A modest plea for sanity in our election coverage

[Commentary] On Feb 20, Republicans vote in South Carolina and Democrats vote in Nevada. While we don’t know how those contests will turn out, we know that the results will be judged not so much on their own terms but on whether they conformed to “expectations.” Before we get sucked into that quicksand, we should stand up and say: This is madness. Why? Because expectations are meaningless.

To reiterate, when a candidate either exceeds or fails to meet expectations, all it means is that the ones doing the expecting — i.e. the press — were wrong. Expectations are a prediction about what’s going to happen. Sometimes those predictions are accurate and sometimes they aren’t. When we punish someone for failing to meet expectations or reward someone for exceeding them, we’re acting as though the expectations themselves represented an important objective reality. But they don’t.