My Hot Election Take Is That We Probably Didn’t Learn Much
Maybe there is no moral
The most click-worthy headline I could publish right now is probably “NEW YORK SUCCUMBS TO MARXISM!!!” Of course, since there are more Beltway Dweebs in my audience than there are sex criminals at a Roblox tournament, “SPANBERGER, SHERRILL PROVE BENEFITS OF MODERATION” probably would have done well, too. Frankly, any version of “EVENTS VALIDATE YOUR PREFERRED NARRATIVE” would work, because that’s what most modern political commentary is: Shading reality to fit your audience’s worldview so that they subscribe. Which reminds me…
Commentators of all stripes have an incentive to pretend that election night was a game-changer. Socialists and Trumpists will agree that Mamdani’s win means that the Marxist revolution has arrived, the former so that they can have a parade and the latter so that they can use that parade as a pretext to nullify the Bill of Rights. Moderates will point out that Spanberger and Sherrill won while running campaigns that were moderate, practical, sensible, shrewd, and other words that mean “designed to convince suburbanites that their administration won’t be some goddamned woke freak show.” Cable news will lead with “HUGE NEWS TONIGHT” because it’s bad TV to start a broadcast with “Kind of a boring day today — I’d watch a Malcolm in the Middle rerun if I were you.” As for political scientists, these results will lead to new iterations of the single most common political science paper, which is one that should be called: “Please Don’t Cancel My Funding! I Have a Family and No Other Skills, I Promise to Publish Splashy (And Probably P-Hacked) Results That Might Get Traction on Twitter, Oh God Please Don’t Cut Me off I Don’t Want to Work at the Amazon Store: A Meta-Analysis of the 2025 Elections.”
I would honestly love it if something exciting or unexpected had happened, for I, too, am a bored man who has squeezed all the enjoyment that can be wrung from Malcolm in the Middle. But I honestly don’t think I learned all that much from the results. Here’s what I saw…