“Voters Are Smarter Than the Media”: The Pundit Class Misjudged the American People

For weeks, the political-industrial complex was sure that these 2022 midterm elections would be a bloodbath for democracy, a “red wave”—or better yet, a “red tsunami”—crashing over America. “Here’s the thing about elections: When they break, they usually break in one direction. And right now, all the indicators on my political dashboard are blinking red—as in, toward Republicans,” Blake Hounshell wrote on October 19 in the New York Times’s flagship politics newsletter. Guess what? Not only was the dashboard not blinking red, it was blinking blue. Hounshell wasn’t alone, as gloomy headlines in Axios and Politico and elsewhere signaled doom… Read Full Article