The Rise of Hate-Based Politics in American Elections

Historically, hate-filled campaigns are rare, usually racial or tribal. But 2016 changed all that; Americans distrusted many, including Hillary Clinton. They did not all like Trump, but they despised Clinton. Trump won. In 2020 and 2024, personalized hate grew. But 2026 takes the cake for hate-based politics. The electoral cycle was decided by Trump haters – regrettable and dangerous.

Some will say “sad” for Republicans only, especially in places like Maine, where superior candidates existed for Senate, Governor, and legislature – over weak, socialist, inexperienced ones.

But the sadness is wider. No one in Maine – or, for that matter, Texas, Iowa, Ohio, Georgia, Nevada, Kansas, North Caroline, South Carolina, and Indiana – wants higher taxes, reckless spending, poor management, unaffordable electricity and housing, bad healthcare, or more unchecked fraud.

But that is what is coming. Mark my words, the impact will be intense and adverse, and will leave millions with unmanageable debt, fearing government, filled with anxiety not seen in years.

Why? Because the winning Democrats did so on hate, not talent. Worse, they are “of a type,” most militantly Progressive, openly neo-Marxist, Socialist or Democratic Socialist, pushing for concentrated power to redistribute wealth, taking from working people for the non-working.

If this sounds backward, austere, even strange, this is Marxist orthodoxy, and it is at our Republic’s door, consistent with co-opting education, allowing wider drug abuse (versus recovery), reduced law enforcement, rising crime, higher housing and healthcare costs, centralized control, and  “sanctuary status” which invites non-citizens to get free everything, implicitly for their votes.

Democrats in “sanctuary states” like Maine have already introduced bills seeking to legalize non-citizen voting. They now control the state governorship and legislature, the attorney general, and the judiciary. This kind of one-party state greenlights abuses of power, socialism, and rampant fraud.

Voices like mine, Republican candidate for Governor, and Senator Susan Collins, offered a clear and clarion warning about bad things – seriously bad things – following a Democratic Socialist win.

Even now, in the calm before the coming storm – shocking government overreach, excesses of one-party rule – there is a sense of being Cassandra, the Greek figure who made true prophecies, never believed. Many of us – despite differences with the president – know socialism is devastating.

In each of the states listed above, including Maine, and at the federal level in both chambers, expect ill-equipped, irresponsible officeholders to push policies that shock voters, further indebting these states and the federal government, concentrating power and unsettling markets.

Whenever elections are based on hate, one gets unintended consequences. These are bad for those seeking to block them and entire states or a nation, including those who voted based on hate.

In this cycle, the unintended consequences are predictable: Higher taxes, more unchecked spending, more breathtaking mismanagement, unaffordable electricity, higher rents and home prices, faltering healthcare, rampant fraud, waste, unaccountable self-dealing, and arrogance.

As night follows day, these themes are the touchstones of the next four years. Hope is that, as life goes from hard to worse, voters reverse course in 2030, if not before. Democrats ran a hate-based campaign. In history, such campaigns produce unintended consequences. They will now.