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this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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It's really not. Lincoln held midterms in the middle of the Civil War. FDR held elections after Pearl Harbor. Ffs, Bush cleaned up the year after 9/11 and rode the pro-war election wave through 2004.
The idea that your elected leadership is immune to recall when you're in a state of war is anathema to democracy. It insulates unpopular leaders and empowers military dictators.
There is no distinction, save that liberals like Zelensky and hate Trump.
It makes a big difference whether the war is in your own country and touches everyone, or if it's waged elsewhere or touches only a small part of your country.
US Civil War didn't have 500 drones flying to various cities across US each day and night. If Ukraine had elections now, there would be queues on the street and those queues would get bombed by the Russia. I don't think this would have been a risk around the time of Pearl Harbour.
What is your suggestion for how the elections in Ukraine could be organized safely and so that the result would be reasonably representative?
The Confederate Army got as far north as Gettysburg, Pennsylvania by 1863. The Union Army's Anaconda Plan embargoed the entire Gulf Coast and resulted in the bombardment of cities as far south as New Orleans and Galveston. Sherman's march wrecked a trail of destruction from Atlanta to Savanah, across 285 miles. They didn't need remote controlled planes to bombard cities. They had troops outright razing cities to the ground month by month.
Do Mail In Voting. That's the same method we've been using in peacetime and wartime, around the planet, for centuries. It worked during COVID in 2020. It worked to end South African Apartheid in 1994. Mail in voting was vital to maintain democracy during mass deployments in WW2, Korea, and Vietnam. And, again, in the middle of the US civil war in 1862.
But, again, this isn't an issue of whether democracy can work. This is an issue of whether Zelensky can maintain his position as his popularity nosedives. What scares the shit out of American liberals is the idea that a popular vote in Ukraine will reveal people aren't enthusiastic about another year or three of grinding attrition with the Russians. Ukraine can't risk having an election that refutes the dogma of the hawks.
Of cpurse Zelensky won't be able to hold his position if his popularity nosedives. That's a simple answer to a simple question.
But how is that relevant? His popularity isn't going to nosedive in that manner anytime soon.
Elections are the means by which we survey a burraucrat's popularity.
Well, for that there are other ways as well. Elections are for making decisions. Popularity can be polled in easier ways as well.
But what I asked was why is it relevant that Zelensky won't stay president very long of he somehow loses his support among the people? It's a self-clarity, so I was interested in knowing why you chose to mention that.
Unless you're included in the sample group, your stance isn't being counted. Polling is great for gauging sentiment between cycles, but if you're not actually doing a fully election poll, you're effectively empowering the pollsters to set the policy (implicitly or explicitly) based on their weights and biases. Frank Luntz can, pretty famously, bend his polling group into a pretzel when he puts his mind to it.
He's the head of the government right now. He has the most to gain by postponing elections indefinitely.
Probably he does, but at the moment his support is strong enough by enough of margin that it's clear he'd win an election anyway if it was held now, so this is kind of moot.
(And then he'd be the president for the next half a decade, which might be already right after the end of the war no longer what the people in Ukraine want)
I think it's a bit of a stupid rule to have in your constitution, and I think it was probably written before 2014 when Ukraine stepped into democracy (or even before 2008, when it started seriously heading towards proper democracy). But as bad as I find the rule, it's currently in the constitution and wasn't added by Zelensky.
It does make sense that at a time like this you do live according to the constitution. Organizing elections would be against the Ukrainian constitution, and it would be a bigger problem with democracy to break the constitution than it is to postpone an election.
Especially since in the current situation an election would be massively unrepresentative. (What do you do with a mail-in election when the Russia destroys the whole warehouse where the ballots, or at least the ballots from a whole province, are stored?)
Bush was in the middle of his term a year after 9/11, I assume you mean the Republican Party?
Bush's party, the Republican Party, took the majority of the legislature after 2002 and greatly expanded the powers of the chief executive office that Bush held.
"yes" would have been much easier to type, just for your future convenience
I was a teenager around that time, and I remember Bush being insanely popular for awhile.