Humans, and even political pundits, have a natural inclination to want to create patterns and narratives out of chaos, and never is that more obvious than during midterm elections, when they are called upon to make sense of thousands of different outcomes that hinge on hundreds of different idiosyncratic local issues. Sometimes those pronouncements are anodyne, obvious and mostly harmless: “Americans are still waiting for a national leader,” perhaps. Or the equally timeless and meaningless nostrum, “Candidates matter.” But amid the hyperbole of the Trump era, analysts’ attempts to paper over the country’s restlessness with bland truism are both a failure of imagination and a disservice to those Americans who have poured their labor, their money and their lives into their communities. I understand the desire to tidy up the sprawl of democracy. There were more than 6,000 state legislative seats up for election this year, plus thousands of sheriffs and school board members, judges and county commissioners. There were 155 statewide ballot measures and even more local ones. And the results were, I suppose you could say, all over the map. Grand narratives are attractive but unattainable, as the contours of individual races are as unique as the people running in them. Candidates have personal strengths and weaknesses; constituents’ interests may not align perfectly with party agendas; precincts have their own unique brews of social and economic forces. New York City’s only Republican borough elected a Democrat to Congress on Tuesday, which had far more to do with commute times on Staten Island than with President Donald Trump.
