romney won would be different from the world where Obama won in significant ways. Not unrecognizably different, but it wouldn’t take you long to realize you’d fallen into a parallel universe.
On the other hand, Mitt Romney, who in many ways invented Obamacare, was probably not going to be able to repeal & replace it as he had promised, for all the same reasons that Trump was unable to repeal & replace it in 2018. The top issue of the 2012 election was probably always safe. The only Supreme Court justice Romney would have replaced is Scalia (a defensive replacement), and at least part of me always feared that he would have nominated a Kennedy-style libertarian rather than a conservative like Neil Gorsuch or Paul Clement. For conservatives, that would have been a catastrophe.
Okay, these really have to get shorter.4
#6: The Election of 2008
This was not an empty presidency. The Obama Wave led to the passage of Obamacare. Obviously, if McCain had won, no Obamacare. Paul Krugman also thinks Obama single-handedly saved the economy, although the fact that George W. Bush was pursuing many of the same policies already (the bank bailout happened under Bush!) makes me doubt McCain’s policies would have been much different, and I doubt Krugman’s whole economic theory anyway. President Obama named two Supreme Court justices that Republicans would have killed to name themselves, but that wasn’t going to happen: David Souter and John Paul Stevens would both have clung to their seats for dear life rather than surrender them to a Republican presidency. (Both survived the entire Obama presidency.)
What else did President Obama do in his first term? I’d better link a list of his achievements so his fans don’t come after me, but, like… look at that list. Not much! Hilariously, the list closes by claiming that Obama “served two terms with no serious personal or political scandal,” which tells you just how in the tank the author is. Even if you look at the list favorably, the biggest stuff this guy could come up with was Dodd-Frank? Would America have ended up that much different under President John McCain?
Perhaps. I harbor a strong suspicion that McCain would have started at least one more war than Obama did, and that McCain would do more to win our wars than Obama did. Yet Obama’s ascent didn’t begin a new era in American politics, as so many had hoped. Instead, Obama ended an era. Neoliberalism: R.I.P.
#5: The Election of 2024
It’s dangerous to predict the importance of an election before it’s all played out. I’m sure I would have misjudged the importance of many of these elections at the time. So much can be known only in hindsight. Yet the 2024 election does not bear the hallmarks of an unusually important election. Both candidates are running on mostly very vague policies, and both are shameless about triangulating for popularity. Both candidates are likely to be stymied by the Senate. Trump, if elected, is term-limited.5 Both candidates, if elected, are idiots.
As in much of the past century, then, the most important political action of the next few years is likely to play out on the Supreme Court, not the White House, and there isn’t very much the White House can do about that. Obviously, all presidential elections matter, and lots of individual people will live or die or suffer or thrive because of the decisions of the next President. I am certainly worried about the possibility of war with China, and I am even more worried that I really don’t have any idea how either candidate would react to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. All things considered, though, America in 2028 will probably look much the same no matter which candidate wins. You might expect me, then, to put this election closer to the unimportant end of this list. However, there are an unusual number of ways this election could turn into a mega-important one:
If Harris wins and secures 50 seats in the Senate, she has made clear her intention to destroy the legislative filibuster in order to seize control of the Supreme Court and ram through radical progressive legislation, starting with her bill to “restore Roe” (n.b. it does not “restore Roe”; it goes way past that) and ending God-only-knows-where. This would be apocalyptic, not just for conservative policy priorities, but also the separation of powers and the legitimacy of our entire system of government. Conditional on Harris winning, she has about a 50/50 chance of winning Senate control and a slightly smaller chance of managing to actually persuade her majority to kill the filibuster. This is genuinely quite a big danger and is one reason you should not vote for Harris (even to stop Trump).
