The 2024 presidential election deserves a name matching its dreadfulness. 

My mother used to say that there were some Yiddish expressions that are better at describing things than English words are.

She was right.  2024 is the “Oy vey!” election.

“Oy vey!” Think of being so exasperated and so upset that you want to slap the side of your head and scream. Or instead of slapping your head, burying it in the sand.

Oy vey is “woe is me” on steroids, “auwe” with a full mouthful of wasabi and a veil of tears.

Forget for now which candidate you like and instead think about the election as a whole. The 2024 election is already a noxious mix of anger, fear, withdrawal, disappointment and disgust, with a large dose of ambivalence that makes the poison even more potent.

To make sense of this sad mix and its confounding consequences, think of the electorate as a combination of two groups.

The Haters: those who know their choice and fear and loathe the opponents. The ones who say the other side is beyond wrong. It’s a menace.

Full disclosure, most of my friends are Haters. Most people who talk about their favorite candidate are Haters too.

Haters are strongly attached to one political party, and consistently vote for its candidates. Haters are thinking “oy vey” because they believe that if the opposition candidate wins, catastrophe looms.

The other group is the Double Haters, a term that Trump campaign operatives coined in his race against Hilary Clinton. They are the significant number of voters who can’t stand either Biden or Trump.

I’m not saying that any of these hate-based views are wrong. They are understandable. That does not make 2024 any less awful. In fact, it makes the election even more so.

The awfulness boils down to two things. One is that both Joe Biden and Donald Trump are flawed candidates, in some ways historically flawed. The second is whatever the issues, the dominant overall message will be about fear and hate.

‘Those Two Guys Again? Oy Vey!’

How’s this for voter unhappiness? Over half say that neither Biden nor Trump is fit to serve a second term — Biden because they think he is incompetent and too old, Trump because they think he is dangerous and corrupt.

Both Trump and Biden are, for presidential candidates, unprecedently unpopular with mutually terrible approval ratings.

As one writer put it looking at a recent poll in Wisconsin, a swing state where Trump and Biden are running neck and neck, the candidates’ political weaknesses are “glaring — almost fatal” except when they are running against one another.

Two lame horses in a horse race.

Republican voters are reasonably but not overly enthusiastic about Trump. Whatever their fears about Trump, Democratic voters are not enthusiastic about Biden.

The choice between two damaged candidates for voters, many of whom feel “meh” about them, is not exactly “Happy Days Are Here Again.” More like “Here we go again.”

Which brings us to the importance as well as the mystery of those Double Haters.

‘A Pox On Both Your Horses’

The importance of the Double Haters arises from this cauldron of disappointment and disdain.

About 20% of the electorate are Double Haters. That’s a large number, probably a little bigger than in 2016 when both Clinton and Trump were also extremely unpopular. Their number is large enough for many analysts to predict that the key 2024 constituency is this group of people who think both candidates are unfit.

It’s too early to tell. We don’t know how likely the Double Haters are to vote and whom they are likely to choose if they decide to cast a ballot.

One poll has Biden with a 12-point lead over Trump among Double Haters, which is unusual since Trump generally gets the votes of people dissatisfied with both candidates. Another shows the two are even.

If people think both candidates are so bad, why do they vote at all? Are many of the Double Haters chronic non-voters, or do they resemble “ambivalent voters” who go in and out of voting depending on the candidates and the situation?

Two things stimulate ambivalents to vote. One is if they perceive a stark contrast between the candidates.That does not sound like Double Haters because they put both candidates in the same basket of bozos.

Above all, fear and anxiety get ambivalent voters to the polls. Both the Biden and Trump campaigns are acting accordingly.

“Neither is serving up hope,” Marcela Valdes says about these campaigns in her article about ambivalent voters. The Trump strategy is to play on fears about immigration while Biden’s is to stress threats to democracy.

In short, both campaigns are spreaders of the very things that make 2024 so off-putting and sad.

An enormous number of people will cast their votes not out of enthusiasm but out of various degrees of fear and hate, protecting themselves from bad things rather than moving forward with better ones. Playing defense.

Understandable, but in terms of what this kind of election does to the social fabric, it’s awful because whoever wins, 2024 is going to enhance the political pathologies that have been around way too long.

The 2024 presidential election will be very much like the last two. It will be a reflector of society, not a corrector or a connector.

There’s so much sadness, so much sourness about 2024. I don’t mean the sadness and sourness voters may feel about the chance their side will lose the election. 

I mean the sadness that comes from taking a step back from our choices and realizing how sullen, pessimistic and concerned folks are about the whole thing.

Some very smart people think that the 2028 presidential election could break this pattern with a “transformative” candidate able to put together a new coalition based on the changes going on among both Democratic and Republican voters.

That’s one kind of change. Another is more from the ground up, recognizing that relying on politics is part of the problem. Our political beliefs have seeped into and polluted our everyday lives.

That change requires a real cultural shift that would make it possible for people to accept the limits of politics and rely more on other ways to build a better society and a better self. I’ve discussed this before.

That’s all about then. This is now. For now, 2024 makes me want to slap the side of my head and bury my head in the sand.

Say it one more time with feeling:

OY VEY!