We have all heard a thousand times that this is going to be a wave election, but what we haven't heard is that this election will wipe away the remnants of credibility of the mainstream media.
The Internet has eaten away the revenue of American journalism, leaving newspapers and other traditional media mere shells without the ability or drive to do any real reporting.
So, the news media has become a shallow circle of talking heads repeating the same baseless hypothesis.
Let's look at the elections for U.S. House members in Arizona to understand how bad this has become.
This started with the 1994 election. I worked for the news media then and everyone was caught flat-footed, first when Republicans captured the House and then as the evening wore on when they captured the Senate. The off-year election cycle surprise has become so ingrained in the minds of the surviving commentators that they can talk of nothing else.
In the old days, say back in 2006, there used to be polling firms that checked on races. In Arizona, educational television station KUAT did polling. Now, there is no current polling in the Arizona House races, only talking heads.
Let's take in particular the race of Ann Kirkpatrick. Now, let me say that Kirkpatrick is not the best person in Congress and not the best campaigner.
But she is an incumbent Congresswoman in a race against a nutcase dentist who hasn't paid his taxes and believes Social Security is unconstitutional. Now, in Arizona, people can be a touch on the conservative side and go on about big government, etc., etc. But they damn sure expect that check to come in the mail. She is hitting Gosar hard on the radio and there is no indication he is getting up off the mat.
There has been no real polling on this race for over a month. Rothenberg has this race "lean Republican." What happened to the rule that an incumbent is never rated lower than "toss up"? I guess if enough people say the Tea Party is going to capture the House, then people like Rothenberg believe it.
At the next level in the foodchain are people like Nate Silver, adding a level of brilliance to polling statistics never seen before on this planet. However, the old rule still applies: garbage in, garbage out.
If there is no good polling data to work from, then the statistical analysis of nothing is nothing.
It is not just Kirkpatrick's seat. There are eight congressional seats in Arizona. Only two of them are really nailed down. Rotten Baby Potatoe Ben Quayle could lose one for the Republicans and we are told all the Democratic seats are unsafe except Ed Pastore's.
When control of the House depends on perhaps a few seats nationally, how can the outcome be so confidently called with six seats up in the air in Arizona where there is no reliable polling?
I'm 97.9 percent sure that the Republicans/Tea Party will be stopped far short of their wildest expectations. They will turn on each other viciously, blaming each other for poor candidates and poorer leadership.
But the real casualty will be the mainstream media. If they have no idea what they are talking about, then why would anyone listen.