A cliché that partisans from both sides trot out before each presidential election, warning ominously of the impacts if the other side were to win.
We haven’t even had the 2014 midterm elections yet, but people already are saying this about 2016. "I have been very clear that, in my view, the 2016 election is the most important election of our lifetimes," Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz recently told National Journal. "Our nation teeters on the brink of a precipice. And I believe 2016 will be an election like 1980 about two fundamentally different visions for America.”
In Tennessee, Jason Zachary – who unsuccessfully challenged Rep. John J. Duncan in the GOP primary – echoed that view. “I will work to unify conservatives in the 2nd District,” Zachary pledged. “We must be unified heading into the 2016 elections. It will be the most important election of our lifetime.”
Democrats are equally prone to such hyperbole. Liberal writer Jonathan Cohn, on the eve of the 2012 presidential balloting, argued in The New Republic: “The gap between what Obama and Romney believe—and between what each man proposes to do—is larger than it has been for any election I can remember.”