Every election cycle, things get even more intense, politically speaking, than they typically are.
Candidates for public office, their campaign staffers, and their surrogates all dial up the rhetoric, pointing to how the country will be worse off and will travel down a dark path if you elect their opponents.
We political junkies are no different in this regard. I sincerely believe that when Democrats are put in charge of things, whether it's a city council, a state legislature, a governor's office, Congress, and/or the White House, that, on balance, life is going to be more challenging for the people they are elected to represent - whether the consequences are felt in the short term or long term, and whether the consequences are felt on a deeply personal basis or more on a community/city/state level.
And the closer you get to Election Day, the more antsy you get - especially if it seems like the consensus from the pollsters and the prognosticators is that your party is not going to have a good night.
I remember how utterly deflated I felt when Barack Obama was elected president and then got reelected. Not that I was a big fan of John McCain and Mitt Romney. It was because I was like so many other Obama critics in that I didn't have a good feeling about him and his troubling promise to "fundamentally transform" America, regardless of how well he could give a speech.
So many of us were certainly right about him, as his presidency brought about a tidal wave of problems that are still being felt to this day.
Whenever he gets on the campaign trail, as he did recently for Michigan Democrat Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, I think back to the despair I sometimes felt in those days about how easy it was for a snake oil salesman to fool so many people.
At one point during his time in office, I remember asking my mom, in frustration, her opinion on whether our country would ever find its way again, or if people would continue to elect charlatans like Obama simply because he made them "feel good" and promised "free" stuff that wasn't actually free.
Her response to me was that America always finds her way back in due time, but that we had to continue to work at it and pray about it. A lot. She told me things that deep down I already knew, but needed to be reminded of: that the fanfare and fangirling surrounding Obama and his sycophants and the era of Democrat Decadence under Obama would end soon enough.
I prayed for the future of our country, and prayed on what Mom said, and she was right. But what I didn't count on was that the person who would lead in rescuing us from the evils inflicted under the Obama administration and the woketivism that came from it would be Donald Trump.
I didn't support Trump in 2016, opting to vote for Marco Rubio in the primary (which didn't matter because Trump was well on his way to becoming the nominee at that point), and writing in Rubio's name in the general election (which didn't count), thinking to myself that it wouldn't hurt Trump because he wasn't going to win anyway. But once it became clear that he indeed was going to defeat Hillary Clinton, I didn't throw a tantrum. I simply prayed to God that he would be a good president, the person we needed in that moment in our nation's history.
And he ended up being, in my view, the unlikely hero America needed, turning the tide against woke, trans "rights," the vilification of Christians, etc.
Here we are 10 years after the 2016 election, and we're at yet another moment where things may not swing in our direction. Am I going to be unhappy if Republicans lose the House and Senate? Sure. Am I going to have an unhinged meltdown similar to what we saw from The Usual Suspects after Trump won in 2024? Nope.
I'll say another prayer for our country, its leaders, and its people. Then, Lord willing, I'll wake up the next day and fight, fight, fight in the court of public opinion all over again in hopes that by 2028 enough people in the "woke" contingent will wake up, walk away, and join us in the fight for the soul of the greatest country on Earth.
