Teacher Takes Notes

A teacher reads the US midterms

My pediatrician once told me something about raising small children that I’ve never forgotten: with little ones, make small changes. A drift, not a shift. Move the bedtime by ten minutes, not two hours. Introduce one new food, not a new diet. Change that happens too fast triggers resistance. Change that happens slowly gets absorbed before anyone thinks to object.

I kept thinking about that sentence this week, watching American politics. But first I owe you an explanation of why a Language and Literature teacher is writing about it at all.

Why a teacher is writing about this

Let me start with a claim, and then I’ll complicate it : )

For most of human history, the most exalted thing you could be was a teacher. In the Indian tradition the guru stands almost above the gods. I know that’s a romanticised, even orientalist, picture, and the reality of any ancient teacher’s life was surely messier. But the status is real, and it’s worth asking what happened to it.

My suspicion is that we traded our voice for our compliance. Somewhere along the way the profession began to define itself by adherence: to standards, to frameworks, to the next requirement on the list. Each one reasonable on its own. Together they made us people who are busy rather than people who are heard.

Here is what I think we forget. Teachers are positioned differently from most professionals. Nearly everything we do in a day is oriented toward someone else’s future: a child’s understanding, confidence, chances. I won’t claim we are wiser than doctors or nurses or social workers, who also give of themselves in ways I admire. But I will say that a profession whose daily work is aimed at the interest of someone other than itself has earned a hearing on how a society should be run. Societies already trust us with their children. If we can be trusted to guide the young, we are not out of our depth discussing the world they are inheriting.

So I’m going to make myself heard. Not as a political scientist, which I’m not, but as a teacher who reads carefully, checks claims, and tries to model for students what it looks like to hold a view and examine it at the same time. That’s the deal I’ll keep in every post: my view, my evidence, and the best objections to both.

What happened

On 3 November, Americans voted in the midterms. Major outlets projected that Democrats won control of both the House and the Senate. NBC reported at least seven Senate seats flipped, in states including Kansas, Iowa, Texas, Ohio, Maine, North Carolina and South Carolina, and projected the largest House majority in nearly two decades. CBS reported the president’s approval at 38 percent, historically low for a midterm, and that 89 percent of voters called the cost of living a major or crucial factor. Democrats also flipped governorships and state legislative chambers. Counts were still being finalised as I wrote, so treat every figure here as provisional.

Then came the reaction I want to examine. Many cynics, on the left and the right, say it makes no difference: new faces, same machine. Democrats and Republicans, in this telling, are two arms of one donor-funded system, and elections just rotate the branding.

My thought, as an observer

I don’t fully accept the cynics’ conclusion, but I think they’ve noticed something real, and I’d like to put it in my own terms.

Picture a car with a gear lever. Society keeps shifting between two positions, and the vehicle, the economy and the political system we’ve built around it, keeps moving in broadly the same direction. One gear changes things fast and visibly. The other changes them slowly and with more gentle language. The fast gear is obvious; it provokes resistance because you can see it. The slow gear is the pediatrician’s drift: change spread thin enough that nobody can point to the moment it happened.

That intuition has respectable relatives in the social sciences:

• Incrementalism. Charles Lindblom argued in a famous 1959 essay that real policy is rarely a bold redesign; it’s a series of small comparisons and adjustments, “muddling through.” Political systems tend to move by small steps.
• Shifting baselines. The marine biologist Daniel Pauly noticed that each generation of scientists treats the depleted state of the ocean they first encountered as normal. Slow change resets what counts as normal. Whatever came before is forgotten.
• The frog in the pan. The story says a frog dropped in boiling water leaps out, but one in slowly heated water stays put until it’s too late. It’s a vivid metaphor for habituation. It is also, as modern biologists point out, false: a frog gradually heated will jump out. I’ll keep the metaphor because it’s useful, but I’ll tell you it’s a metaphor. (There’s a lesson there about the stories we repeat because they feel right.)

Now the harder question: is there evidence that the system itself, rather than either party, constrains what any election can change?

The strongest piece is the Gilens and Page study (2014). Using roughly 1,800 policy questions from 1981 to 2002, they found that economic elites and organised business groups had substantial independent influence on policy outcomes, while average citizens and mass-membership groups had little or none once those other forces were accounted for. They also noted a strong status-quo bias: change is hard to get regardless of who wants it. If their picture is right, it supports the cynics’ core claim: the machine is partly indifferent to which party wins.

