Why both candidates are terrible

Log into your account. Forgot your password? Password recovery. Recover your password. Get help. Thursday, November 11, About us. How do voters select a candidate when no one they like is on the ballot? Choosing to reject In a study we ran online in April, we showed people only Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as the two candidates for president.

Attacked but not hacked: How secure was the US election? Read now Attacked but not hacked: How secure was the US election? Article Level: 1 Introductory. Florida just wants it over After a long, bad tempered campaign, the main desire from voters in Florida is not for Trump or Clinton, but just for release from the electoral cycle.

Read now Florida just wants it over. What does the US election mean for Europe? Read now What does the US election mean for Europe? Copyright: Dreamstime. Copyright information. Publication details Originally published : Monday, 3rd October Be the first to post a comment Leave a comment. Sign in or create your OpenLearn account to join the discussion.

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Find out more Support us. Second, the makeup of the hater vote likely differs from that of Bernie Sanders, falls in this group. The question is whether these haters will disproportionately vote for one candidate, as they did in The share of haters in the electorate could grow or shrink in the coming months, too.

But a watchdog that barks "wolf" every minute starts to lose credibility after a while. Back when I was more in the business of dispensing relationship advice most of my friends are married now , I was fond saying you shouldn't move in with your significant other until you were ready to marry that person.

When you scrutinize too much, you see faults. When you focus on the faults, you see deal breakers. If we spend almost two years looking at these candidates mostly trying to find fault with them, it's no wonder they start to look pretty bad. It's a long, drawn-out electoral process, by far the longest in the world.

It creates a long and brutal struggle that can't help but make most of our candidates look worse for all the wear. On top of an increasingly aggressive media looking for faults see reason No.

With each election, there is more money spent on advertising, and more of that advertising is negative. The presidential election was by far the most negative on record , with more than 80 percent of ads classified as negative. Like presidential races, House and Senate races have also grown more and more negative over time , in part because more and more money is coming from outside groups.

Like houseguests and fish , candidates start to stink after a while, especially when everything in our campaign media system is designed to tear them down. Certainly, we should have some reasonable time to evaluate and assess our candidates.

But that period should probably be closer to two months than almost two years. What do we want in a president? Pretty much everything. As Brendan Nyhan is fond of pointing out, we want a superhero. A Green Lantern. So we build up these ridiculous expectations. Every Republican genuflects before the ideal of Ronald Reagan, but with each passing year, the ideal of Ronald Reagan slayer of communism, fighter for freedom, ruthless champion of small government becomes more and more separate from the reality of the actual Ronald Reagan whose record of raising taxes , tripling the debt , and negotiating with dictators now borders on apostasy to Republican Party values.

Of course we don't like our candidates. They can't be who we want them to be because we want things that, collectively, are not possible. We say government is too big , but we like all of its programs. And who's to tell us we can't have it all? Only somebody who doesn't know how to overpromise in a way that will ultimately disappoint us. Also, we are collectively in a pretty foul mood these days. We're a tough crowd to please. Moreover, as an electorate, we are actually even more divided than the simple red-and-blue nation dichotomy implies.

Sometimes we think about this in terms of the "primary" voters versus the general election voters, with the primary voters seen as being more ideological.