Garbage-gate might not be the scandal America deserves this election cycle, but it’s the one we’ve earned.

First, Donald Trump’s campaign invited an insult comic to his Madison Square Garden rally last weekend, where said comedian proceeded to refer to Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage.” Though the campaign rapidly distanced itself from that statement, it didn’t get far, given Trump’s history of inflammatory remarks.

President Joe Biden was not content to stand idly by while the Trump campaign stuck its collective foot in its mouth by denigrating millions of voters. Biden sat down for a call with progressive group Voto Latino and jammed his own ankle clear back to his tonsils.

“The only garbage I see floating out there,” he said, “is his supporters.”

You will notice I omitted the strategic apostrophe which the Biden administration inserted into the call’s transcript, on the pretext that Biden had merely been referring to “his supporter’s demonization of Latinos.” The reason for the omission is that I have watched the video and am a native speaker of English. It’s as clear to me what the president said as it was to the White House stenographers, who, according to the Associated Press, issued an apostrophe-less transcript that was then altered by the administration’s press office.

This scandal matters little enough in itself; Biden will leave office in a few months, and Vice President Kamala Harris has said she “strongly” disagrees with criticizing people based on their votes. Yet it’s important because L’Affaire Garbage reflects something that’s poisoning our politics: an increasing tendency to demonize the other side’s voters along with their politicians.

Post readers know how this plays out among Republicans, so I won’t belabor the litany of offensive MAGA comments. They might be less attentive to how it manifests among Democrats, some of whom seem to think they can make lasting political change by anathematizing Trump’s voters along with the man himself.

This was evident when Hillary Clinton said during the 2016 campaign that half of Trump’s supporters belonged to a “basket of deplorables” who were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it.” But it was more evident after Trump was elected, and journalists and academics attributed his victory to the racism of his voters.

That thesis is certainly arguable, though I find it oversimplified and somewhat hard to reconcile with the fact that Trump’s vote share keeps improving among non-White voters. The research, as well, seems underwhelming. But what was most interesting about the debate was not the empirical details, but how personally invested many people seemed in it. They argued with more vehemence than you usually see when pondering the age-old question of why voters do what they do.

In person and online, gentle pushback to their theory was met with the suggestion that anyone who looked for another explanation was racist themselves. An entire school of media criticism sprang up, devoted to complaining that we didn’t spend enough time calling MAGA racist. When this article is published, the online comments section will be well-peppered by people denouncing MAGA voters as a bunch of malevolent bigots, as happens to nearly every column I write this close to an election.

Over the years through which this debate has raged, I wondered what this theory’s most passionate proponents thought they would win, if they were proved right. If half the electorate was truly as driven by racial animus as progressives theorized, this didn’t give liberals a path to victory; it meant their cause was doomed.

One answer is that they hoped that labeling Trump and his voters as incorrigible racists would make it unthinkable to vote for him again. With Trump himself, that’s at least a reasonable theory of politics — an incorrect one, given that he’s now neck-and-neck with Harris, but at least one that has worked sometimes, with some politicians. But calling his voters bigots or “garbage” offers no such payoff.

You could establish beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are awful people, mentally prejudiced and morally irredeemable, and they would remain roughly half of the country, and entitled to vote for the candidate of their choice. The people who got invested in this argument were acting as though the purpose of an election was to choose the right electorate, sorting the good voters from the bad ones, rather than selecting the person who will oversee our government.

This is the wrong way of thinking about politics, which is the art of hacking out some kind of workable compromise between the often-incompatible desires of 330 million diverse people. When too many people see voting as an expressive act in which you demonstrate that you’re one of the good ones, our elections turn into a battle of the vibes and the tribes. It means that we’re often voting against something we hate, rather than for something we like. And when what we hate is the other half of the country, it becomes harder and harder for the losing side to live with the results.

Megan McArdle is a Washington Post columnist.