I recently drove around the congressional district in which I grew up, Virginia’s 7th District, which encompasses the suburbs of Richmond. It’s the home of Dave Brat, the Tea Party-backed professor who stunned the political world by upsetting Eric Cantor in a 2014 primary that everyone assumed was a safe bet for the sitting House majority leader. Today, Brat is being challenged by Abigail Spanberger, a former C.I.A. operative and mother running in a district teeming with college-educated, suburban women who Democrats are counting on this year. The district hasn’t elected a Democrat since 1963, but every Republican and Democratic professional in Richmond knows that anti-Trump energy has put the race in striking distance for Spanberger. National Republicans are now playing defense, with Paul Ryan’s super PAC coming in to attack her on television and Brat playing hide-and-seek when it comes to scheduling a debate. Even two years ago, that state of play in that district would have been unthinkable.

The precinct where I was raised is mostly white and upper middle-class. Millennial parents move there for the good schools, pretty tree-lined streets, and nice mall (ahem, “Fashion Park”) that includes both a Brooks Brothers and a humming P.F. Chang’s. People in Richmond refer to the area, the West End, like people in Los Angeles talk about Orange County, or people in Cincinnati talk about Indian Hill. It’s basically a wealthy, white suburb that’s been reliably Republican since the 60s. Over the years, it’s trended purple, handing more of its votes to centrist Democrats like Mark Warner and Tim Kaine. But never in my life have I witnessed what I saw driving around that pocket of Henrico County a few weeks ago: yard signs at every third or fourth house for Spanberger, a Democrat running for Congress in a district that should be as starched-shirt Republican as it gets.

And that’s where I checked myself, because this kind of journalism-by-anecdote—the genre where Tom Friedman talks to an Uber driver with purple hair and renders some kind of sweeping cultural thesis—is supposed to be kind of unfashionable. Especially when it comes to political journalism. Since President Barack Obama’s data-driven re-election in 2012, there’s been a rush among political experts to embrace science over art, math over texture. Snark merchants on Twitter who rarely leave their desks sometimes enjoy mocking the old David Broder style of reporting, in which a big-foot journalist travels to a bellwether state, listens to voters, and tries to convey a political mood.

So I asked a Republican strategist in Richmond, Will Ritter, a veteran of Mitt Romney’s campaign, what sort of public data might support the idea that Spanberger was surging. “Other than yard signs and chatter I’ve got no evidence,” Ritter told me. “There’s no numerical backup to the VA-7 race being Dem-energized except farts and smiles.”

The lack of polling in races like Brat’s is one factor leaving Beltway types uncertain about what’s really happening in the midterms. National polling organizations have never really bothered to spend time or money polling House races, instead devoting their energy to sexier statewide Senate campaigns or approval ratings about the president. As a result, national pundits keep getting floored by the “shocking” success of insurgent Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York, Andrew Gillum in Florida, and Ayanna Pressley in Massachusetts. If they had paid attention to the yard signs and chatter, or the opinions of the people living and breathing in those states and districts, political journalists might not have been blindsided.