Campaign Speech Lies at the Heart of the First Amendment

There's something almost quaint about having to argue this in 2024, but here we are. Campaign speech, the messy, hyperbolic, sometimes flatly wrong stuff candidates and their supporters say to win votes, is exactly the speech the First Amendment was built to protect. Not the polite op-ed kind. The kind that makes you wince. That's the whole point of a system that trusts voters to sort out truth from spin rather than trusting a regulator to do it for them.

Every time someone proposes cracking down on "election misinformation," ask who gets to decide what counts. It's never a neutral referee. It's whoever currently holds the microphone in government, a platform's trust and safety office, or a court sympathetic to one side. History is not short on examples of incumbents using "protecting the public" as cover for muzzling the people trying to unseat them. That's not a hypothetical harm. It's the default outcome whenever speech restrictions and political power sit in the same room together.

None of this means campaign lies are good, or that we should shrug at candidates who lie shamelessly. Call them out, hammer them in debates, vote them out. That's the remedy the Constitution actually assigns to bad political speech: more speech, not less. The moment you hand government the power to punish lies in an election, you've handed it the power to punish inconvenient truths too, and no administration of either party has proven trustworthy enough to hold that power responsibly.

Defending this stuff is unpopular precisely because it protects speech people hate. That's not a bug. Protecting only speech everyone already likes isn't a First Amendment at all. It's a courtesy, and courtesies get revoked the moment they're inconvenient to whoever's in charge.