Virginia, 2022, And Writing The Ending Early
Why The Conventional Wisdom Is Wrong
One of the most fulfilling parts of 2021 has been the fiction writing binge I’ve spent the year on - with the time and space that lockdown has created, it’s given me space to write, an outlet for anxieties, a way to deal with my past, and it’s fun to read the results sometimes. It’s been great, and I love it. The problem with it is that I like building worlds, and I like landing the plane - also known to normal people as finishing those stories - much less. It’s hard, wrapping everything up, but it’s especially difficult when you know your ending, and you have to write backwards, almost.
If you let the story come naturally, you end up in a position where you let the ending come at the logical point. You may know the end point of the story, but the way it ends, and the way the narratives and character arcs build to the end, is a natural evolution. If you write your ending in its entirety in the middle of the story, you end up either constrained in the story you’re telling, or you end up having to fix your ending to account for the way the story developed.
I finished a second novel a week ago, and the way I thought the story was going to end when I was halfway through ended up being entirely different to the ending I ended up writing. It ends at the same place both times, but the act of waiting to write my ending saw the characters evolve in the writing process, and in so doing, changing the ending. Had I insisted on writing to the ending I had, the story would have been much worse (although how good it actually is is up for debate) because I would have been trying to force them into a narrative, and a character act, that didn’t actually make the most sense.
It’s also why the conventional political wisdom is wrong these days.
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The average member of the Beltway, or of Elections Twitter, thinks they know the answer to how 2022 will go - Democrats will lose the House. Because this is going to happen, in their minds, everything becomes the reason why, and even if you play Whack-A-Mole with the rationales, they don’t change their mind about the outcome, because they know the answer. “History says we’ll lose seats,” is the starting answer, and when you point out history also said McConnell would be Senate Majority Leader with 52 seats after Georgia, instead of thinking that the history might be flawed, the argument changes.
“The suburbs will revert without Trump on the ballot” is the next argument, which is easily dismissed because of the (I bet you were wondering when we’d get here again) Global Fucking Realignment, and then it’s waffle about 2010, which I dismissed at length here, and eventually it’s just a mess of bad arguments. “What about CRT/Afghanistan/not calling impeachment witnesses/whatever other Beltway bullshit story of the day” is the final terrain, because people worry about 2022, but they think they know the answer, and so they need a logic. If 2022 will be bad for us, and that’s a given to these people, then we need a reason, and so CRT and cancel culture and a thousand other stories that never left Twitter get elevated as Reasons To Worry Democrats, because they’re so sure they have the answer. The problem is, they don’t.
You know who else did this? Me, for 7 months in 2020. I knew the answer, and it was 413, and Texas was flipping. Maybe you could have convinced me Ohio and Iowa weren’t, but there was nothing that could have happened that was getting me to predict red Texas. I knew the answer, and I spent 7 months working backwards from the premise it was going to be a landslide, and everything - from fundraising to polls to campaign visits - was used as the rationale for my belief. Turns out I didn’t know shit from a hole in the ground, and that’s why I’m so much more cautious about predicting 2022. I’ve said quite a bit what I think the state of play is now, but I’ve never written anything other than a loose prior - and it’s entirely possible I’ll have a GOP House Majority forecast by Labour Day 2022, let alone by election day. I don’t know what’s gonna change, or if anything will at all.
The difference between me and the commentariat is that I accept I don’t know the answer about what will happen in the future, and too many think they know it. “Critical Race Theory is the reason Loudoun County will revert” relies on the implicit certainty that Loudoun - a North Virginia suburban county that’s gone from being Obama +4.5% in 2012 to Biden +25 last year - will actually revert. We just saw this in California, where there were dozens of articles written about why Newsom was in trouble - from COVID restrictions to wokeness to cancel culture to the fucking French Laundry debacle - and then he won by essentially the same margin as 2018. Harry Enten wrote an article for CNN about how the political environment was trending right and used California polls as his evidence, and basically said “if California’s even close, it’s bad news for national Dems.” That would be true, but California was exactly as partisan for a state race as in 2018, but Enten wanted to say Dems were in trouble so he believed a shit set of polls instead of waiting for the results, because he thinks he knows the answer.
We’ve seen Dave Wasserman repeatedly say that “in a favourable midterm environment” in the last few weeks as new district lines are drawn, when the polls right now show an unchanged political environment from the 2020 election and the polling misses we’ve seen so far - mostly in California, but also in the one poll of the New Mexico 1st special election - have been errors where Democrats have been understated. That’s irrelevant, though, because it’s a Biden Midterm and therefore a theoretical Biden +6 seat in Illinois with Marie Newman in it is a tossup, but Don Bacon’s Likely R in his Biden +6 Nebraska 2nd, because he knows it’ll be a Republican friendly midterm. And yet, the case for it hasn’t been made.
History means less and less every time we get to the polls, Georgia disproved two decades of history in January, the realignment in America just got confirmed in Canada as a Global Realignment, and the expected doom for Democrats hasn’t come yet. We keep being told they’ll start underperforming any minute, and so far they haven’t. Ah, but Virginia’s gonna be close, right? No, not really, because Fox’s most recent poll gave Youngkin a 20% overperformance with Black voters compared to 2020 and a Biden +7 electorate and they still got a McAuliffe +5 result, YouGov got a McAuliffe +3 with a Biden +2 electorate, and all the evidence - from California last month and from the 2020 Montana and Missouri Governors races - suggests state partisanship is about to strongly kick in. Put another way, if Joe Cunningham is down 3% two weeks out in his 2022 Governor’s bid in South Carolina, will anyone actually believe he could win? No? Good, you’d be right not to. For some reason, the same logic doesn’t apply here.
The commentariat is fucking this up because they think they know the answer, and are trying to work backwards from the ending they wrote. The problem with doing that, of course, is sometimes the rest of the story has a way of fucking up the ending you originally wrote. I’m not saying anything about what will happen in 2022, but to respond to 2020’s wild uncertainty with certainty about 2022 is a huge mistake, but everyone thinks they know the answer.
Thing is? They don’t.