With 2026 campaigns underway, pace yourselves

We’re still early in Georgia’s 2026 campaign cycle, though most viable candidates have been running for months – some longer. Or maybe we’re still late in the last cycle. We still have people demanding we debate the 2020 election results after all.  

It all seems to blur together. Mostly, it has. Even many of the official campaigns are really about the next one. It too often seems candidates aren’t running for an office so much as they are placing themselves on a trajectory. Voters ultimately decide if they get chutes or ladders.

The problem with these campaigns is maintaining the voters’ interest over a two or four year span. Campaigns live on engagement. They need constant stimulus to develop voter lists, drive earned media, show changes in internal and external polling, and of course, to fundraise. 

Much of this is done well outside the work of any specific campaign. Blurred lines between media, activists, technology platforms, and institutions – government and private – have created an ecosystem whose main output is red meat stimuli for our consumption. 

We all tell ourselves we need to change our diet and exercise more. Yet as soon as the kitchen in the outrage cafeteria produces a fresh dish, we return to the buffet line for another heaping serving.

This overindulgence is neither good for us nor for our republic. 

We know this, when we stop to think about it. But how do we ween ourselves off of what has essentially become a societal addiction? 

First, we must individually accept that we have a problem. We can’t fix the rest of the world if we can’t first fix ourselves. 

It’s amazingly easy to see the speck in someone else’s eye while ignoring the plank in our own. Too much of our politics is asserting a problem, then declaring the solution is for the people we don’t like to change while we do nothing.

That’s not an excuse to “both sides” any issue. Ultimately elections are about choosing consequences. While there are still people out there mumbling about “the uniparty” – usually as an excuse to complain about everything while offering no concrete path to solutions – we are at a time when what our major parties represent, and the actions they propose to take, are diverging at a rapid pace. 

We’re just over a year from yet another “most important election in our lifetime”, and about eight months from when primary elections will decide our nominees. The outcomes will change the future of our state and our nation. We need to be of clear mind when making the choices of who best will lead us.

Most of the noise produced by the political ecosystem during the next few months will be just that – noise. That’s not to say that the underlying events happening and that will happen are not consequential. 

We have people being shot for their political beliefs. We have churches and synagogues being targeted because of religious beliefs. We have district attorneys who refuse to bring criminal charges and judges who put people charged with violent crimes right back on the street.  

Meanwhile, you have “experts” chosen for their political ideology instead of their factual findings being replaced by other “experts” with opposite ideology and findings. We also have those who led political based prosecutions of their political opponents finding themselves prosecuted for more or less the same charges. 

Elections are always an exercise where voters try to undo the wrongs of the past while projecting themselves into a better future. Campaigns are now, more or less, about manipulating voters’ views of history while promising the undeliverable. 

If voters are going to make the best choices in May and then again in November, they’re going to need to be clear headed, focused, and discerning not only of the problems they want handled on “the other side”, but who is best to make decisions when future events put us in situations we haven’t yet contemplated.

We’ll need to pace ourselves. We must remain engaged so as we’re aware of what’s going on. We also need to shut down our screens and turn off our TV’s when we realize our bellies are getting full of whatever the outrage du jour has been served in plentiful proportions.

These are in fact serious times. We are called upon to make serious choices. They must be made not out of an induced anger, but of clear and sober calculations of what we believe is best to move us forward.