The beauty of Russia’s presidential campaign season is that it’s a short twelve weeks. Which is good, since its novelty wears off quite quickly.

The drama between candidates is mostly a scripted spectacle. Enthusiasm is a concoction. And in terms of policy and vision, the campaign is bereft of content. Increasingly since Vladimir Putin took office in 2000, politics has mattered less and less during election season, when it goes into a kind of hibernation. It’s immediately before and after the campaign period that the political atmosphere tends to grow most intense, as ruling class elites jockey for position, spoils, and influence. Since the dawn of the millennium, the candidates challenging Putin haven’t mattered much. And today they matter even less.

Vladimir Putin is set to win his fourth presidential bid in today’s election. But it’s wrong to call it an election. It’s really a referendum on a single question: do you want Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin as president for six more years? A vote for Putin is yes — but so is a vote for any of the other seven candidates: Ksenia Sobchak (Civic Initiative), Pavel Grudinin (Communist Party of the Russian Federation), Maxim Suraykin (Communists of Russia), Vladimir Zhirinovsky (Liberal Democratic Party), Sergey Baburin (Russian All-People’s Union), Boris Titov (Party of Growth), and Grigory Yavlinsky (Yabloko).