By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, October 30, 2026
I have no major gripe with “the polls” (or the Poles). I
certainly don’t subscribe to the various grand conspiracy theories about how
they’re rigged. But just as a general rule, I don’t trust polls in the final
days of a long election cycle. I can’t give you a great reason for it—I just
think it’s not a good idea to get too invested in them.
Again, I don’t think they’re necessarily wrong. But like
eating a burrito before sex, ordering ceviche from street vendors in landlocked
third-world countries, sitting on a Harley-Davidson parked outside a biker bar
without permission, lending money to a guy with only one name, betting on
horses recommended by dudes without a full complement of teeth, striking up a
conversation with a dude who could have picked one of the dozen urinals that
wasn’t right next to mine, or posing for selfies with bear cubs, I just think
it’s generally not a great idea to invest in the last polls of the race as
predictive.
My argument against over-interpreting early vote turnout
data is more empirical. Even in this era of polarization and partisan identity
politics, assuming that people from Republican or Democratic precincts will
predictably vote Republican or Democrat is bad practice.
Besides, if you’re really interested in the way turnout,
polls, ad spending, and similar trends are going in the final days of the
midterms, there’s probably not much I can tell you at this point that you don’t
already know. And there are better places to go to find that stuff.
With all that said, the fact that the loved ones of
various Republican political consultants are confiscating their belts and
shoelaces, nailing shut their office windows, and changing the combinations on
their gun safes, as the consultants white-knuckle the next four days
chainsmoking unfiltered Marlboros, strikes me as a sign that the mood of the
GOP is not great for a reason. So, let’s assume the pre-election conventional
wisdom is right and Republicans are about to have the best part of John Husted handed
to them.
Indeed, let’s talk about conventional wisdom. The term
itself is old, and the concept is older still. John Kenneth Galbraith is widely
credited with popularizing the phrase in The Affluent Society. He defined conventional wisdom as the “ideas which are
esteemed at any time for their acceptability.” They don’t necessarily have to
be true, or be the only true ideas, but they are the ideas that people act
upon, and organize around, as if they have the most explanatory power. Often
they are just the most convenient ideas. As Galbraith wrote:
To a very large
extent, of course, we associate truth with convenience—with what most closely
accords with self-interest and individual well-being or promises best to avoid
awkward effort or unwelcome dislocation of life. We also find highly acceptable
what contributes most to self-esteem. … For a vested interest in understanding
is more preciously guarded than any other treasure.
We’re entering one of the more interesting phases in
politics: the moment when political conventional wisdom starts to melt enough
to become malleable. Historians often write about how time doesn’t unfold
evenly over civilizations, societies, or nations. There are long periods of
relative stasis or continuity, and then suddenly events get really fluid, stuff
changes, and then ideas and arrangements congeal around the new reality. As the
historian Fernand Braudel puts it, “History may be divided into three movements:
what moves rapidly, what moves slowly and what appears not to move at all.”
These moments of high speed go by all sorts of names: “inflection points,”
“critical junctures,” etc.
Something similar happens in electoral politics. Campaign
season starts with various theories of the case, a set of assumptions about
what voters want to hear, what they care about, what will motivate them.
Opposing candidates and parties—and many of the journalists who cover
them—subscribe to these different interpretations to one degree or another, for
all the reasons Galbraith discusses—true belief, convenience, self-interest,
etc. Then we have an election. The votes are tallied, and the fight commences to
interpret the new facts. In this brief period, conventional wisdom, or rather
various conventional wisdoms, become molten and malleable. Within days or
weeks, or very rarely months, the CW cools, congeals, and eventually hardens.
During the malleable phase, interested parties do their
best to make their impression on the moldable blob. When it eventually hardens,
it becomes a kind of golden idol, a thing we’re all supposed to genuflect to as
the thing “everybody knows” is true. Reality is never actually captured by the
new conventional wisdom. Some maverick interpreters refuse to bow before the
new CW and acquire reputations as heretics, cranks, ideologues, or voluptuaries
of ideas no longer in fashion. Their dream is to be proven right the next time
the CW becomes malleable enough to do so.
There’s always a good deal of truth to the new
conventional wisdom. But conventional wisdom is by its very nature a topline
summary, a simplified story, a theme, a narrative. It’s the picture made by
connecting the dots that a quorum of people agree to connect. In short, it’s a convention—the
word is right there. Culture is full of conventions, generally agreed-upon
rules, beliefs, practices, and assumptions. They exist because most people
subscribe to or adhere to them. But there are few conventions that everyone
agrees with or observes.
Every election produces a conventional wisdom explanation
for why one team lost and one team won. That’s fine. But it’s also
insufficient. For starters, it leaves out contingency, accidents, human agency,
etc. For instance, if Ken Paxton loses the Texas Senate race, we’ll hear a
great deal about grand themes of changing demographics, outdated ideas, etc.
But if John Cornyn had been the nominee, it’s highly unlikely that the GOP
would have lost that seat. The point is not that ideas and ideology don’t matter,
but that they’re not the only things that matter. Paxton is a gargoyle. That
matters, too.
Of course, that will be one of the things that gets
pounded into the new idol of conventional wisdom. Trump will be
blamed—rightly—for putting his ego and interests above those of the party and
endorsing Paxton instead of Cornyn. If Paxton wins, the triumphal claims of
“Red Texas” will be reinvigorated and the mockery of James Talarico will be
vindicated. It’s all part of the ritual.
