This week marks our fifth year of writing for and running The Postrider, so it’s left me a bit nostalgic. If you’ve been with us from the beginning, you know the degree to which our site and our approach has changed (anyone remember my half-hearted original vertical “State & Science”…?), and you know the many ways in which it has stayed the same. 

After I hopped off a call last week with our storied and relentlessly patient advisor, David Hunke, in which we recounted the strengths and reputation of our content, I was moved to try to really nail down what makes our approach special – to attempt to put our actions and thought process into words – because I think there is something particularly unique about the way we approach political analysis and insight, something about the coincidence of the words of encouragement from David and our fifth anniversary as a site make me think it’s not just about time, but it’s the right time. 

When Michael Lovito and I launched The Postrider in July of 2018, we were roommates (and – until literally that same month – coworkers!) in our early twenties living in Washington, DC. As I like to say, we were both “journalism adjacent,” in that we worked alongside or in “the industry,” had a deep passion for quality writing and the press, and had ideas we wanted to put into the world, but were limited by the job market and our own professional adolescence. We started this site as a place to start building up our portfolios and flexing our outlook and abilities, and as a place to provide a platform for ourselves and a number of our friends and colleagues who also had interesting perspectives but couldn’t make it their full time job either. 

Even early on, before we even knew what made us unique, our content and in particular our political content, was – if anything – the opposite of what successful content in the 21st century looks like. We eschewed the easy eye-grabbing headlines that you see across even the most reputable outlets in the world and opted for a down to earth, realistic, and often underwhelming take. There was an ingrained pragmatism to how we invoked subjects that Michael and I, as something of old souls, lamented seeing less and less of in the world. Contrarianism isn’t quite the right word, but it stemmed from a recognition that change rarely happens all at once, but slowly – which makes for a less interesting story, and a less interesting world. 

It feels like, for a lot of people in our generation who center their lives around politics, the 2016 election instilled this instinct. The first female president felt imminent, the promises of the often underwhelming Obama era would ultimately be fulfilled – if years too late, and the political parties would veer off the polarizing path they were on after experimenting with populism. Of course, thinking about it clearly, this was naive. There was a very real (roughly 30%) chance Donald Trump would be elected instead – and he didn’t come out of nowhere. There was a well-documented trend of far-right extremism percolating into the Republican Party since at least the 1990s (and – arguably – much earlier, as both major parties saw shifting coalitions in the Civil Rights era), very clearly breaking into the GOP mainstream during the Tea Party movement. And besides, political parties rarely win three presidential terms in a row, and Hillary Clinton was an incredibly unpopular candidate. 

The 2016 election sticks out as the most memorable shock to the national conscience since 9/11 because the media failed to calibrate expectations and analysis around reality. That has not improved. While working in a DC newsroom after the 2016 election, the thing that I struggled the most with was the sensationalism and “what could happen” takes that came to dominate the Trump era. There is no dearth of doomerism (“This is exactly how a nuclear war would kill you” from Vox in October 2018), speculative intrigue (“Get Ready for a Contested Convention” from the Wall Street Journal in December of 2019), counterintuitive hopium (“Trump Is Actually the President We Need Right Now” from Politico in March of 2020), and outright redundancy (“Do You Buy That … Georgia Is A Battleground State?” asked FiveThirtyEight in December of 2022).

That’s not to say I – or we, at The Postrider – are immune from this. There’s something fun about covering the “what if” and frankly there’s something forgiving about writing and publishing pieces that are based one notch off from reality. They’re easy and interesting to think about, but difficult to be held to when history moves against you. Take, for example, the headlines about vice presidents being dropped for a president’s reelection campaign. These are a dime a dozen, we’ve even written them, but what you may not know is that it also has not happened since FDR was in the White House. Despite a wealth of reasons and rumors that Trump, Obama, Bush and others would drop their vice president when they ran for reelection, not a single one of them did so.

Many of these things make for great headlines but they do little to bring our heated political climate down to earth. If anything, they make it worse. By thinking in terms of wipeouts, waves, shocks, and the abstract, they detract from the slow burning crises and temperate pace of change that do matter. They also diminish the actual progress in the world. One party winning an election in a tsunami is incredibly rare in our polarized era of politics, no matter how much we talk about it – but passage of substantive legislation in an evenly split Senate and seeing an incumbent president lose states that their party has held as safe for decades is a much bigger deal than it seems.

And it’s this kind of content that we really strive for and that we are best at. We’re never going to be able to break the news to you faster than someone else – we’re just two guys in our homes with our own lives and other full time commitments who do this at cost – but we are going to be able to offer a prudent objectivity that is colored by American history (no one can accuse us of being ignorant to political history at this point) and which seeks to abandon the interesting-but-useless story and realign expectations and perspectives back in reality. 

We have already taken this tone throughout our writing, and – without getting too narcissistic – we’re pretty good at it! Our bottom-up narrative approach to Senate and presidential elections consistently beats out the models of heavy-hitters like FiveThirtyEight and The Economist. We didn’t buy the “red wave” narrative during the 2022 midterm, we have always been down on the presidential prospects of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, we approached the Kevin McCarthy saga with serious (and numbers-based) hesitation, we thoughtfully pointed out how competitive the elections in Nevada this past cycle were shaping to be (despite the state having gone for the Democrat in the last four presidential elections), and stamped out hopes for anyone trying to change the structure of the Senate. But reporting of this kind isn’t always inherently negative either – in the real world, there is an obvious logic to keeping your running mate, and Biden will do exactly that; there are also some straightforward reasons an incumbent president is heavily favored to win reelection; and we earnestly believe in the hard work of federal employees – yes, even the supposedly lazy members of Congress! But sometimes there are simply muddled conclusions to be drawn from what feels like a major election.

This is always a hard balance to strike. Would we have succeeded in bringing the discourse about the Build Back Better Act – or, excuse me, the Inflation Reduction Act – back down to earth? What was really most obvious there? That a party in narrow control of Congress would deliver lest they face electoral annihilation, or that a conservative Democrat from West Virginia would derail the entire process? There are layers within layers here too. Maybe it was obvious that Joe Manchin (who votes with Joe Biden about 90% of the time) and Kyrsten Sinema (who votes with the president 100% of the time) would ultimately vote for the party’s agenda. Or maybe hard things really are hard, and this was a miracle pulled off by Chuck Schumer. I think the answer lies somewhere in the middle, but sadly so much of the discourse is focused on the two extremes. Somewhere between “um actually, Joe Manchin has always been a party loyalist” and “Chuck Schumer is the most cunning strategist in world history” is the line we at least try to strike in our political coverage, even if we don’t always hit it right on the mark.

We all need to get better at living in the reality of our times, where paradigm changes take time and surprises are often unsurprising. It may not seem exciting, but I think it’s worth calibrating your expectations against so much of the headline-grabbing content you see today. For that, we hope you continue to find – or begin to find – The Postrider’s political content worth your regular political programming.