Anderson edited "Leveraging: A Political, Economic and Societal Framework" (Springer, 2014), has taught at five universities and ran for the Democratic nomination for a Maryland congressional seat in 2016.
The midterm elections, which of course are not over, confirmed once again that polls used to predict who will most likely win an election, though they have value, do not have that much value.
Social scientists and journalists who try to use data and focus groups to predict the outcome, of one election or hundreds, must be given less attention going into an election. There was no "red wave." The Senate has stayed in Democratic hands. The House will probably go to the Republicans, but this is not a certainty. What seems clear is that the Republicans will have a slim majority if they do seize control.
The political class needs to stop paying so much attention to what social scientists, journalists and party leaders predict. The public apparently was not paying attention. The voters get bombarded with wrongheaded predictions and in some cases overcome it.
There is a better way.
In the future, the public would benefit from more normative (value-based) arguments for why one candidate rather than another, or one party rather than the other, should be followed. Arguments for why you should vote for one candidate or why you should not vote for another are both normative as opposed to factual arguments.
The key is for these normative arguments, rather than preconceived notions, to dominate the attention of voters. For example, there’s a preconceived idea that in a midterm election the party which is not represented in the White House should gain seats in Congress.
Moreover, it is not just a question of the amount of polling and the amount of normative arguments that we have. It is a question of what role these considerations play in campaigns and in party posturing overall.
In the current political environment, polls and the party predictions frame the elections, and the arguments for and against candidates take place within that framework. The framework, in other words, provides a narrative that shapes the way voters perceive the arguments for and against candidates.
What we need, instead, is a normative framework that is animated by values associated with either the party perspective or the candidate perspective.
Within those normative frameworks we do need facts to be used by parties and candidates to provide support for their arguments. Facts about crime, poverty, climate control, child care needs, inflation, taxes, infrastructure deterioration, scandals and so on.
So we have things completely backward now. Factual arguments, especially predictions (which make the case for what will in fact be the case), frame our elections. And value arguments for what voters should choose arise within these frameworks.
But we need the opposite: Normative arguments for the party perspective and/or candidate perspective need to frame elections, and within that framework factual arguments are needed to support the value positions. The overarching narratives should be about values and what parties stand for and what candidates stand for, not predictions based on polling data or lessons journalists have learned over the years.
Values supported by facts must drive our elections. Then voters will decide for themselves who to vote for and they can weigh the arguments for the candidates and consider the factual evidence they bring forth to support their policy positions and visions.
This is not to say that value positions are based solely on facts. They are not. And facts are always in dispute, which is reality. But predictions from social scientists, journalists and party leaders should be given less emphasis and not be used to frame our elections.
There are 435 Congressional elections and more than 30 Senate elections every two years, not to mention all of the state and local elections. Each race is different.
But there should be no overarching framework animated by very unreliable predictions about how things probably will be. Instead, there should be frameworks animated by forceful arguments about how things should be.
If we reverse the role played by values and facts in our elections, this would make a world of difference. How to achieve this is a different question, but it is important to set a goal worth fighting for.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivers a keynote speech at the 62nd Munich Security Conference on Saturday, Feb. 14, 2026, in Munich, Germany.
Marco Rubio is the only adult left in the room
Finally free from the demands of being chief archivist of the United States, secretary of state, national security adviser and unofficial viceroy of Venezuela, Marco Rubio made his way to the Munich Security Conference last weekend to deliver a major address.
I shouldn’t make fun. Rubio, unlike so many major figures in this administration, is a bona fide serious person. Indeed, that’s why President Trump keeps piling responsibilities on him. Rubio knows what he’s talking about and cares about policy. He is hardly a free agent; Trump is still president after all. But in an administration full of people willing to act like social media trolls, Rubio stands out for being serious. And I welcome that.
But just because Rubio made a serious argument, that doesn’t mean it was wholly persuasive. Part of his goal was to repair some of the damage done by his boss, who not long ago threatened to blow up the North Atlantic alliance by snatching Greenland away from Denmark. Rubio’s conciliatory language was welcome, but it hardly set things right.
Whether it was his intent or not, Rubio had more success in offering a contrast with Vice President JD Vance, who used the Munich conference last year as a platform to insult allies and provide fan service to his followers on X. Rubio’s speech was the one Vance should have given, if the goal was to offer a serious argument about Trump’s “vision” for the Western alliance. I put “vision” in scare quotes because it’s unclear to me that Trump actually has one, but the broader MAGA crowd is desperate to construct a coherent theory of their case.
So what’s that case? That Western Civilization is a real thing, America is not only part of it but also its leader, and it will do the hard things required to fix it.
In Rubio’s story, America and Europe embraced policies in the 1990s that amounted to the “managed decline” of the West. European governments were free riders on America’s military might and allowed their defense capabilities to atrophy as they funded bloated welfare states and inefficient regulatory regimes. Free trade, mass migration and an infatuation with “the rules-based global order” eroded national sovereignty, undermined the “cohesion of our societies” and fueled the “de-industrialization” of our economies. The remedy for these things? Reversing course on those policies and embracing the hard reality that strength and power drive events on the global stage.
“The fundamental question we must answer at the outset is what exactly are we defending,” Rubio said, “because armies do not fight for abstractions. Armies fight for a people; armies fight for a nation. Armies fight for a way of life.”
I agree with some of this — to a point. And, honestly, given how refreshing it is to hear a grown-up argument from this administration, it feels churlish to quibble.
But, for starters, the simple fact is that Western Civilization is an abstraction, and so are nations and peoples. And that’s fine. Abstractions — like love, patriotism, moral principles, justice — are really important. Our “way of life” is largely defined and understood through abstractions: freedom, the American dream, democracy, etc. What is the “Great” in Make America Great Again, if not an abstraction?
This is important because the administration’s defenders ridicule or dismiss any principled objection critics raise as fastidious gitchy-goo eggheadery. Trump tramples the rule of law, pardons cronies, tries to steal an election and violates free market principles willy-nilly. And if you complain, it’s because you’re a goody-goody fool.
As White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said not long ago, “we live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.” Rubio said it better, but it’s the same idea.
There are other problems with Rubio’s story. At the start of the 1990s, the EU’s economy was 9% bigger than ours. In 2025 we were nearly twice as rich as Europe. If Europe was “ripping us off,” they have a funny way of showing it. America hasn’t “deindustrialized.” The manufacturing sector has grown during all of this decline, though not as much as the service sector, where we are a behemoth. We have shed manufacturing jobs, but that has more to do with automation than immigration. Moreover, the trends Rubio describes are not unique to America. Manufacturing tends to shrink as countries get richer.
That’s an important point because Rubio, like his boss, blames all of our economic problems on bad politicians and pretends that good politicians can fix them through sheer force of will.
I think Rubio is wrong, but I salute him for making his case seriously.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.