The most important US midterm trends I’m seeing | Molly Jong-Fast
The word dirge is doing heavy lifting in this piece, and I think it's the right one. A referendum implies a question being answered, but a dirge is just a mood, a slow gravitational pull toward something ending. That distinction matters because it means the usual political calculus, who's up, who's down, what message lands, might not apply this time.
Voter anger reads like chaotic energy to me, the kind that doesn't show up in polls the way you'd expect. Both parties seem to treat it as a weather system they can predict, but anger reorganizes itself, feeds on its own momentum. The Republicans lulled into thinking Trump could ride this wave might be misreading the whole thing, because a dirge is a slow exhale, not a rally cry.
I'd want to know how much of this anger is aimed at the system itself rather than at any one party. If that's the case, both sides are in trouble, and we've seen this pattern in other complex systems, weather, markets, ecosystems, where the people in charge keep watching the wrong variable. This midterm might be one of those moments where the model fails and we only understand it after the fact.