Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer
For the past month, Academy Award-winning documentary maker Michael Moore has been emailing out a daily missive “Mike’s Midterm Tsunami of Truth” on why he believes Democrats will win big in America’s midterm elections next month.
Moore calls it “a brief honest daily dose of the truth – and the real optimism these truths offer us”. It also – at this moment in time – flies in the face of most political punditry, which sees a Republican win on the cards.
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Making predictions is a risky undertaking in any election cycle, but especially in this round with Democrats banking they can hitch Republican candidates to an unpopular supreme court decision to overturn federal guarantees of a woman’s right to abortion. Republicans, meanwhile, are laser-focused on high inflation rates, economic troubles and fears over crime rates.
But political forecasting has become Moore’s business since he correctly called that Donald Trump would win the national elections in 2016 against common judgment of the media and pollsters businesses.
The thrust of his reasoning that this will be “Roe-vember” is amplified daily in the emails. In missive #21 (Don’t Believe It) on Tuesday, he addressed the issue of political fatalism, specifically the media narrative that the party in power necessarily does poorly in midterm elections.
“The effect of this kind of reporting can be jarring – it can get inside the average American’s head and scramble it,” Moore wrote. “You can start to feel deflated. You want to quit. You start believing that we liberals are a bunch of losers. And by thinking of ourselves this way, if you’re not careful, you begin to manifest the old narrative into existence.”
Reached by telephone last week, Moore, 68, told the Guardian that his purpose, in effect, is to puncture herd-thinking. He points to three recent examples where political norms were wrongly interpreted.
“If I said to you six months ago, ‘you know Kansas, right? It’s a huge pro-abortion state and this summer by a margin of 60% they’re going to keep abortion legal’ you’d think I had made a crazy statement,” he says.
“If I’d told you at the same time that in the congressional election in Alaska, a hard red state, that it’s not only not going to be won by a Democrat but a Native Alaskan Democrat, again you’d have to question if I was out of my mind.”
Finally, he draws attention to Boise, Idaho, where an incumbent Republican candidate for the board of education was endorsed by a far-right group, the Idaho Liberty Dogs, and lost to an 18-year-old high school senior and progressive activist, Shiva Rajbhandari, who was also co-founder of the Boise chapter of climate group Extinction Rebellion.
In each case, Moore says, conventional thinking was challenged.
“I have a high-school education so probably, maybe, you shouldn’t be getting your news from me, if you’d just been paying attention in the last six months to Kansas, Idaho and Alaska you’d have seen the red flags going up,” he says.
Moore likes to go off in a different direction. He comes from Michigan with its strong connections to anti-government movements – Moore went to the same high-school as Oklahoma bombing co-conspirator Terry…