Contact The Editor
Articles By This Author
Carlos Sanchez would be forgiven if he never made another political prediction.
In late spring 2016 Sanchez left a top staff job on Capitol Hill to work on Hillary Clinton's campaign as deputy political director. He believed in her, and perhaps just as important for someone who had always dreamed of working in the White House, he believed in her unbeatable odds.
Whoops.
There was no time to wallow after Clinton's shocking loss, so Sanchez grabbed a job working for a congressman he'd worked with before, one who not only represented a solidly Democratic seat and who Sanchez liked and believed in, but also had designs on becoming a leader in the party.
He was safe. He had potential.
He was ... Rep. Joe Crowley, whose name you may know from his surprising defeat to the 28-year old socialist dynamo Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in June.
"I'm not going to be the guy anymore who professes to know what's going on," Sanchez said, rubbing his hand through his salt-and-pepper beard on a couch in a now-temporary Capitol Hill office. "After being wrong this last time, I decided I'm just going to do the work and see where the pieces fall."
So say we all. We're within 30 days of an election, less than a month until we can finally figure out what the hell is going on. And the end can't come soon enough, and not just for those whose employment depends on an election going their way.
"I can't remember there ever being a countdown to a midterm before," said Jen Japuntich, a stay-at-home mother in Wauconda, Illinois. "And I can't look away, it's like waiting for a rocket launch."
"It can seem exhausting," said Esther Choo, a doctor in Portland, Oregon. "But in a way it's like we've been training for the midterms."
"I am sick of all the chaos and the nastiness of our politics," Michelle Obama, who's currently between jobs, said at an event in Las Vegas last month. "It's exhausting, and frankly, it's depressing."
"REMEMBER THE MIDTERMS," President Donald Trump tweeted recently, in case anyone had forgotten amid Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court hearings.
Sure, everyone in D.C. is still making predictions and filling out their nerdy House race brackets. But after a 2016 election that surprised everybody (except possibly the guy who draws the Dilbert cartoons), today's conventional wisdom on conventional wisdom is that conventional wisdom can no longer be trusted.
Case in point: The number crunchers have determined Democrats have a great chance of winning the House of Representatives, and even an outside possibility of winning the Senate. So, naturally, Democrats are in a panic.
"I've got Democratic friends who would normally go to a watch party on election night, but are afraid of crying in public if it goes against them," said Tom Manatos, a lobbyist for Spotify who moonlights as the curator of a D.C. jobs list. "It's total hysteria on the Dem side bracing for another election to be full of disappointment."
Rep. Dennis Ross, R-Fla., had a foolproof way to avoid personal disappointment. He decided not to seek re-election
"I'm just glad not to be running," he said. "The mood out there is tough."
Not that he's predicting complete doom and gloom. He remembers being on a conference call with his fellow congressmen shortly after the "Access Hollywood" tape came out, when his party was sure that they were about to suffer a humiliating defeat in 2016. While many of his colleagues decided to distance themselves from a toxic Trump, Ross spoke at one of his rallies the very next day.
With that experience under his belt, Ross says he still believes in his gut that Republicans are going to retain control of the House, even if it looks bad.
"Then again," he said. "I'm biased and may have no idea what I'm talking about."
There is a group of people, despite all odds, that still feel pretty confident, at least about their job security: political prognosticators.
"Political analysts are far from out of a job right now, and that says a lot about the nature of the industry even after 2016," said David Wasserman, who makes a living predicting the outcomes of congressional races for the Cook Political Report. "There's still an intense desire to try and know what's going to happen before it happens."
"Try" being the operative word. They tried last time and were 90 percent sure Clinton was headed to the presidency. And they try now to inform the public that just because someone has a 90 percent chance of winning, doesn't mean it's always going to happen.
"Probabilities can be a little technical and hard to understand," said Sam Wang, who runs the Princeton Election Consortium. Two years ago, Wang boldly promised to eat a bug if Donald Trump won and he followed through by swallowing a cricket on CNN. That, we could understand.
Wang is back at it this year (the aggregating that is, not the alternative snacks) and said he's learned from his mistakes. He no longer thinks it's best to give odds of winning, focusing instead on what share of the vote each candidate is projected to get. He thinks the House will likely go Democratic this year, but said it's important to know there is no such thing as a sure thing. He ended his interview with a simple request.
"Don't make me look like an idiot," the bug-eater said.
Politics has long been a haven of second chances. In 2014 a pollster named John McLaughlin bungled one of the biggest races of the year when he predicted Majority Leader Eric Cantor would win his Republican primary by 34 points, only for him to lose it by 10 to a little-known college professor named Dave Brat. And what was his punishment? Polling for the president of the United States.
But surely, after the 2016 polling fiasco, things should be different, right? Yes, the overall numbers ended up being close to right (Clinton did win the popular vote, after all), but there's something wrong with your product if most of the users feel burned after using it.
Larry Sabato, who runs an election predicting project out of the University of Virginia that he calls his "Crystal Ball," isn't particularly worried.
"I've got news for you," he said. "It really doesn't matter. Everyone will survive."
He continued: "Why does it matter if you know who is going to win a day before the election?"
Hey, we're not the ones with the crystal ball!
Sabato and others say the point of polling isn't just to predict what's going to happen, but to get people interested in politics, and also, perhaps, to help them figure out the best places to put their energy (if you're going to donate time or money, polls can help find the best bang for your buck). Should they be held accountable just because people use their product incorrectly?
Matter or not, people are addicted. The New York Times brought back their herky-jerky election-night needle to predict the results of special House races, and added a new feature that lets readers watch as polls get conducted in real-time. Pundits on television are already listing potential 2020 candidates based on ... the poll inside their gut?
The good news for everyone is that we will soon know exactly where things actually stand. There will be no more weeks with a poll one day showing Rep. Beto O'Rourke losing by nine points to Sen. Ted Cruz in Texas, followed by another poll the next day with O'Rourke up by two. No more months where the nomination of Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court will be seen as a drag on Republicans, only to be told later that it's pumped up enthusiasm among Republican voters. Soon, we will finally have election results, and you can't argue with facts. Unless ...
"What I worry about is that with the president questioning the legitimacy of our institutions, it's hard for people to trust anything," said Kristina Mitchell, a professor of political science at Texas Tech. "What's to stop people from discounting election results?"
After being on the wrong side of the two biggest political upsets in quite some time, Sanchez didn't question the legitimacy of the elections. He drove out to Montana and did some fly-fishing, and then puttered over to South Dakota to see Mount Rushmore. He tried not to think about what's next, even though the possibilities could be limitless.
He could try to work for his old boss, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., if Democrats win back the House and she again becomes speaker. He could try to figure out who would be the House majority leader in that situation and try to work there. He could try to hitch his wagon to one of the many, many Democrats who might run for president.
Or, he could stay put and admit he doesn't have the best track record when it comes to envisioning the future.
"Look, I could pretend I know what the hell I'm talking about," he said. "But nobody really does anymore, right?"
Previously:
• 07/26/17: Can a Bronx socialist help a campaign in Kansas? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will find out soon
• 06/12/17: For Trump and evangelicals, unlikely bond is undiminished
• 04/13/16: Trump's own Beltway establishment guy: The curious journey of Don McGahn
• 02/18/16: 'Meet the South Carolina Republicans who are horrified by the Trump coronation
• 02/12/16: 'You didn't hear this from me, but ...': Why South Carolina primary politics are so dirty
• 01/28/16: The secret history of the presidential debate buzzer
• 11/26/15: Marco Rubio is just the guy to win the youth vote --- or so the old folks think
