Trump will lose the election and please stop worrying

First of all, there’s no amount of worry that will guarantee that Joe Biden will be re-elected and that Donald Trump will not. Worry, as an effort, is easy. Sure, it’s time consuming, but it’s a simple process. Unlike self victimization, worry requires little to no creativity. Since most of us automatically default to worry, it’s not like we have to plan it out or pencil it into our calendars. Worry integrates flawlessly with anything else that we might be doing. We can easily multitask worry, running it quietly in the background while we go about the rest of our day.

Unfortunately, worry is useless. It is incapable of achieving a desired outcome and, invariably, it’s totally unnecessary. It’s not even an efficient stress reliever, a reliable tool for venting emotional discomfort. It’s just a steady, non-stop, mildly energetic flow of ineffective tension. At best worry flows steadily and stagnates us. At worst, worry builds upon itself, multiplies and overwhelms us.

When we worry, especially about the 2024 election, we simply suffer the loss of our democracy over and over again. Each day and every moment that we worry, we fully experience the outcome of the thing that we’re worried about.

Want to live though a 2024 Biden loss and and a Trump victory repeatedly? Just keep worrying about it. For the several months you’ll suffer a thousand election losses, none of which will actually happen. If you think about it, it’s quite silly. It’s like regularly sticking a needle into your finger because you think that one day, a needle might get stuck in your finger.

What makes the worry even more asinine is that I believe Biden will win the election. Of course, the polling is close. It was close in 2020. Actually, Trump was way ahead of every potential Democratic candidate at this point in the last election.

More importantly, polling has become such an inexact science that it’s almost useless. It’s wrong more than it’s right. Pollsters certainly haven’t figured out how to accurately asses the pulse of the modern electorate, a globally sensitive constituency that communicates on cell phones and social media platforms.

Sure, political campaigns and news outlets still rely on polling. They don’t have anything better to work with. Instead of ditching an almost useless medium, they re-live polling-Groundhog Day election after election. They spend millions of dollars for mixed results conjured up by Madame Politico’s latest dime store algorithm.

Still, it kind of makes sense for mainstream media outlets to use polling. News is partially entertainment and polling is drama, especially bad polling. If your preferred candidate is just three points behind the guy who you can’t stand, you’re going to tune into the news station over and over, hoping against hope that the polling gods will shift gears and that your politically inspired fortunes will change.

Maybe just maybe, if I tune into cable news twenty two more times in the next five hours, my guy will magically go up by two points. And, sometimes it actually happens.

It’s emotional gambling.

Forget the polls. Forget the worry. There is nothing that a babbling Trump or his malcontented cronies have done to achieve the millions of votes that he did not receive in the 2020 election. And, I know this may sound shocking, but there is nothing that Biden has done to lose those votes.

Each election since 2020 has been a grand loser for the GOP because unpopular, modern Republican ideology is nothing more than no-longer-interesting Trumpian lunacy. The campaign season need only be a wild ride if you want it to be. If you want to wallow in worry, fear and political self distraction for the next twelve months, the tools to achieve that effort are easily accessible and readily available.

If you want to experience peace for the next year, detach from the inevitable outcome and consciously stop worrying. Sure, stay informed. Cable news isn’t bad. They provide important information. Just remember that part of what they provide is also entertainment, very stressful entertainment. After all, in the end, you know that a horror movie isn’t real. It’s easy to detach. You can do the same thing with cable news. Use your common sense to discern what is relevant and what is nonsensical. And, most of all, take polling with the tiniest grain of salt.