On Politico.com’s homepage on Tuesday the lead story declared “A blue wave in next year’s midterms might not flip that many seats. Here’s why,” deploying that most douchey of mainstream media tropes to a premise already tailor-made to be derided by those long past sick and tired of the sane-washy bothsides-y limp dick narratives of the Beltway/national political press that would print a headline like “Trump disparages Rob Reiner’s political views a day after his murder.

The article itself had a more tolerable headline of “The underrated factors limiting the power of a blue wave next year,” and the content even much more so makes the compelling case – that also isn’t surprising if you’ve internalized what the top election geeks have been saying and writing for the past three years or so – that, along with smaller factors like geographic assortation, the 2021 decennial redistricting greatly reduced the number of truly swing seats across the country.

Defensible, informed content with good data science design to it. If the writers end up being wrong it’ll be because of their small-c conservatism, not big-C. The big C-words are the editors who want the MAGA C-words to click on it out of excitement when they see the “Here’s why” but then don’t actually read the whole thing because it isn’t actually telling them what they want to read.

The editors probably wrote the headlines and appended that douchey “Here’s why” to the end of the one on the homepage. Make a statement and let the text itself tell you why it’s true rather than being such a twatwaffle that you need to affirm what’s already supposed to be self-evident.