A consequential election ends with a stark choice and an uncertain future [Video]

John Duffy, the late political strategist and author, began Fights of Our Lives, his lively and encyclopedic account of the federal campaigns that shaped this country, with a simple premise — one always worth returning to at moments like this.

“Elections matter,” he wrote.

Writing in 2002, Duffy was pushing back against what he saw as the lazy cynicism of “academics, journalists and political dissenters of various stripes” who had “worked very hard for many years to convince voters in democracies that elections are inconsequential or, even worse, rigged, so that this or that social group maintains dominance no matter what happens at the polls.”

Duffy’s view was that elections — fundamentally human endeavours — are precarious and dynamic, and the choices that leaders and voters make are consequential.

If anything, the last decade of global politics has made it much harder to be complacent. With the future of Western democracy newly uncertain, the climate crisis bearing down and polarization on the rise, it can now …