The winners of the 2022 elections will determine who controls the Congress and state houses. The winners of the explanation of those results will determine what the 2024 campaigns look like. What matters to voters is who won and who lost in 2022. What matters to politics is who wins and loses the story.
If social media is to be believed, the midterm elections went pretty much as predicted, were a win for progressives, a victory for the mainstream against the extreme, a mandate against election deniers, a victory for insurrectionists, a win for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and President Biden, and all about Gen Z. It came down to abortion, inflation, and democratic values. According to Dominic Pino in The National Review, Republicans will control the House because of Rep. Lee Zeldin (R), the losing gubernatorial candidate in New York. The best insight may come from Maggie Astor in The New York Times who wrote that it was “a weird year” with “some interesting regional nuances.”
Everyone agrees that at the end of the day, when push comes to shove and all the votes are counted, the bottom line is that we all know the reality of the situation is that the color red involved a water metaphor.
Pundits get paid to definitively explain how and why someone won or lost. Being on TV or quoted in publications like this one requires a plausible “that happened because of this…” Consultants get hired because they follow the explanation with “therefore do this next thing…” No one was ever invited back on CNN who, when asked about an election, said “beats me.” No consultant ever got hired for saying “it’s a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.”
We will shout our takes into the social media void, on TV and in columns like this. We will arrange Zoom briefings and write PowerPoint slides with lots of impressive graphs and clever graphics. We will tell our version of our story and say that for a fee we can turn that story into electoral victory in 2024.
The problem is Han Solo might have been right. In campaigns — especially close campaigns — most explanations are plausible. In some places, some groups of some voters might be motivated because of a specific issue like abortion or inflation. Others might be persuaded to vote by family members or peer pressure. Some because celebrities encouraged them to. There’s probably a voter somewhere who has a thing for “I Voted!” stickers. Odds are good that each of those reasons mattered to someone. Candidates may have won or lost because of where they happened to be running, who they were running against, their voter turnout operation, their famous last name, what and who else was on the ballot, a really clever Tik-Tok, or the weather.
In Expert Political Judgement, Philip Tetlock persuasively argues that political pundits — people like me and maybe you — are terrible predictors of political outcomes. We fall in love with our own theories about how politics work, we misread situations, find patterns where there aren’t any, or find the wrong patterns where they do exist. We’re the college students who are worse than lab rats at figuring out where the cheese will be, because we assume patterns when in reality experimenters randomly put the cheese on one side 60 percent of the time, and the rats just play the odds.
But pundits and political professionals have never been accused of being overly humble or circumspect. The political industrial complex demands explanations, so those of us who live in it will explain things.
The winning explanation of 2022 will in large part determine the campaigns in 2024. Consultants and candidates will look at the dice thrown all over the floor, find a pattern, and declare that pattern the way forward. They (we, I also advise campaigns, pundit, and teach students), will order the confusion and act on our order. We will say, “that because of this, therefore do this to get the next thing…” We might be right. Odds are good that we are at least in part right; with so much going on, we’re bound to get something on the nose. And we’re not entirely daft, we know the best predictor of voting behavior is party identification, that voters don’t like taxes or inflation, that the party in power tends to get blamed for bad things regardless of their culpability, and that most people would rather not think about politics at all. But odds are good that in some cases and for some races we will be wrong, or if we’re right about why a candidate won in 2022 that may not matter for campaigns in 2024. Sometimes it’s just about the cheese being one side more often than the other and winning is about simple tricks and nonsense.
Peter Loge is an associate professor and Associate Director at George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs.