John F. Harris is editor-in-chief of Politico and author of The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House.

My son turns 14 next month. Over the past year, he has grown in height by six inches. Ponder that for a moment: If current trends continue, he will, by the time of the 2016 election, be seven feet tall.

At this rate, he promises to tower over his peer group for the next generation or more.


Of course, it’s possible that his growth spurt will level off. In that case, he is on path to fall within the Bell curve as a moderately but not freakishly tall adult male.

Current trends, after all, do have a way of not continuing.

I was reminded of this last week, as the GOP wave rolled in on election night. A right-wing friend from high school reminded me of an e-mail I wrote the day after President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election. My friend noted that I wrote then, “I don’t think that the comprehensive nature of the GOP debacle can be understated.” He asked mildly, “How would you summarize this evening’s results?”

The taunting subtext of that question required no elaboration: My political analysis is bullshit. I feel sure he did not intend to restrict that conclusion narrowly to me. Much of what is served up as political insight in modern media—as articulated by reporters, political operatives, academics and assorted gurus—is likewise B.S.

My first impulse was that of every political journalist who has his wisdom challenged: indignant self-defense. In fact, I am not ready to surrender the view I held two years ago. The fact that Republicans in 2012 could not win against a president with hum-drum approval ratings at a time when polls showed large majorities believing the country is on the wrong track speaks volumes to the GOP’s inability to attract Hispanic voters, young voters and unmarried women voters as building blocks of a national party. These are problems that could kill the party if uncorrected. As for big Republican gains last week, well, you know, mid-term elections attract different voter profiles.

My second impulse, alas, was to ruefully acknowledge the reality: A lot of what political journalists write as we try to divine larger meaning from election results involves a whiff of bovine byproducts.

At least, that is, when we issue oracular pronouncements about how one party or the other is either poised for either dominance or irrelevance “for the next generation or more.”

In 2004, after George W. Bush won re-election despite the war controversies that had battered his approval ratings, the line went like this: The turnout machine built by campaign advisers Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman was so technologically superior that—combined with the natural GOP advantage on national security—Republicans held an advantage that would allow them to dominate national politics for the next generation. Rove, in the afterglow of victory, famously declared that “a conservative era in American governance could be starting now” and discussed the possibility of a permanent majority.

Two years later, Democrats won control of Congress, and two years after that, the Obama era launched a new set of “for the next generation” narratives. Obama campaign manager David Plouffe’s data wizards had lapped Republicans in the former art and now science of voter outreach and mobilization. Meanwhile, the GOP was the party of old, white, male straight conservatives in a country that is increasingly less of all those things.

While throwing myself on the mercy of the court let me hasten to plead that there is a difference between pure B.S., and much of what colleagues I respect produce—an alloy of partial B.S. merged with some genuine measure of intelligent and conscientious effort to divine larger truths about the broad patterns shaping our political life.

Those earlier narratives that were served up with such emphatic confidence weren’t flatly wrong. They just failed to reckon with the reality of life: Current trends never continue indefinitely. Politics especially is an infinitely fluid process, refreshed continually by new issues, new circumstances and, above all, new voters with different generational perspectives. Politicians are intelligent people, whose ambitions naturally orient them to accommodate change and find a way to prosper in it.

The suspicion that a lot of election analysis is froth is not new. The columnist Michael Kinsley wrote a couple decades ago about an amusing paradox. Before Election Day, the assumption of many political stories is that the outcome hinges on minute but essential strategic and tactical calculations—the decision to move TV ad buys from the Roanoke market to Bristol, or the candidate’s choice of mousse over hairspray before the big debate. After the election, there is a pivot, and the assumption of political stories is that the results flowed from inexorable forces of demographics, ideology and national mood.

It is a more recent phenomenon, however, that journalistic and academic consensus about the broad direction of American politics has swerved so frequently.

What’s going on?

Decades ago branches of journalism and political science developed that tended to view politics through the metaphors of geology. There were long-term factors of class and partisan identity that were like tectonic plates. Every generation or so, an earthquake would come along, the plates would shift and a new set of political assumptions would shape the next couple decades.

I suspect (disclosure: this could be just more B.S.) that the fluid nature of modern life—the constancy of communication, more geographic and career mobility, weaker attachments to traditional institutions—means that politics simply moves faster. We should be studying it not as geography but as something more like meteorology. Forecasting models to predict the weather a few days out have vastly improved over the years. But they still do a weak job of predicting the weather a few weeks out.

The familiar narratives of polarization and Washington gridlock sometimes get translated as speaking to a broader paralysis in American politics, but that’s not the case.

In six of the seven congressional elections since 2000, the results had a clear partisan coloration and were strong enough to dislodge sizable numbers of incumbents who likely would have been safe in more conventional years. This happened to GOP advantage in 2002 and 2004, to Democratic advantage in 2006 and 2008 and back on the side of Republicans in 2010 and 2014.

This fluidity is historically notable. In 1994, when Newt Gingrich’s Republican Party took over the House, this was shocking because Democrats had held the chamber for 40 years. In the 20 years since then, however, House control has shifted twice and been legitimately in contention more often than not. (2014 was an exception in that few people ever thought Democrats would do anything but lose seats.) The Senate has shifted control four times.

As Yale political science professor David Mayhew flatly told my colleague Jonathan Topaz: “There isn’t any hundred-year majority.”

There is scant evidence that this is because of very many voters actually switching back and forth between parties with increasingly little ideological overlap. Instead, at a time when there is widespread distrust of government (and most other establishment institutions), and political leaders of both parties usually battle low approval ratings, elections have become grievance derbies: Which party can do a better job of fomenting disgust toward the opposition and mobilizing turnout of sympathetic voters, often by exploiting whatever transient controversies are in the news at a particular moment ?

This is an inherently unstable climate—one ill-suited to long-term forecasting.

What’s more, journalists no longer have any special claim on information or wisdom that makes my appraisal of long-term trends necessarily more credible or less speculative than yours. Anyone can study exit polls and other data. Not everyone can interview campaign operatives and scholars the way Washington reporters do, but no one with Internet and cable connections can feel deprived of their observations. Travel and door-knocking, the stock in trade of an earlier generation of journalists like David S. Broder and Haynes Johnson, did provide important texture about the national mood, but they were not really a good way to understand deep currents of politics.

So where does that leave people at places like Politico and our competitors, who should at least have something original to say about those currents?

Clinging to the difference between pure B.S. and partial B.S. might sound desperate, but to me it is a difference that allows me and other people who cover or study politics for a living to spring out of bed in the morning, the difference between employment and unemployment. Having reasonably intelligent and fair-minded people work hard thinking and talking about politics with intensity, often over many years and election cycles, is good for something. The fact that understanding is frail and fragmentary doesn’t discredit sincere efforts at understanding.

But it does dictate caution on some subjects. One of them is the infatuation with the merger of technology and politics. Parties do sometimes gain the upper hand in using technology to identify, communicate with and mobilize sympathetic voters. The GOP for years had a lock on direct mail; the Democrats have proven generally more adept at recent data-driven campaigns. But these advantages almost by definition are ephemeral, since the other party inevitably catches up or even surges ahead with the next technological innovation.

Another place for caution is in core assumptions about voting behavior. Yes, it’s true that Republicans face huge problems if they don’t improve their appeal among Hispanics and young people. But there is no reason to suppose the GOP will stand still, any more than Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party stood still in the 1990s when his party faced problems with voters who thought Democrats were too soft on crime and foreign policy. Republicans like New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez challenge the notion that the GOP can’t compete among women and Hispanics, just as Kentucky Senator Rand Paul is hoping to challenge the notion that the party can’t improve its appeal to young voters.

The record also dictates a certain humility. We should be satisfied with understanding the present—a hard enough task—rather than extrapolating current trends far into the future. I started my reporting career in Virginia, at a time when Democrats had not carried the state at the presidential level for nearly three decades. Now it’s a swing state that Obama has carried twice. Maryland, Massachusetts and Illinois are three of the most reliably blue states in the country. All three elected Republican governors earlier this month. “It’s always suspect to assume the future will be like the present,” says political scientist Ruy Teixeira, whose own 2002 book with John Judis, The Emerging Democratic Majority, predicts a structural advantage for Democrats in presidential elections for years to come.

In any event, reporting is more fun when we admit we don’t know how the plot turns out. “The future,” the late historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. liked to say, “outwits all our certitudes and ... the possibilities of the future are more various than the human intellect is designed to conceive.”

Jonathan Topaz contributed reporting.