On Election Day, We All Get to Be Haley Stevens and Pick the (Hopefully) Less Lousy Candidates

However they voted, Americans waking up Wednesday morning can probably sympathize with Rep. Haley Stevens (D–Mich.), who surprised campaign watchers by rescinding her support for her party's Senate nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, and endorsing Republican Mike Rogers in the race. After her past harsh words for the GOP hopeful, Stevens seems an unlikely Rogers fan. Instead, it appears she concluded that he sucks less than the Democrat and cast her lot accordingly. Most voters can sympathize.

In the past, Stevens called out Rogers as a " MAGA grifter " and " an out-of-touch, out-of-state millionaire ." That's pointed, but it's standard-issue political rhetoric for 2026. Those taunts pale in comparison to the charge, leveled in her video announcing the about-face , of "hate… from our Democratic nominee." Stevens also criticized El-Sayed's association with Hasan Piker, the communist-curious influencer who frequently lashes out at Israel and Jews .

Stevens, whose pro-Israel stance is well-known, broke with El-Sayed after he refused to denounce an antisemitic ad targeted at Rogers that had been produced by a PAC associated with Piker's uncle, media personality Cenk Uygur. Earlier this year, El-Sayed also infamously shrugged off a terrorist attack on a Michigan synagogue by saying "hurt people hurt people."

It's easy to see how Stevens could conclude that a grifter is less odious than El-Sayed's inclinations.

Americans seem to make similar calculations as their political choices swing wildly between America's two entrenched major parties, through the ideological mutations suffered by those organizations.

Americans Habitually Pick What They Hope is the Less Awful Option

In May, Pew Research reported that "58% of U.S. adults have an unfavorable view of the Republican Party" while "a nearly identical share (59%) have an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party." Twenty-six percent can't stand either one.

That's not to say the Democratic and Republican parties no longer have enthusiastic partisans—they certainly do. True believers loyally cast primary ballots to select party standard-bearers who seem increasingly capable of ginning up excitement among a small segment of the population while repelling normies. In 1988, the earliest year surveyed by Gallup , voters roughly divided themselves in thirds among Democrats, independents, and Republicans. The two parties now each claim the support of just over a quarter of the electorate while independents represent 45 percent of voters.

Ultimately, those independents generally fall into line to vote for Republicans or Democrats, but they do so as less-bad alternatives to what they really dislike.

"Majorities of Republican leaners (56%) and Democratic leaners (64%) say a major reason they lean toward their preferred party is that the other party's policies are harmful," Pew noted last month. "Relatively few Republican leaners (34%) and Democratic leaners (27%) say a major reason they lean toward their preferred party is the perceived good of its policies."

The Trick Is Selling the Other Guy as Worse

We've created a political system in which everybody gets to be Haley Stevens for a day—or much longer, really, given the now never-ending nature of campaigning. We all pick the (we hope) less bad option.

The trick, of course, is deciding which candidate or party is awful rather than evil, and therefore less undeserving of a vote and election to political office. That's why so little of our political discourse delves into the relative merits of competing policy proposals and so much involves warnings about the inevitable doom to befall us if those people win. We hear very little "candidate X is great" and a lot of "candidate X is a corrupt pedo who will raise prices and end the republic."

That's pretty much the tone of the political ads in the piece of Arizona where I live.

What's remarkable is that there's little evidence that political advertising works. A 2020 Yale study found that "ads' effect on whom individuals intended to vote for was…a statistically insignificant 0.007 of a percentage point." That said, 2021 research from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management found some impact from political advertising, but that "negative ones were more effective at swaying voters' decisions."

Advertising also boosts name recognition. So, if you're going to do it at all, it makes sense to go with the odds and the tone of the moment and embrace the dark side.

That doesn't mean voters all come to the same conclusion about which party or candidates are more repulsive. Based on their values and priorities, and the degree to which they're angry about the state of the world around them, Americans make very different decisions about who sucks less. They argue about those conclusions with friends, neighbors, and strangers who make contrary choices about who to vote against, with participants absolutely convinced that this time they've identified the real danger.

Buyer's Remorse Is the Inevitable Outcome

Often, these debates take place among people who came to different conclusions about who was the bigger threat in the last election cycle, and the one before that. Voters then typically suffer buyer's remorse over the conduct of politicians who emerged victorious from the last round of balloting.

"Since 1946, there have been 20 midterm elections," Robert A. Strong, a senior fellow at the University of Virginia's Miller Center, wrote in January. "In 18 of them, the president's party lost seats in the House of Representatives. That's 90% of the midterm elections in the past 80 years."

In September, a survey by Navigator Research "found 18 percent of 2024 Trump voters regretted their vote." That's pretty close to the 20 percent of voters who cast their votes for Joe Biden in 2020 that told Zogby pollsters the next year they regretted how they filled out their ballots.

In a world where many people cast votes against the candidates they think are worse, it's unsurprising that dissatisfaction with the victors is a regular feature of the political process.

It's fair to ask, at this point, who I'm voting against. Well, after years of trying to parse the most pressing danger in each election cycle only to see the winners, some of whom I supported, treat the aftermath of the election as a hold-my-beer moment, I decided not to cast a ballot at all.

This year, I experience no buyer's remorse for my political decisions. I only have to suffer the consequences of others' bad choices. Like Haley Stevens, I'm sure they all hope they chose less wrong.