If there is a very close election, it is not difficult to imagine ways the aftermath could spiral into civil war. This is not likely, but it is conceivable, and obviously very bad. You all remember my infamous 2020 Civil War Post, and (more recently) my Review of Ross Douthat's Review(s) of Civil War (2024) so I won’t drill deep into this, but remember that the main ingredients of civil war are partisan hatred and legitimacy crisis. Florida 2000 was a huge test for our republic, which we passed because we had immense stores of institutional faith stockpiled, and because Al Gore did the right thing. I do not think we would survive another Florida 2000 today.6
If Trump wins, there’s plenty of ways he could provoke a constitutional crisis. After all, he literally ended his last term by trying to remain in office beyond the end of it, in defiance of the Constitution, all our election laws, and the clearly expressed will of the people! If he does something similarly lawless in his second term, it could be apocalyptic for not only progressive policy priorities, but also the rule of law and the legitimacy of our entire system of government. Indeed, it would be worse than a President Harris packing the Supreme Court, since packing the courts (although it overthrows major, important norms) is unambiguously legal. Republicans would need to respond to court-packing with hardball politics, whereas Democrats facing a second Trump coup attempt would be justified in responding with violence.7
Any one of these happening would send the 2024 election way closer to the most-important end of this list. None of these are especially likely, though. Harris winning and carrying the Senate is only about 30% probable. Nate Silver gives the odds of an election recount at around 10%, but the odds that it turns into as much of a mess as Florida 2000 are lower. Trump doesn’t care about the rule of law and may surround himself with other people who don’t care, but we’ve seen him in office for four years and it turns out there isn’t that much you can do with contempt for the rule of law when you’re an easily-distracted idiot surrounded by competing toadies, hemmed in by the courts and the military.
Nevertheless, “unlikely” is far from “impossible.” Even though my expectation is that we’ll look back on 2024 as a #7 or #8 election, I’m giving it spot #5 as a hedge.
#4: The Election of 1992
This election marked a phase change in American politics: the end of the long Reagan Era and the dawn of the Neoliberal ‘90s.
Bill Clinton’s unpopular liberal governance during the first two years of his term provoked two things: the Contract for America, which defined the Republican Party from 1994 through the Fall of Paul Ryanism in 2016, and the Democratic Party’s flight from openly-confessed progressivism toward the triangulated center, which defined them from Clinton’s “Sister Souljah moment” in 19928 until the Bernie Sanders insurgency and Hillary Clinton’s final defeat in… huh, also 2016. Guess we’ll be coming back to that one.
The Clinton-Gingrich government that dominated the 1990’s was a weird chimera of mutual hatred that was nevertheless amazingly effective at reshaping America in a neoliberal image. They left a legacy of landmark laws and (mirabile dictu) a balanced budget. None of this fundamentally transformed American society, but it made enough difference in enough places that America probably would look weirdly different, in a lot of ways you might not expect, if George H.W. Bush had won re-election. (Or, much more obviously, if Ross Perot had pulled off his near-miss upset and become the first third-party President since Abe Lincoln.)
Also, Clinton was able to name two Supreme Court justices. If Clinton had lost, Progressive justice Harry Blackmun probably would have remained on the Court until he could retire under a Democratic president… but centrist pro-lifer Byron White seems to have eschewed any attempt at political timing when he retired under Clinton, and the fact that his seat was filled by Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a tremendous (and crucial) victory for progressives, who were able to ride that replacement to major policy victories in Stenberg v. Carhart (striking down partial-birth abortion ban), Lawrence v. Texas (establishing a constitutional right to consensual sex, overturning White’s decision in Bowers v. Hardwick), Obergefell v. Hodges (gay marriage), and likely others. (White was an unpredictable maverick; RBG was not.)
#3: The Election of 2004
If you weren’t there—and we now have two living generations who weren’t!—it’s probably hard for you to understand just how profoundly 9/11 reshaped the American consciousness. In six hours, we went from an invincible, prosperous peace, to watching people stumble out of ruined street delis after the first tower collapsed, faces caked gray with debris, screaming. This in one of the seats of American power, at a time when Americans still loved one another. There was never another (successful) major attack… but we did not know that at the time. Nearly all of us expected that there would be another attack, and that it would be bigger. That’s why America reacted the way it did in the Middle East—and, to be fair, you can make the argument that it worked.
Much of our popular culture for the following fifteen years (basically 24 through Person of Interest) was either a reaction to 9/11 or a reaction to the reactions, including some stuff you wouldn’t expect. The Dark Knight was clearly a reaction to 9/11 and everybody knows it, but I think the whole Marvel Cinematic Universe took over the box office because Iron Man and the first two Captain America movies were also reactions to 9/11. The Bourne Identity, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man… 9/11 consumed us.
