We Already Know How This Will Turn Out
WILSY tries its hand at uninformed pre-election analysis
I’ll admit my disdain for political punditry has a little to do with watching CNN hire a couple of my former colleagues, excellent reporters, and then turn them into performing monkeys. I’m not going to name names, because I genuinely admire them both. Suffice to say that one of them now regularly writes features where he goes line-by-line through Trump speeches or Mitch McConnell press avails and counts up the number of remarks he finds stupid or absurd.
It adds to The Conversation.
The best argument for punditry is that someone’s gotta do it. Because voters are curious to know what’s going on. And I suppose that’s true. But curious about what? Punditry tells the story of politics the way fanatics prefer to hear it: as divination. The political version isn’t much different from sports punditry. It’s basically another consumable, marketed to obsessives as insight. People like to tell themselves they tune in to the pundits to “stay informed,” but really they tune in for signals. They want to be reassured about whether the future will please them by looking for clues in the present. This goes a lot deeper than civic-mindedness.
Fanatics use politics to manage emotions, more specifically the effects of neurotic personal development. So they invest punditry with the power to hurt or (preferably) to heal. They never cop to it, but fanatics also tend to believe politics is governed by sympathetic magic, and that pundits aren’t just describing reality but in some way creating it. Which may actually be true. (I watch capital-markets pundits. And yeah, I expect them to cast spells.) At least when sports pundits congeal conventional wisdom it doesn’t affect the game. But money follows the conventional wisdom in politics, and voters often do, too.
It’s not just that fanatics are way too invested in political outcomes; it’s that political journalism is way too invested in fanatics, who chase around confirmative insight the way Rocky went after that chicken. It’s a healing journey, after all, and fanatics are fickle. This is how punditry ends up warping politics. It reduces politics to a crude binary in which each team is either winning or losing, so it’s important to always seem to be gaining advantage.
Politicians love to complain about the result — they claim to want elections to be about “the issues” — but it does cover a multitude of sins. Giving voters a choice between polarities allows your party to be the less-bad of the alternatives. That’s a game even the laziest politicians (and journalists) can play. When the coverage isn’t trying to work out who is on top, it is trying to settle who is worse.
(One hilarious entry into this latter effort is this Times piece from last weekend which attempts to work out which party is guiltier of using divisive and inflammatory rhetoric. I’ll end the suspense: It’s the Republicans. Artificial intelligence was used.)
I remember tuning in to those farcically over-populated panels of “experts” CNN would throw together in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election. You can probably guess the gist of the message: Clinton had this thing in the bag. These panels included the usual crew of gasbags — Gloria Borger, Bakari Sellers etc — and often a lone arsonist, Jeffrey Lord. Lord came branded as a Trump acolyte, and seemed to believe anything so long as it meant Trump was going to defy the expectations and win. What is with this dude? I’d regularly ask myself. His purpose seemed to be to make the Trump argument for victory sound as insane as possible. (More often than not, he succeeded.) The panels used him like one of those inflatable clowns you put in front of children.
We all know how that turned out.
Political punditry must be either too hard or too easy. I can’t decide. On the one hand, if you have opinions and also a mouth, you could probably do it. But can you also be glib? Can you sound informed and convincing?
Michael Moore was famously correct in predicting Trump’s victory in 2016. Here he is calling next month’s elections for the Democrats recently:
“If I said to you six months ago, ‘You know Kansas, right? It’s a huge pro-abortion state and this summer by a margin of 60% they’re going to keep abortion legal’ you’d think I had made a crazy statement,” he says.
“If I’d told you at the same time that in the congressional election in Alaska, a hard red state, that it’s not only going to be won by a Democrat but a Native Alaskan Democrat, again you’d have to question if I was out of my mind.”
Finally, he draws attention to Boise, Idaho, where an incumbent Republican candidate for the board of education was endorsed by a far-right group, the Idaho Liberty Dogs, and lost to an 18-year-old high school senior and progressive activist, Shiva Rajbhandari, who was also co-founder of the Boise chapter of the climate group Extinction Rebellion.
In each case, Moore says, conventional thinking was challenged.
I’m convinced. These are all signs of a coming Blue Wave. In a mid-term election. When Democrats control the White House. And the President’s approval ratings are abysmal. It also indicates nothing that one year ago the voters of Seattle — yes, I said Seattle — elected a Republican city attorney who ran on restoring law and order to the city. That was a one-off. School-board elections in Boise are where you take the temperature of a nation.
I also agree with Moore that the Democrats are smart to run on abortion and the MAGA Peril in a year when just about everyone is putting inflation and the economy atop the list of concerns. Crime is also near the top of the list, but the numbers don’t tell us whether voters are maybe just really fond of crime. In any case, voters will look past the issue when they realize that Lauren Boebert might be in a Congressional majority.
And none of this has even the slightest whiff of wish-casting, hoping for an outcome by predicting it.
Don’t agree with Michael and me? Tell it to Jeffrey Lord.