With Election Day hours away and early voting increasingly popular, many of us may not need one more appeal to vote. But with turnout in the three most recent federal midterm elections straining to reach the 40 to 50% mark, it’s clear that millions of Americans choose to sit on the sidelines when the occupant of the White House is not on the ballot. Of course, a conscientious American can decline to vote and often has good reason not to prefer either candidate. Whatever case can be made about voting for “the lesser of two evils,” doing so can be tiresome — and in recent years the difference this strategy makes has been put to a severe test.

Is 2026 likely to be any different? On the basis of the advertising campaigns being run across the country, cynicism seems rational. The negativity of advertising on all sides seems to have hit a new low. Vulgarity, name-calling, personal accusations, AI-generated mirages, and corruption charges have dominated spot after spot. More importantly, very little of the ridiculously expensive ad buys out there discuss any of the major issues besetting the nation or address what the candidate will do to address them. Name an ad that discusses the mortal coils being wound in the Middle East, offers ideas to deal with the massive and growing national debt, addresses 7.5% mortgage interest rates, or suggests ways to restore respect for life and marriage. The public has little idea how much money is spent — and wasted — on these ads and on generous commissions for the companies that craft and place them.

Pronouncing a “plague on all their houses” would be completely natural. If the crosstown bus is headed for Hades, wait for the next one. But such a view would be wrong for a variety of reasons. A habit of non-voting — of washing one’s hands of the whole business — did little for Pontius Pilate’s long-term reputation. It also failed in its short-term objective, as he played an indispensable role in the condemnation to death of an innocent man.

So, in what practical ways is this disappointingly run election important, indeed vital? First, its successful execution is essential to show that, once again, no matter what turmoil grips the country, we can stage a peaceful election, determine its outcome (promptly in almost all cases), and move on the swearing-in of representative bodies at every level of government. The situation has been one of “wars and rumors of war” — fraud and rumors of fraud — talked about at every turn but seldom occurring in fact. Extending that record of orderly elections another two years, even bitter years, matters.

Second, no matter what one’s political leanings, this midterm represents a national decision on the final two years of a tumultuous administration that has in many ways thrived on controversy and contest. Will the next two years extend those themes with yet another round of hearings, indictments, investigations, and next-to-no policy debates or changes? Is there any chance that turning toward a new chapter of leadership in the country, with mammoth questions more aggravated than ever as the stakes increase, will induce us all to dig deeper into manifold dilemmas and demand more of officeholders on all sides? Or will we fall back asleep and watch as our government borrows trillions of dollars and pursues practices like “gender transitioning,” commercial surrogacy, and large-scale genetic screening in campaigns to farm a crop of better babies for the elite?

One election will not answer these questions, but it will set a course. For pro-family Americans and Christian voters, the election bodes major impact on the sanctity of life and the multiplying issues under that rubric. While he takes various occasions to deride a Supreme Court he views as insufficiently suppliant, President Trump has accomplished a transformation of the federal courts like no other Republican president achieved for more than half a century. Should the U.S. Senate fall into the hands of today’s Democratic Party, and the 2028 election goes south as well, the achievements in restoring constitutional self-rule the Trump court has advanced will be swiftly undone. Preserve a GOP-majority Senate and a fair opportunity exists to strengthen and extend an originalist high court after the departure of its two oldest members, Clarence Thomas (78) and Samuel Alito (76).

With Republican retention of the Senate, Justices Thomas and Alito could decide to retire with reasonable confidence that their replacements will reflect a conservative judicial philosophy. That result would ensure the durability of the court’s originalist rulings for a generation to come absent a politically perilous court-packing scheme from the Democrats, which would inflict major damage on our form of government. We would no longer have, as Alexander Hamilton put it in Federalist 78, a branch of government to adjudicate the gravest disputes, a branch that has “no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society; and [that] can take no active resolution whatever.” The founders’ vision of a judiciary that “may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment” will be lost in perpetuity.

Pundits are largely predicting the GOP will lose control of the House of Representatives on Tuesday. The stakes there are equally huge. Granted an opportunity to moderate their views on any number of topics where they are extremely unpopular with voters, like the invasion of girls’ sports by male athletes, Democrats have instead encouraged the candidacies of liberal extremists and socialists. The platform of the Democratic Socialists of America is a bracing document. It claims to be for the working people of America but champions the generation-destroying practice of abortion up to birth, a calamity that robs from working families the most valuable form of wealth human beings will ever have — their children.

The 2026 ballot also features four crucial state initiatives on abortion whose outcome will represent national, as much or more than, local news. In one of its most profound miscues, the Trump administration altered the 2024 GOP national platform to suggest that the sanctity of human life is a local matter. Defeats at the ballot box in several states in 2022 had given credence to that approach and have contributed to repeated inaction from the White House and the FDA on distribution of abortion pills without regulation across state lines. The new reality of abortion via the mails has all but abolished the possibility of effective abortion limitation in the states without a federal role.

The four states whose voters will act on Tuesday include two with a pro-life heritage — Missouri and Idaho — and two whose recent history has pushed the envelope toward legalization of abortion on request. Will pro-lifers prevail on at least two of the ballot questions this year? Again, the stakes could not be higher as GOP voices for life in Washington, D.C. will quaver once again if pro-life voters cannot prevail in the popular vote in these locales.

The continued deterioration in respect for human life at all stages in our nation is self-evident. The most recent example is the dropping of all charges against a North Carolina couple who used legally obtained pills to induce abortion of their child at 31 weeks’ gestation, allegedly allowing the baby to be immersed in a toilet after it survived the birth. The pills were reportedly obtained from Virginia by mail. State laws proved unavailing to avert this tragic crime, but in truth the entirety of our medical and social systems is at fault for incidents like these. Death via the mails can come to anyone.

No single vote or election will turn around a nation that has shirked so many responsibilities and forsaken so many of its blessings. We have forgotten too how much of our compact as free men and women rests not on a voluminous gallery of laws but on the customs and practices that, if followed by a virtuous people, make laws less necessary and communities more prosperous. As the poet W. B. Yeats once wrote, “How but in custom and in ceremony are innocence and beauty born?”

America’s politics at this moment is decidedly neither innocent nor beautiful. Casting a vote, uncertain of the outcome and not overconfident in the impact, each of us as Americans exercises our birthright. We become participants in the drama, even if only to decry much of it, and we honor the prices paid by those who went before us and sacrificed to the full.

This year marked the last in the decades-long series of events Family Research Council titled Pray Vote Stand to muster Christian witness in public life. On November 3, 2026, that call remains — if you and others you know have not gotten to the polls, please do so. You are vital.