I pride myself on my ability to make some of the most accurate political prognostications in the game, but I have a feeling that this year’s midterms are going to make a fool out of almost all prognosticators, me included. I’ve never seen an election remotely like this one, and the weirdness is coming from many quarters.
Let’s start with the media environment. I’ve actually been watching almost no politically related television for the simple reason that almost none of it has anything to do with the upcoming elections, let alone actual issues that might be taken up by the next Congress. The media has been keeping the country almost in an election blackout, with coverage mostly related to conflict in the Middle East and the Ebola virus (see, for example, current front-page of CNN.com). I don’t know how to account for this fear-heavy media coverage, but I do know that it cannot help the Democrats that they have not been able to get any kind of aspirational message in front of the electorate. I’m tempted to blast the party for incompetence, but the media simply isn’t covering any political messages at the moment. If the Democrats had a compelling message, I can’t honestly say that things would be appreciably better because the electorate would never hear it on the news.
So, this election about nothing is a new thing, and while I can anticipate that this favors the Republicans, I can’t figure out how disastrous this media environment is on, say, a scale of one to ten.
The second weird thing is the gigantic sample of senatorial and gubernatorial elections which are showing either contradictory polls or polling that is consistently within the margin of error. The Democrats seem to be doing better in North Carolina than they are in Arkansas, but I can’t really be sure that that is true. The polls are so tight in so many places, that the possibility exists for a bloodbath for either party (despite the apparent closeness of the races) or for an election which is totally muddled, with each party carrying off roughly half of the contentious contests.
The third weirdness is the prevalence of strong third-party challengers. We’re seeing this in Maine and Alaska’s gubernatorial races, as well as in the Senate races in Kansas and South Dakota. In fact, in Kansas (Senate) and Alaska (governor), the Democrats aren’t even running official candidates.
Finally, while the media is largely ignoring any substantive aspects of these elections, they are delivering a steady drumbeat of analysis that predicts giant Republican gains and a heavy repudiation of the president. But that outcome is not only much in doubt, the very closeness of these contests undermines the validity of the repudiation narrative. In the Senate, at least, almost all of these close races are in states that Mitt Romney and John McCain carried in their campaigns against the Barack Obama, yet they have not been able to put any of them away. In fact, the Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell is in real trouble and just threw millions more into his campaign in an effort to ward off defeat. This is not what would be happening if red state America was in a mood to deliver a knock-out blow to the president and his party.
When I add all this strangeness up, I’m left in unfamiliar territory. I struggle to avoid letting my mood determine my predictions. Sometimes I feel gloomy and think that we are going to lose across the board in almost every close election, and other times I feel optimistic and think that the pollsters are being much too pessimistic about Democratic turnout in the battleground states.
Before too long, we’ll have some results, although the final verdict on this election may not be made until all the recounts and runoffs and caucusing decisions are completed sometime in January. We’re going to have a bunch of losers who lost despite getting 47%, 48%, or even 49% of the vote. Are those politicians really such losers? Does losing by a point or two or three mean that the public has delivered a massive repudiation? What if you lose by such a narrow margin in a state that the president lost by double digits when turnout was at its highest?
I will suck it up an make my final predictions before the polls open on November 4th, but I’ve never been less confident in my ability to get my predictions right.
I expect to look like a dumbass this year, although I expect the same for most everyone else, too.
