Stop over-interpreting close victories

Earlier this week, “mainstream, moderate” Democrat David Crowley beat democratic socialist Francesca Hong in the Democratic Party primary for governor of Wisconsin. This is almost certainly a good thing for Democrats’ chance of keeping the Wisconsin’s governor’s office, which has been occupied by the moderate, boring and popular Democrat Tony Evers for the last eight years. But it was also unexpected, because Hong had been leading Crowley by double digits in pre-election polls.

The result has been another whip-sawing of the national media narrative about the moderate vs. progressive struggle which is said to be defining Democratic Party primaries. So far this year, that narrative has been all over the place. Every time a progressive or democratic socialist wins a primary, the media heralds it as the takeover of the Democratic Party. Then every time a moderate wins a primary, the “end” of the takeover is said to be upon us, with progressives having “failed”. We are constantly being told that our overall impression of the state of the left ought to change completely on the basis of the latest primary result.

What I would like to ask everybody to do instead is to calm down.

The United States is a country that is split almost fifty-fifty between Republicans and Democrats, and where national elections are usually won by just a few percentage points. This means that if you tell some sort of totalizing story about what an election “means” or what it has revealed about the “soul of America”, you are often way over-interpreting something that in reality could have gone either way.

For instance, when Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, this became the basis for all kinds of hot takes about the “soul” of the “real America”, the values of the “heartland” versus the “coasts”, etc. But in reality, if the weather had been slightly better (or worse) in parts of the Midwest or if Hillary Clinton had bothered to visit Wisconsin or if James Comey had handled the announcement about Clinton’s emails slightly differently, Clinton could have won in 2016 and people would have been flinging precisely the opposite take.

This doesn’t, on the face of it, invalidate anybody’s takes about anything. It just means that when you want to reach conclusions about the underlying values, desires and goals of the American electorate, you shouldn’t be telling a different story just because Hillary Clinton got 48.2% of the vote rather than 49.2%. There is just not that much difference between those two numbers and pundits ought to be straight-up about that.

I feel like this truth is also being disregarded in coverage of Democratic primaries this year.