So the first post-9/11 election was a very big deal, and presented two very different visions for how to respond going forward: Bushite neo-conservatism versus Kerry’s lead-from-behind coalition-building. (I would argue that President Obama largely delivered what Kerry was selling.) Bush prioritized aggressively persecuting terrorists, but Kerry placed a higher priority on the civil liberties of terror suspects. (We later learned there were good reasons for this.)
This alone might not be enough to put 2004 way up here at #3 on the list, but 2004 was also important because it confirmed President George W. Bush’s legitimacy. Dubya had lived under a cloud ever since the traumatic resolution of the Florida 2000 debacle. (Anyone who “won” that election would have.) He was the President, but many Americans doubted his legitimacy, both because he had lost the popular vote and because they weren’t convinced that the legal process installing him had been fair. The 2004 election was an opportunity for Bush to win an outright majority, confirming that he was the choice of the American people. This would ratify the Supreme Court’s controversial decision in Bush v. Gore. That’s exactly what happened, and that went a long way (I think) toward putting the 2000 election behind us.
Finally—and maybe most importantly—the winner of the 2004 election was able to nominate two Supreme Court justices. Bush’s replacement of Sandra Day O’Connor with Samuel Alito was the Court’s first clear rightward shift since Clarence Thomas in 1991, and the last until Donald Trump replaced Anthony Kennedy with Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. The removal of O’Connor, who had drifted slowly leftward over the years, paid enormous political dividends by making Anthony Kennedy the Court’s kingmaker for the next 13 years. Although Kennedy often defected to the liberals in important cases, he also delivered major conservative victories, which certainly would never have happened if John Kerry had won the election: the great defense of the First Amendment in Citizens United,9 the famous exposition of the Second Amendment in D.C. v. Heller, the salvation of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act in Gonzales v. Carhart, and plenty more. Even beyond the end of Kennedy’s time in control, Alito has continued to prove crucial to the originalist takeover of the Supreme Court. Trump gets (and demands) a lot of credit for getting Roe v. Wade overturned, but, the fact is, Roe would not have been overturned without Bush’s nomination of Justice Alito.
An America where Kerry won, with William Rhenquist dying in 2005, would be a very different country from the one we know today, in ways that would be difficult to predict, even in hindsight.
#2: The Election of 2000
This one actually is going to be short, because I already made much of the case for it.
We had no idea that this was the 9/11 election. We thought it was actually quite a dull election (up until the fireworks in Florida), much as 1996’s snoozefest had been. The debates were sedate. The SNL parodies were perhaps the best debates SNL has ever done:
…but even these joked about how irrelevant the election was.
Nevertheless, unbeknownst to us, this was the 9/11 election. If Al Gore had been president on that day… I really have no clue, none whatsoever, what would have followed. What wars would we have fought? Would they have been more (or less) successful than the ones we actually did fight? Would Gore have prevented al-Qaeda’s next attack? What anti-terror measures would Gore have taken domestically? Would we have a Department of Homeland Security? Would we have the TSA? Would Gore have framed terrorism as a “war” or as a kind of law-enforcement issue, and what mechanisms would he have used to pursue it, with what help from what countries? The first-order effects of these decisions are staggering; the second-order effects unimaginable. (For example, disillusion with Iraq fueled the secession of disaffected Republicans from the party’s establishment, leading first to the Tea Party rebellion—which, recall, mostly targeted moderate Republican office-holders, not Democrats—and eventually to Trump.) In retrospect, the 2000 election was the most important election of many people’s lifetimes… a stark reminder that every election has that potential, even the boring ones.
#1: The Election of 2016
Here it is. The one time (so far) that people have told me I was voting in the “most important election of my lifetime” and it was actually true.
This election decided the fate of the Supreme Court—and we all knew it would. Antonin Scalia was dead, and the next president would fill his seat. If Clinton won, she would replace a stalwart conservative with a stalwart liberal and undo forty years of conservative trench warfare overnight. I’ve linked this several times before, but Mark Tushnet’s infamous article, “Abandoning Defensive Crouch Liberal Constitutionalism,” captured the moment perfectly. The vision he describes was precisely what a Hillary Clinton presidency would have brought.
