Frank Bruni’s latest New York Times column makes a case for optimism in the Democrats’ quest to re-take the Senate. In surveying their long but improving odds, he indirectly raises an issue with contemporary political prognostication that has received insufficient attention. Over the last few decades, and certainly over the last ten years or so, as American politics have become more polarized and close or funky outcomes more normal (e.g., two presidential elections out of the last five in which the popular vote winner did not win the presidency), coverage of politics has been subjected to increasing levels of professional, political science-type expertise that has made polling and other expert research a larger and more familiar part of the public discussion. As a former poli sci student myself, this development in some ways deeply pleasing — welcome to my world, America! — but unfortunately all this professionalism has obscured the fact that political science is not actually science with verifiable theories and predictable outcomes. Exhibit A is election night of November 2016, when we witnessed the upset of the century in terms of polls and the expectations set by the common wisdom.
Of course politics can be measured and surveyed to greater or lesser degrees. The problem, though, is not just that there is a general tendency to forget the limitations of this approach, but that we might allow this forgetting to in turn blind us to the possibilities of politics, and to turn the prognostications into self-fulfilling prophecies. Some of the dangers along these lines can be seen in discussions around not only the fate of the Senate, but around the Democrats’ possibility of taking back the House of Representatives. The generic ballot polls asking people to choose between Democrats and Republicans has narrowed significantly since blowout numbers earlier in the year, yet any on-the-ground assessment shows massive and arguably growing Democratic enthusiasm to support their candidates, kick the GOP’s racist ass, and get out the vote in a highly fire and fury manner.
Bruni’s reference to trends being in favor of the Democrats gets at a particular limitation of an overly analytical political model. It is simply part of reality that political opinions can move and that change can happen; too obsessive a focus on the state of play each minute of each day can systematically blind us to these basic facts, which are of course also necessary aspects for democratic politics. It may be that the political polarization that helped usher in this deep-focus political coverage also carried with it a bias against seeing the possibility of change in such an environment.
For the sake of our democracy, it's critical that the Democrats win back both the House and the Senate, but it is as important that they run on a progressive, pro-democracy platform that signals a clear repudiation of Trump’s efforts to subvert our system of government and run working Americans into the ground. The immediate battle is Election Day 2018, but the larger fight will continue well after that: to reform U.S. politics and the economy so that our nation cultivates and empowers citizens who are dedicated to our commonwealth, and no longer mass produces marks for whatever Trump 2.0 the GOP might try to inflict on us next. We need to make profound change that can’t just be measured in poll results and survey responses.