When Michael Anton coined the term “Flight 93 election” in 2016, scare tactics were nothing new. Likening the election to the highjacked flight, Anton urged voters to charge the cockpit and save the country. Though Donald Trump may be “worse than imperfect,” he argued, a Hillary Clinton presidency would mean “certain death.” While the metaphor was novel, motivating voters with fear is about as old as voting itself.
That’s because it works. Studies show that campaign messages with fear are nearly twice as effective as messages without. And so, in every presidential election, each side courts votes by depicting the doom the other side would bring. Some even liken their opponent to Hitler, a man who killed two thirds of Europe’s Jewish population. Among the most famous examples of scare tactics is Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 “Daisy” ad, where a nuclear bomb explodes behind a young girl picking daisy petals. “The stakes are too high for you to stay home,” says a voice over a black screen.
While Johnson won in a landslide, the effectiveness of scare tactics may fade from overuse. There are only so many times voters can be told this is the most important election in history. Eventually, they become like Aesop’s duped villagers who tell the boy crying wolf: "Save your frightened song for when there is really something wrong!”
In this year’s election, both sides insist there is really something wrong. Flight 93 rhetoric is in full effect. Trump and Kamala Harris say “threat to democracy” so often, it is practically their pet name for one another. Repeated use of the term may aim to deprive it of meaning, undercutting the charge. If everyone is a threat to democracy, no one is.
Also undermining predictions of catastrophe is their history of inaccuracy. Though Clinton’s loss prevented her from disproving Anton’s warnings, he used similar language in the 2020 election, predicting that a Democrat victory would bring “permanent one-party tyranny.” Others echoed the rhetoric, claiming a Biden presidency would mean a “dictatorship” of the Left. If the Biden warnings proved false, why should voters believe them about his Vice President?
Harris supporters face a similar problem with their warnings about Trump: the past. They say a Trump win would end democracy and bring about fascism. But if Trump wanted to replace democracy with fascism, voters might wonder, why didn’t he do so when President? Trump spent four years as Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful military the world has ever seen. Might that not have been a good chance for a fascist to impose fascism?
Other warnings of doom under Trump fared no better. When Trump was elected in 2016, economist Paul Krugman wrote that his presidency would bring “a global recession, with no end in sight” and that markets would never recover.
And yet, there is one difference between the prior warnings and those in this election. This time, warnings also come from people on Trump’s side, from those who worked with him in the White House. No one in the Biden-Harris administration is calling Harris a threat to democracy. But, Trump’s former aides are sounding the alarm.
Trump’s Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, says he is “a threat to democracy as we know it.” His White House Communications Director Alyssa Farah Griffin says “a second Trump term could mean the end of American democracy as we know it.” His former National Security Adviser John Bolton calls him “unfit to be President.” And his former Chief of Staff John Kelly says that Trump has “nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.”
Unlike scare tactics common to every campaign, these warnings have no recent precedent. Though their content resembles the usual Flight 93 hype, the distinction is their source: people with no incentive for hyperbole. People who have seen Trump in the Oval Office and fear what would happen if he were there again. As Trump’s one-time deputy Press Secretary Sarah Matthews sums it up: “It should be alarming that the people that Trump hired to work for him in a first term are saying that he’s unfit to serve for a second term.”
As the election approaches, polls are so close that the few remaining undecided voters may determine the outcome. In Aesop’s fable, when a wolf eventually did come, and the boy sang as loudly as he could, the villagers ignored him. For undecided voters, are this year’s warnings the same old song? Or, is this one really the wolf? Trump aides say it is.
Reprinted from The Daily Progress.