And there is a specific kind of change that fits my “drift” idea, though I need to be careful here. The political scientist Jacob Hacker uses drift as a technical term, and his meaning is different from the pediatrician’s. In Hacker’s work, drift is change through inaction: institutions stay on the books while the world changes around them, so their effect quietly erodes. He argues this has been among the most pervasive dynamics in US social policy since the 1980s, and a very effective, low-visibility way of rolling back protections. It’s a cousin of my metaphor, not the same animal. But it carries a related warning: the quietest forms of change can be the most consequential.

Where my own metaphor strains

I promised you the best objections, so here they are, and they are not small.

First, the parties have not behaved identically. Larry Bartels, in Unequal Democracy, analysed post-war income data and found large, consistent differences by the president’s party: families in the lower and middle of the distribution did markedly better under Democratic presidents, with higher growth and lower unemployment, while Republican presidents saw gains skew toward the top. The differences are small at the top and large at the bottom. That is hard to reconcile with “one and the same.”

Second, the picture has shifted over time, which partly helps my argument and partly hurts it. The economist Lane Kenworthy, reviewing Bartels, noted that since the 1970s the link between presidential party and income distribution has been much weaker, and that the partisan gap shows up mainly in pre-tax, pre-transfer income. So there’s evidence for convergence in recent decades. But “weaker” is not “gone.”

Third, the “oligarchy” study is contested. Omar Bashir’s replication critique argued that the Gilens and Page model explains only a small share of the variation in policy outcomes, that the preferences of the wealthy and the average citizen are highly correlated (so they often win together), and that results hinge on opaque coding choices. Others found that even when the affluent win, resulting policies don’t lean systematically conservative. The authors have published a rebuttal. The honest summary is that the study is influential and disputed, and its data stops in 2002.

Fourth, and most important for my own claim: the post-election agenda itself shows real differences. NBC’s reporting noted that Democrats now hold leverage to restore enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies and reverse Medicaid cuts. Whether they succeed is an open question, and whether it counts as meaningful change is exactly what cynics and optimists will argue about. But a fight over whether millions of people keep healthcare subsidies is not a fight over branding.

So I’ll refine my thesis. I started with “same change, different speed.” The evidence supports something more modest and, I think, more useful: the parties often differ in direction and in who benefits, yet both operate inside a system with a strong status-quo bias and heavy donor influence that limits how much any election can alter. The lever isn’t connected to nothing. It’s connected to a machine with a lot of friction.

What a teacher takes from this

If I teach my students one thing from this episode, it’s how to judge the claim “nothing will change” without either swallowing it or rejecting it out of hope.

1. Judge outcomes, not faces. Elections change who is in the room. The test is whether specific policies change: who gets covered, who gets taxed, who funds the campaigns. Track those, not the headlines.
2. Be suspicious of any total theory. “Both sides are identical” and “this election fixes everything” are both too clean. The evidence points to differences with limits. Be wary of a story that flatters your mood.
3. Notice tempo. Fast change is visible and gets resisted. Slow change is easy to miss. Ask not only what is changing but how fast, and whether anyone has designed it to slip under the threshold of notice.
4. Don’t let cynicism become the lever. Cynicism is comfortable, and it is also demobilising. If every outcome is predetermined, there’s no reason to act, which suits anyone who benefits from things staying as they are.

And for my fellow teachers: you are allowed to have a view, and you are allowed to share it. What makes it worth hearing is the habit we ask of our students every day: show your evidence, name the objection, and be willing to revise. We spent years learning to follow standards. It’s time to remember we also taught ourselves how to think.

I’ll keep watching the policy outcomes over the coming months and write again. I’d like to be wrong in public, with evidence, rather than right in private without any.

References:

• CBS News, NBC News and CNBC live coverage and results of the 2026 midterm elections (3–4 November 2026).
• Gilens, M. & Page, B. (2014). Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens. Perspectives on Politics.
• Bashir, O. (2015). Testing Inferences about American Politics: A Review of the “Oligarchy” Result. Research & Politics.
• Bartels, L. (2008). Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age. Princeton University Press.
• Kenworthy, L. (2008). Presidents and Income Inequality (blog review of Bartels).
• Hacker, J. (2004). Privatizing Risk without Privatizing the Welfare State. American Political Science Review; Hacker, J. & Pierson, P., and Galvin, D. & Hacker, J. on policy drift.
• Lindblom, C. (1959). The Science of “Muddling Through.” Public Administration Review.
• Pauly, D. (1995). Anecdotes and the shifting baseline syndrome of fisheries. Trends in Ecology & Evolution.
• Contemporary biologists’ accounts of the boiling frog myth (e.g., Hutchison, University of Oklahoma).