A vote for Trump, on the face of it, was only a vote to protect Scalia’s seat and maintain the existing balance of power… but of course everybody could see that Anthony Kennedy was getting old, and might retire under a Republican president, which would at last create the first clearly conservative court in the past 80 years. (Then, as it turned out, Justice Ginsburg died in office during Trump’s first term, which was also tremendously consequential.)
The 2016 election, then, was the rarest thing in U.S. politics: an open battle for ideological control of the Supreme Court, the true center of power in American life. The stakes for the next several decades could not have been higher, and the transformative effects of Trump’s victory will not be fully understood for many years to come.
That would have been true even if it had been a normal election! Yet 2016 was anything but! It wasn’t just that Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton; it was that he defeated everything she represented: the Washington establishment; the Republican Party; the mainstream press; the bipartisan foreign and economic policy consensus; the full panoply of foundations, non-profits, and universities that fueled power on both sides of the aisle; and, really, all of us in the gentry class who have comfortably ruled America for the past… well, I don’t know, but at least for the past ten elections.
I have to admit that my own loathing of Trump is not exclusively rational. I viscerally dislike him. At least some of that is surely because he is not part of my social class, has no interest in joining my social class, and loves nothing more than flinging the norms of my social class in my face. (He also committed adultery with a porn star and paid her hush money, which is just objective morality.) He represented a breach in the Westeros Wall that many gentry-Americans are still processing:
The 2016 election is the first election that I can remember that drove people insane. I don’t mean in the “boy that guy sure is triggered, must be TDS” sense; I mean in the “President Trump’s victory caused a measurable increase in diagnosable mental illness” sense. Of course, Trump’s defeat would no doubt have also had huge impacts, but in the opposite direction.
I’m not going to try to say here which 2016 outcome would have been better, but I feel I’m on fairly safe ground when I say that an America where Hillary had won (and confirmed the Establishment in its limitless power) would look unimaginably different. The same currents that brought us to 2016 would have continued flowing, and there would have been a reckoning eventually, but when or how that reckoning might have come… I have no idea.
Finally, the election of 2016 both accelerated existing trends in voting behavior and kicked off a bunch of new trends in voting behavior. 2016 was when the White vote split along the education fault line. It was the start of suburbs migrating toward the Democrats, with rurals going to warp speed in the opposite direction. It kicked off what seems to be a developing pattern of racial depolarization, where Whites become less clearly Republican and Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians all move away from the Democrats. In 2012, I was able to argue that the gender gap was chiefly an artifact of non-White women voting at higher rates than non-White men,10 but Trump has turned the gender gap into a signal feature of American politics. Voter turnout has risen to heights that were almost unimaginable as recently as 2014… and it has stayed at record heights in all four elections since 2016.11 2016 was a realignment election, which may very well have been the dawn of a new Party System—only the seventh in American history.
2016 was the most important election of my lifetime. 2020 and 2024 have been echoes, largely battling over the spoils.
Not that that’s going to be a ton of comfort to about half of us in about half a week!
P.S. Commenters, I have been reading all your comments, even when I have not had time to reply. It turned out that I had a lot of articles to write in this final week of the election, and those had to take priority. Please continue posting and I will hope to rejoin the conversation when things settle down.
Next up: the 2024 De Civitate Election Preview, coming Monday or Tuesday, if I can type fast enough.
IMAGE CREDIT: The headline image for this piece is from The New Yorker. As a fellow member of the gentry class, I’m sure you already knew that, but honor and a desire not to be sued requires me to say it expressly.
Several of these are from a collection at History News Network, which HNN attributes to the New York Times.
I was conceived on August 15, 1988, so I was a few months into my life when George H.W. Bush faced down Michael Dukakis. Readers who oppose fetal personhood are free to insist that I have lived through only nine presidential elections.
A moderate, a liberal, and a conservative walk into a bar.
The bartender says, “Hey, Mitt.”
I was sincere when I wrote this, but… sigh.
As I closed in on the ending tonight, I told my wife that I was writing a 500-word review of past elections, and she immediately asked, “So how many words over are you?”
