Midterm Election Results

Okay, there is going to be one political post this month, instead of entirely game and creative writing posts.

The one major thing that strikes me about the midterm elections is that I'm not sure there is any kind of coherent narrative here. The losses suffered by some of the Democrats further out to the left and some of the Republicans that tied themselves enthusiastically to President Trump suggests that both parties should be looking to the center - but then there's a number of moderate Democrats that did unexpectedly poorly, some farther left Democrats that did well, and a number of extreme Republicans that managed to survive. I'm sure eventually someone will come up with data trying to show which narrative is stronger overall, but I think the message from this one is never going to be anything other than a mixed verdict overall. Which probably means it's going to be even easier for people to read whatever they want into this one, of course.

I think this election does also suggest that we can expect close elections to continue. There are a lot of Democrats who are hoping that finding a candidate less disliked than Clinton will cure all of their ills, but the defeat of some fairly high quality Democrats this time around suggests that partisanship is just going to keep getting stronger. I worry that this also means each party will stop worrying about margins and just take any victory as a mandate to do everything they want, rather than trying to find the compromises that our system makes necessary. If that does happen, we're going to see even more gridlock than we already have.

Try as I might, I don't think I see any of this getting better soon. Demographic change might help the Democrats a decade or two from now, and the Republicans might hope that the demographic groups they're currently ignoring will be won over by economic gains, but I don't think either is going to make much of a change in the near future. I guess we'll get to see whether tribalism and partisanship rip us apart before some kind of change helps us reunify - and while I certainly am interested in the results of that experiment, the drastic nature of the consequences for failure worries me quite a bit.