OPINION:
Elections are here again.
They are noisy, partisan, expensive and often exhausting. Politicians make extravagant promises, attack their opponents and bombard voters with advertisements.
Yet beneath all this commotion lies one of the greatest achievements of modern civilization: the ability to correct political mistakes peacefully, regularly and without tearing the country apart.
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As Americans prepare for the Nov. 3 midterms and Taiwanese voters look toward their Nov. 28 local elections, including the dramatic Taipei mayoral race, we are witnessing democracy at work.
Democracy’s real strength is not that it always produces good leaders or wise policies, but that it gives people the power to change course when things go wrong.
Every politician is susceptible to arrogance. Every governing party eventually risks confusing its own interests with those of the nation. Elections interrupt this dangerous tendency, reminding those in power that their authority is temporary, conditional and ultimately belongs to the people.
Nothing humbles a politician like the prospect of losing an election. Campaigns force officials to leave their comfortable offices, listen to angry constituents, explain failures and defend decisions they would rather forget. This is the practical meaning of vox populi, the voice of the people.
The American midterm system is particularly ingenious. Think of it as a college midterm examination. As a professor, I know that students who receive feedback only at the end of a semester often discover their mistakes too late. A midterm tells them where they stand, what they have misunderstood and what they must improve before the final exam.
American democracy works similarly. Presidents serve four-year terms, but every two years, voters elect the entire House of Representatives and roughly one-third of the Senate. They can change congressional control, restrain presidential initiatives and demand policy adjustments — without removing the president or provoking a constitutional crisis.
Midterms also offer a corrective to political extremism. Parties that stray too far from ordinary voters’ concerns risk losing power. Politicians consumed by ideological battles may discover that voters care more about jobs, inflation, public safety and competent government.
Elections do not eliminate partisanship. They provide a regular, peaceful outlet for political frustration.
Taiwan offers an instructive contrast. Its president and national legislature both serve four-year terms without an American-style nationwide legislative midterm.
After the 2024 elections, President Lai Ching-te took office while opposition parties — principally the Kuomintang and the Taiwan People’s Party — secured a legislative majority. The result was prolonged confrontation over budgets, legislative authority and the president’s agenda.
That confrontation helped fuel Taiwan’s Great Recall movement in 2025, when activists attempted to remove some of the most intransigent, partisan opposition legislators before their terms expired, though all recall efforts ultimately failed. Supporters saw the recalls as necessary accountability; opponents viewed them as partisan attempts to reverse legitimate election results.
Four years is a long time for a divided government to remain locked in political warfare without a scheduled national legislative election. Taiwan’s recall mechanism provides a remedy, but it is no substitute for the routine accountability of American midterms.
The U.S. can change the balance of congressional power every two years without resorting to a nationwide recall campaign. Taiwan’s 2025 Great Recall Movement functioned as a grassroots political corrective to the island democracy’s lack of a midterm electoral mechanism.
In communist China, the fundamental problem is not simply that elections are absent but that the ruling party has made itself virtually immune to accountability.
The Chinese Communist Party claims that one-party rule delivers efficiency and stability by eliminating electoral competition. What it actually eliminates is the people’s power to dismiss those who govern them.
The CCP investigates, judges, disciplines and ultimately absolves itself. It decides what constitutes success, what counts as failure and who must take the blame. The public has no independent electoral means of challenging that verdict.
This creates a dangerous political culture. Leaders who never have to face voters become accustomed to issuing commands rather than answering questions. Criticism becomes disloyalty, dissent a security threat.
Over time, unchecked power breeds an arrogant, aggressive, imperious ruling party convinced that its authority is beyond challenge at home and that its will should be imposed abroad.
Communist China constitutes the bloodiest regime in human history, with an estimated 80 million unnatural deaths in its decades of totalitarian rule. Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward produced one of history’s deadliest famines. The Cultural Revolution devastated Chinese society for a decade.
The early opacity and mismanagement of COVID-19 under Xi Jinping’s administration exacerbated a pandemic that ultimately resulted in an estimated 15 million excess deaths worldwide, including more than 1 million Americans.
In these cases, the concentration of political authority and suppression of dissent allowed disastrous policies to continue long after their consequences became evident.
Who was held politically accountable for these failures? No national election allowed Chinese citizens to judge the leadership’s record. No opposition party could campaign on an alternative policy.
Democracies also make serious policy mistakes, but their leaders face independent scrutiny and the possibility of electoral defeat. In China, political survival depends principally on loyalty within the ruling party, not the consent of the governed.
The lesson is unmistakable: When a government cannot be voted out, its mistakes can become national catastrophes. When rulers face no effective public accountability, their greatest incentive is often not to correct failure but to conceal it.
The American Founders understood this danger. James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51 that “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”
Democracy’s noisy arguments, frustrating compromises and constant campaigns are not necessarily signs of weakness. They are part of a system that allows political conflict to be settled without repression or revolution.
The real test of a political system is not whether its leaders make mistakes, but whether those mistakes can be exposed, corrected and punished without bloodshed.
So when Americans complain about another exhausting election season, they should remember what is at stake. The same goes for Taiwanese voters navigating their own contentious democracy.
Elections are democracy’s periodic examinations. They do not guarantee that governments will always pass. They guarantee that governments must answer to the people.
• Miles Yu is the director of the China Center at the Hudson Institute. His “Red Horizon” column appears every other Tuesday in The Washington Times. He can be reached at mmilesyu@gmail.com.
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