Anyone Who Says They Know How the Midterms Will Go Is Full of It | Opinion

The political conventional wisdom about this year's election has taken so many twists and turns over the last few months that even casual observers could be suffering from whiplash.

In the late spring, with President Biden's legislative agenda appearing sunk and the media filled with stories of rising inflation and Democratic infighting, the widely accepted political conventional wisdom was that Republicans would easily sweep into power in both the House and Senate. As spring turned to summer, and with Biden having one of the most successful legislative summers in modern political history and with gas prices easing, the conventional wisdom swung wildly, and the new, widely accepted narrative was that Democrats would buck historical trends and keep the Senate and possibly even the House. Now, a month before Election Day, the conventional wisdom seems to be shifting once again, with pundits fanning out over cable news proclaiming that Republicans have regained their footing and are closing in on winning both the House and the Senate.

But what if all this political conventional wisdom is really just conventional and not wisdom at all?

Political conventional wisdom that is spit out with confidence ad nauseam 24/7 on cable news, on Twitter, and in newspaper columns across the country is usually set by two factors: polling and the theory that, in politics, the past is prologue.

The truth is our politics has been so disrupted over the last few years by forces both external—such as the changing media landscape and the increasingly fragmented way voters consume news and information—and internal—such as the increased tribal partisanship brought on by the Obama and Trump presidencies—that those traditional data points are likely no longer reliable indicators.

For example, take polling, the primary driver of political conventional wisdom. We've reached the point in the cycle where the daily deluge of polls allows partisans and pundits to cherry-pick data to support their desired narrative. But as the last few cycles have shown, the proliferation of polling has not given us a better read of elections. If anything, it has had the opposite effect. Time and time again, pollsters have missed major blocs of voters in their samples—whether that was non-college-educated voters for Republicans in 2016 or the wave of women that came out for Democrats in 2018. This is particularly true for state-based polling and is particularly acute in battleground states throughout the Midwest and Sunbelt—the very states that will determine who will control Congress next year.

As for using the past as prologue, this election is playing out like few we have ever seen. Usually at this point in a cycle, the battlefield of issues has been narrowed by voters and the two parties, and outside dark-money groups, spend hundreds of millions of dollars to define the same set of issues to a small subset of swing voters. But this cycle, the two parties seem to be running completely different campaigns. The parties aren't trying to compete for votes over the same set of issues but rather running on polar-opposite issues. Republicans are all-in on crime and immigration, while Democrats have placed their bet on abortion access and threats to our democracy and institutions. Both parties going all-in the way they have this cycle on such a divergent set of issues is virtually without precedent.

But the competing sets of issues and the lack of a defined battlefield are not the only ways this cycle seems to be different from past cycles. And they are likely not the most disruptive either.

Traditionally, midterm elections in a president's first term in office are a referendum on the sitting president and his party. Tune in to the news on any given day, and the president is likely to be one of the top stories. But it is not the current president; rather, it is his predecessor. As he has for nearly six years now, even out of office, Donald Trump continues to dominate our politics and the news cycle. The combination of his insatiable need to be at the center of attention at all times and the ongoing criminal probes into his actions in and out of office has not only kept him at the forefront of the political debate but has for all intents and purposes put him back on the ballot again. So, unlike any midterm in recent history, there is not one president who is being judged by voters this fall but rather two.

So, with one month until Election Day, what does all this mean for where the race stands and where it will end up? I have no idea. And I suspect, despite all their bluster and confidence, neither do the people who take to TV and Twitter daily and tell us how this race will end up.

What is crystal clear in an otherwise murky political environment is that we are in uncharted territory, and the traditional inputs and norms that have been used to handicap past election cycles seem to have been disrupted in ways that seem to make much of today's conventional wisdom seem as accurate as polling was in 2016.

All I know for sure is this: Keep your hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times, because the next month is going to be wild, unpredictable, and filled with many more twists and turns.

And anyone who confidently tells you how it will end is lying to you.

Doug Gordon is a Democratic strategist and co-founder of UpShift Strategies who has worked on numerous federal, state, and local campaigns and on Capitol Hill. He is on Twitter at @dgordon52.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.