The next time we meet on these pages, our country will have elected a new president of the United States.

Maybe.

Hopefully.

With the election firmly in our faces, I can’t help but wonder how each side will react regardless of the results.

You’d think all involved would be celebrating the end of political ads bombarding them at every turn, but I digress.

As we all know, the last election was strongly contested by conservatives who could not believe Americans disliked Donald Trump enough not to vote for him. Similarly, in 2016 liberals had a tough time accepting the fact that Americans existed who disliked Hillary Clinton enough to clear a path for Donald Trump to win that election.

I hate reminding my liberal friends of this fact, but many top-ranking Democrats (including Clinton herself) publicly questioned the legitimacy of that election afterward. So it came as no surprise that someone with an ego larger than the Mexican border would follow suit and do the same thing when Trump lost in 2020, albeit more vociferously.

History shows there have been a handful of presidential elections that were highly questioned by those who didn’t win. Go back to the year 2000, when George W. Bush barely edged Al Gore out in that election. Remember the term “hanging chads?“

What many people forget about that particular election is that Bush lost the national popular vote, the first to do so since 1888, with only the Electoral College saving him. That also curiously marked the first time in recent history that the Electoral College and its legitimacy were questioned regarding presidential elections.

But you can go back to 1960, 1912, 1876, and even 1824 to find presidential elections that were “stolen“.

In fact, in 1824 the election result was so tangled and convoluted it had to be decided by the House of Representatives. Eventually, John Quincy Adams secured the victory, notable for being the only election since the passage of the 12th amendment where the presidential election had no one win the majority of the electoral vote. It also marks the only time in our history that a candidate with the most electoral votes did not become president because a majority of 270 is required to be able to win and four different candidates divided those electoral votes among themselves.

Remember, even in the year 2000 social media and the Internet were not a factor in stirring the flames of distrust regarding the honesty of our elections. Believe it or not, there is already word of pro-Trump factions aligning themselves to declare this 2024 election illegitimate before it ever even happens (curious to see what they’ll do about that if he wins).

I also find it curious that we can take photographs of galaxies and celestial bodies literally millions of light-years away from our planet but we still can’t come up with a 100% viable and secure way to vote for our president. I don’t know about you, that just seems very odd.

Of course, that fact would never be deliberate – would it?

And, like me, I know a lot of you are conflicted about what to do regarding this election. Honestly, I don’t have any sage words of advice to offer you at this point. It does appear the margin is basically razor thin for each candidate heading toward election day, and there’s no doubt that undecided voters will make the difference one way or the other regarding the outcome.

The only thing I can add here today is that historically speaking, people who don’t particularly have any sort of real allegiance to either party or candidate will go into the voting booth still trying to decide which way to go – and that being the case, more often than not their wallet will dictate how they cast their vote. That’s not an endorsement of either candidate, for what it’s worth.

I do have to say it is encouraging that both sides now are recognizing that any unbridled flood of illegal immigration from anywhere is not in the best interest of our country’s health, so I feel like that issue alone will also impact how some independent voters cast their votes.

Regardless, just keep in mind that we have had many other contentious elections in the past, and we as a nation have come through those and made it to the other side intact. I can only hope and pray that the result will continue after Tuesday.