Americans are voting in the midterm elections, and the verdict, in theory, is on Donald Trump. He is not on the ballot, but he features in nearly every other part of the contest. Every candidate has been asked to explain, defend or quietly sidestep him. The midterms are widely seen as a referendum on the president, and for once the cliché is hard to argue with.
A national verdict from local races
Britain has had one or two referendums and is still sorting through the paperwork. The American version is messier because it arrives as hundreds of separate contests, each with its own local grievances, its own dull candidate and its own argument about potholes. Yet the national mood still seeps into all of it. A voter angry about prices or pleased about border policy will tend to treat the person nearest the top of the ticket as a stand-in for the man in the White House.
That is the appeal of the referendum idea, and also its weakness. A midterm can be read as a verdict on a president, but it is cast by millions of people with millions of different reasons. Some will be endorsing the agenda. Some will be punishing it. Some will simply be voting the way their family always has.
Polls and ballots
The polling industry has spent months telling everyone how this will go. It will keep talking until the last possible minute, and then it will explain why it was right, or nearly right, or right in spirit. That is its job, and it does it with admirable stamina.
A poll is a guess about a decision that has not yet been made. A ballot is the decision. Anyone who has watched a British general election night knows how often the confident early commentary ends up wearing a slightly different expression by breakfast. Voters have a habit of declining to follow the script.
A president can claim a mandate, ministers can claim momentum, and supporters can claim the country is behind them. Only an election can test any of it. Until the votes are counted, everything said about public opinion is opinion about opinion.
Waiting for the count
Patience is a quality in short supply on election night. Broadcasters and news sites are publishing guides to when results will be known. American counting does not behave like the British variety, in which a sweaty sports hall and a stack of ballot papers produce a winner by about 3am. It is spread across states with their own rules and their own pace, and some results will arrive later than viewers expect.
That slowness is easy to mistake for a problem. Mostly it is arithmetic done carefully. The trouble starts when somebody with a microphone, a podium or a social media account decides the arithmetic is taking too long and announces the answer anyway. A referendum is only useful if the result is allowed to finish arriving.
Eyes in London
Washington's mood shapes trade, defence and the tone of every awkward phone call with Downing Street. British ministers are watching with the careful neutrality of people who have to work with whoever is left standing.
The verdict
It would be convenient if the midterms delivered a clean answer on Trump's agenda. They will not. They will deliver a set of results, and then the argument will begin about what those results mean, conducted with great confidence by people who spent the previous week insisting they knew already.
That is how democracies work, and it is more honest than it looks. The voters decide, the counters count, and the commentators catch up. The least the rest of the world can do is wait for the tally.
The most reliable prediction of the week requires no polling at all: before the final ballot is counted, at least one person on television will have declared victory for someone, and the kettle will have been refilled many times by those still waiting to find out if they were right.
