Pay no attention to those pundits behind the curtain
Professionals get paid to opine on anything and everything whether or not it matters. At election season, they handicap the horse race. Who’s up? Who’s down? What do the polls show? Last week. This week. They “what if” elections to death in commentaries with less shelf life than Liz Truss. Or a lettuce.
Why we still pay attention to polls and pundits after so many rounds of bad guesses is beyond me. As I was reminded the other day, they were wrong about Clinton sealing up the Democratic nomination in 2008, about Romney winning in 2012, about Trump’s loss in 2016. Biden was a dead duck in the 2020 primaries, etc. Not to mention exit and other polling.
Joe Biden, with slim Democratic congressional majorities and Sens. Manchin and Sinema dragging their own party, will get nothing done in the face of Republican stonewalling? The professionals were wrong about that too. Despite party misteps and dysfunction.
Mike Lux and his American Family Voices team want to remind everyone just what Democrats have accomplished under Biden in a “ridiculously long” political ad. It’s not likely to get network coverage or airtime, but it is a reminder that Democrats came to govern the republic.
It’s the the small, unsexy things no one writes breathless commentary about that make a difference in people’s lives. A friend on the Olympic Penninsula this week complained that, because the state had reduced the number of ballot drop boxes, he had to drive 30 minutes to mail his ballot at the nearest post office. Little stuff matters.
Republicans seek office to sabotage what they can’t profit from. And to shrink government small enough to fit in your uterus.
Elections aren’t won in our heads, on TV, or in the newspapers. They are won on the ground. Democratic canvassers here are in NC-11 out-knocking the rest of state. Will it be enough? For some candidates, yes.
But as Sen. Elizabeth Warren likes to say, you don’t get what you don’t fight for.