Me, meekly: “…about five thousand.”
Then she patted my hand and asked, “Have you tried being a better person?”
Lame Duck Trump is one of several reasons I would prefer Trump defeat Harris, even though I won’t vote for either: if the Constitution holds up, a victorious Trump goes away forever thank God in January 2029. If Trump loses to Harris, he might run again in 2028. Also terrible: if Trump loses to Harris, Harris might run again in 2028.
I have given up all hope of anything but term limits or the sweet release of Father Time being able to put an end to Donald J. Trump’s iron grip on my former political party, and I just despise Harris. Two new candidates in 2028, please.
A caveat, of course: it’s really really not great that I had to insert the phrase “if the Constitution holds up” a couple paragraphs ago, and I wouldn’t have had to insert it for any candidate other than Trump. I think he just wants to serve the two terms he feels he “deserves” and will enter a happy retirement after, serving as kingmaker and suck-up-target-in-chief for the next generation of Republicans. But the guy has no interest in the rule of law, and the Supreme Court’s idiotic decision in Trump v. Anderson calls into question whether anyone can actually stop him from running for a third term. I would not be entitled to surprise if Trump tried to violate our term-limit laws. That’s a huge reason I’m not voting for him!
But I’m willing to accept four more years of Trump if the voters deliver it as long as it makes him go away forever.
I could be wrong.
A better analogy would be President Harris illegally decreeing that the Equal Rights Amendment has been ratified and enforcing it. If (packed) courts failed to block the illegal ERA, Republicans would be justified in responding to that with violence, as I’ve said before.
The “Sister Souljah moment” was Clinton’s attempt to look like a more moderate candidate. He abandoned this stance once elected and governed as a progressive. Then he got the backlash in 1994 and spent the rest of his term governing as the person he’d pretended to be in 1992—and he pulled the entire Democratic Party with him.
This is a widely misunderstood and misrepresented case, but I won’t get into the slanders against it here. Suffice to say that, if Citizens United had come out the other way, the First Amendment would have been a dead letter.
Twelve years later, that analysis still seems correct to me.
2024 is not in the bag yet, but one thing of the few things you can infer from early vote data is that turnout is running high again.
During our generation, the idea that each successive presidential election could be the most important of our lifetimes might be true, because we began digging ourselves a pit that requires more drastic action to climb out of after each successive year of digging deeper.
If Dukakis had won, instead of asking how little H.W. Bush accomplished, we might ask what it might mean to have had a Democratic president who may not have led the party so thoroughly into the neoliberal consensus as Clinton then did.
If Romney had won, Republicans would have learned that hewing to the center works and might not have looked to Trumpism. We would have a president whose outcomes would not have differed much from Obama, but who would have given us a very different future for partisan politics.
Step by step, neoliberalism has paved the way for fascism. Each election, we have failed to reverse that trajectory. Sometimes our meaningful option for changing trajectory was in the primaries rather than the general election, but each passing cycle made a Trump more likely. 2016 was merely the tipping point of the lost opportunities prior. If we had stopped Trump, the conditions leading toward Trumpism would continue to worsen, and another Trump would have arisen within four to eight years.
Trump's eventual death will not mean the end of Trumpism. If we do stop him this election, we will not return to a Republican party committed to your values. We will be fending off the next Trump, and the next, and the next. And each time will be the most important, because the next time one wins, the guardrails defending the Constitution will no longer be strong enough to hold.
Among elections before your time (but not mine), the 1980 election which elected Ronald Reagan and his brand of conservatism, lasting right up to the Trump era, was an important election.
The 1968 election that elected Richard Nixon was important given that it occurred during a time of social upheaval, in society in general and the Democratic Party. (I wonder about an alternate history if RFK were not assassinated, went on to win the Democratic nomination and possibly the White House. Maybe the Vietnam War still gets ended. Maybe society calms down a bit. Definitely Watergate, and the cynicism it bred, never happens).
As to your analysis, I agree with ranking 2016 and 2000 as important. Those are both obvious. Too early to tell about 2020, IMO. And waaay too early about 2024, that an election not concluded can't be fairly evaluated. That will depend on an evaluation of the Trump era, which has not yet ended, and may not for at least 4 more years.