🗳️ Why We Can't Predict Elections Anymore

How all the polling in the world was still wrong about the midterms.

No red wave, just a “pink trickle” (gross), and democracy still seems intact. This year’s midterms were the best kind of election: a mostly boring one. But just like 2016 and 2020, the predictions and hype were wrong. Why?

Coverage of local politics is half-baked

Local news coverage of politics is a dead-end career.

In fact, non-profits do almost as much reporting on state politics today as traditional journalists do. As local news coverage vanishes, so too does the local beat reporter who understands the nuanced political views of residents - which often don’t fall on one side of a two-party divide. As Congresswoman Elissa Slotkin puts it:

“What we have instead is a lot of really wonderful journalists who parachute in for 36 hours, talk to a few people … you know, in a coffee shop … and then make their assessment, as opposed to knowing what is really going on …”

And those half-baked stories are amplified as gospel

The problem then is that these half-baked analyses of local voter sentiment…