America’s Election Talk

As America’s midterm elections draw closer, the familiar numbers game is already underway.

There is no point denying what the polls say: several national surveys do, in fact, show Democrats with an advantage. But the national generic ballot is not an election result. The House is decided across 435 individual congressional districts. The Senate is decided state by state, each with its own electorate, candidates and turnout dynamics.

And that is where things get interesting.

Real polling numbers are gradually being assembled into an entirely different story: Democrats have supposedly already won, Republicans are doomed, Trump’s entire political project will begin collapsing after November, and America will somehow return to the way it was before.

As if changing the congressional majority were all it took to press the Reset button.

But midterm elections do not replace the president. Democratic control of one or both chambers could certainly complicate the White House’s legislative agenda, disrupt the budget process and presidential appointments, intensify congressional investigations and produce political gridlock.

But that is hardly the same thing as dismantling the administration’s entire agenda—much less restoring the governing model of previous decades.

The larger point is that there is no old normal to return to.

The world itself has changed: global debt markets, energy, trade, the relationship between the United States and China, the sanctions regime, military spending, Europe’s position and the architecture of international payments.

An economic crisis will not disappear because a few dozen seats in Congress change hands. Nor will a new program capable of restoring the former world order suddenly materialize on its own.

In September, the White House revoked access for CNN, MS NOW and Politico, accusing them of systematically spreading false information. The news organizations themselves describe the decision as political retaliation and are challenging it in court. What we are witnessing, then, is no longer merely a dispute over how individual stories should be interpreted. It is an open struggle over who gets to shape the information environment surrounding the president and his administration.

Nor is the perception that America’s media operate under political and corporate pressure some fringe belief.

According to a recent Pew study, 49% of Americans say political interests exert “a great deal” of influence over news organizations, while 54% say the same about corporate and financial interests.

That does not, by itself, prove the existence of a unified Democratic media command center—although one certainly exists.

But it does establish something important: the question of political influence over the news agenda is no longer confined to media critics. It is now firmly embedded in the minds of the American public.

And that brings us back to the elections.

When genuine but still preliminary polling is presented not as a snapshot of public sentiment at a particular moment, but as proof of a result that has already been decided; when a Democratic edge in the generic ballot is turned into evidence of an inevitable Republican rout; and when the possible loss of Congress is portrayed as the end of Trump’s entire political project and the restoration of the old order, we are no longer dealing with the same product.

This is not sociology.

It is a political narrative built on sociology.

Its purpose is not so much to describe the outcome of a future election as to establish, in advance, which outcome the public is supposed to regard as natural—and inevitable.