It appears that we’re going to have a “wave” election. In
wave elections, bad candidates can win and good candidates can lose. People
with better arguments can lose to people with worse ones. Campaigns that did
everything right can be defeated by campaigns that made what should have been
fatal mistakes. This isn’t sour grapes from me—far from it. While there are
many Democrats I don’t want to see win, and a few Republicans I don’t want to
see lose, I think Republicans deserve to lose. How much what they “deserve”
should be something anyone cares about is entirely subjective.
The molten period has begun. The CW is starting to melt
like the wallpaper glue in Barton Fink’s room. This period is what some of us
call the “precrimination” phase. “Precriminations!
If you wait until Election Day all the good blaming will have been done.” I
love this phase. Twenty years and one day ago, former House major leader Dick
Armey got in his precriminations a week out from Election Day in the Washington
Post in an essay titled, “Where We Went Wrong.” Why were Republicans
about to be crushed in a “rout”? Armey wrote, “The answer is simple: Republican
lawmakers forgot the party’s principles, became enamored with power and
position, and began putting politics over policy. Now, the Democrats are
reaping the rewards of our neglect—and we have no one to blame but ourselves.”
Four years later, Princeton professor Paul Starr refused to join the finger-pointing at Obama for veering
too far to the left, inviting the coming GOP “tea party” wave in the 2010
midterms. “Excuse me if I don’t join in the ‘precriminations.’”
President Trump loves precriminations because his whole life is one
long story of working the refs. My favorite is when he explained, ahead of the 2022 midterms, “Well, I think if
they win, I should get all the credit—and if they lose, I should not be blamed
at all.” In 2024, he proclaimed, “If I don’t win this election, and the Jewish
people would really have a lot to do with that if that happens, because at 40
percent, that means 60 percent of the people are voting for the enemy.”
Still, I have been
surprised by how little precriminating he’s done. Oh, he’s done plenty by
normal standards, but he is not someone who cares much about normal standards.
Still, you can be sure he’ll insist that but for the failure to pass the SAVE Act,
Republicans would have won. All of those illegal immigrants in … checks notes …
Kansas stole the election. The “Will the real Slim Shady Dan
Sullivan please stand up” dirty trick —and it is a dirty trick—in Alaska could
become an obsession that roils our politics for months if Mary Peltola narrowly
wins and gives control of the Senate to the Democrats.
I think the relative lack of precriminatory spin can be
explained by the fact that until this week, Trump was sure that declaring he’s
on the ballot would work with voters. Now it seems like reality is setting in.
That doesn’t mean he’ll ever accept that talking rapturously about John
Husted’s ass wasn’t brilliant. He’s more likely to believe the Ohio race was
rigged. After all, he’s convinced himself that his ass discourse gave Husted a
10-point bump in the polls.
James Blair, the architect of the GOP’s midterm strategy,
is the locus point of precriminatory energy right now. If he was a prison inmate,
he could walk through the yard and even the biggest dudes and guards would give
him a wide berth, not out of fear of him, but fear of getting caught in the
crossfire or catching a stray shiv. If the Republicans get smashed in a
Godzilla-versus-Bambi steel cage match, I have no idea how much blame Blair
will actually deserve, but I am positive he will get more than his just portion
because Trump will accept no portion at all.
But the precrimination phase is always a subdued affair
compared to the far more glorious post-election recrimination. You don’t want
to be too open about inevitable loss for fear of being blamed in the
finger-pointing frenzy for demoralizing your voters. But once the votes are in,
the Festivus bunting and punchbowls will come out.
No one will be shocked that I think Donald Trump and his
enablers will deserve infinitely—like literally infinite times—more blame than
he will accept or his praetorians will countenance. There will be time to
discuss all that if the election goes as the current conventional wisdom thinks
it will.
But as I said before, the conventional wisdom is never
entirely accurate. The conventional wisdom draws on data and facts, but it is
ultimately a story, and stories don’t have to be entirely true or internally
consistent. I think proof of that will be quite obvious next week. Democrats
will simultaneously make two contradictory arguments: The election will be both
a referendum on the Trump presidency and a referendum on Democrats’
ideas (which, in their telling, are superior). There will be elements of truth
to both claims, but both claims cannot be entirely true. If millions of voters
are primarily voting against Trump, Trumpism, and Trump-fueled
corruption, that means some, probably sizable, fraction of them are not voting for
Democratic ideas.
One reason Trump has such high unfavorable ratings is
that he subscribed to the false conventional wisdom he and Republicans bought
into after 2024. Trump has governed as if every single Trump voter was fully on
board with the MAGA agenda, as if Hispanics voted for mass deportation, and as
if trade-dependent workers wanted full-spectrum trade wars in every direction.
Some voters simply voted against Kamala Harris, not so much for Trump. He
believed that he defined MAGA—fair enough—but he also believed that every Trump
voter was a MAGA voter. He was wrong, as defections over the Iran war, the
Epstein files, Greenland, etc., proved. He and Stephen Miller subscribed to the
ludicrous notion that Trump had a mandate to do whatever Trump (and Miller)
wanted.
If Democrats—once again—overread the election returns and
think they have a mandate to indulge their hearts’ desires, they’ll fall into
the same traps they set for themselves in the Biden and Obama presidencies.
That’s why the fight over the conventional wisdom matters
so much. The CW creates the permission structures and path dependence of
politics. And our politics have been so staggeringly stupid for so long because
the conventional wisdom has been a mandate for stupidity.
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