Five weeks to… “the most important election of your lifetime!” (Right…)

Surely all our readers have heard this meme more than once from the politicians, the influencers, the celebrities, the talk show hosts and callers… and no doubt family, friends, and neighbors.

“Get out! Vote! It’s important!” We are told the fate of humanity depends on this election. Just like it did last election. And the one before that, and the one before that one.

Bob Malone is a correspondent who provides a wee bit of sanity in this discussion:

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Three hundred sixty-six of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives are not seriously in play this November. The Cook Political Report, which handicaps congressional races for a living, rates them solid for one party or the other. Just twenty-one are genuine toss-ups.

Think about what that means. Five out of every six House races are effectively over before the first ballot is printed. In most of America, the decisive political act was not Election Day. It was drawing the district lines.

If you live in one of those 366 districts, your representative is extraordinarily unlikely to lose in November. The real danger comes in the primary, where turnout is a fraction of what it is in the general election. That changes who matters. Your representative answers first to the relatively small number of voters who actually show up for the party primary. If you belong to the other party, or simply skip the primary, you barely enter the political calculation.

You still get to vote in November, of course. You get the sticker. You get the ritual. But in practical terms, you have very little ability to fire the person supposedly representing you.

And here is where the system gets even more interesting.

Two private political organizations largely control whose names appear on those primary ballots and which candidates receive the money, infrastructure, endorsements, consultants, voter data, and institutional support necessary to win. Between them, they have divided nearly the entire American political marketplace. Neither organization appears anywhere in the Constitution.

Economists have a word for competitors who fight furiously over market share while sharing an enormous interest in keeping everyone else out of the market. They call it a cartel.

That is the part of American elections nobody is fighting about, and it is the part that matters the most.

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Cartels, we are told in our high school (and college) history and social study classes, were outlawed by Congress way back in 1890. That is 136 years ago.

But that obviously applies to our situation today. We have a governmental cartel, from DC right down to the tiniest village and special district governing board, the smallest county, and everything in between. It is a cartel that consists of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. Two wings of the same vulture seeking out the next corpse to feast on.

It is a cartel that many groups have sought to defeat, to break up, to even call attention to. But there are so many who benefit from it and its exploitation of the body politic, of the people of these States, that such efforts are virtually always doomed to defeat. Whether it was a Bull Moose Party, Dixiecrats, a one-man (Ross Perot?) effort, the Libertarian Party, or just a frustrated and free-spending independent effort? They have all failed for 160+ years.

Indeed, we submit that the greatest threat to the Cartel is internal Dem or GOP squabbles. But what we have now is in nearly perfect balance. While some States (and other governments) are very definitely one or the other wing, many (and therefore the FedGov) are so evenly split between the public platforms and commonly-assumed differences of the two.

Can lovers of liberty take hope in noting that two-legged stools are incredibly unstable?

We may see, in a few weeks, whether or not that is a forlorn hope or not.

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Source: https://freedombunker.com/2026/09/29/five-weeks-to-the-most-important-election-of-your-lifetime-right/