It gives me no pleasure to tell you that the fate of the nation might just rest on whether gas prices go up or down in the last two weeks of October.

There are a number of close races out there for the Senate, House, and various governorships. A troubling number of them feature a Democrat who, though imperfect, is a reasonably intelligent and rational human facing off against a Republican candidate who is unfit for office, traffics in inflammatory lies about election fraud, or even dips even deeper into the full QAnon conspiracy metaverse. Just in the Senate, we see several such races: John Fetterman vs. Mehmet Oz, Raphael Warnock vs. Herschel Walker, Mark Kelly vs. Blake Masters, Catherine Cortez Masto vs. Adam Laxalt, and Mandela Barnes vs. Ron Johnson.

It’s remarkable that a candidate as bad as Herschel Walker or Blake Masters could have any chance at all of winning a political race of such importance, but, in our polarized society, they do. Most people who will vote for Blake Masters will not do so because of his belief that January 6th was a “false flag operation.” Most people who will vote for Walker will not do so because they admire his personal integrity or his mastery of the issues. No, people will vote for these candidates because they’re mad at Joe Biden about something and these candidates are not from Biden’s party.

The problem is that voters are often mad at the wrong people for the wrong things. Voters, with the encouragement of the media, put too much focus on the presidency and not enough focus on lower levels of government. And they often hold politicians responsible for things over which they have very little control.

Can Joe Biden, or congressional Democrats, do anything about gas prices?

Maybe on the margins, and maybe over the course of several years, but they have no control over whether gas prices go up or down this fall. Rising gas prices are mostly a function of geopolitical events combined with supply and demand. Biden can affect supply and demand a tiny bit by manipulating the strategic petroleum reserve, and he can try to kiss up to Saudi Arabia to get them to produce more oil. He can try to craft policies that might lead to gas prices trending lower in the long run.

But the election might actually depend on whether gas prices go up or down in October 2022, and this is largely out of the control of any politician.

What are some other things that the president and Congress can’t really directly affect, especially in the short term? Here’s a short list:

• Stock prices
• Economic growth
• Inflation
• Crime rates
• What Vladimir Putin decides to do
• What Xi Jinping decides to do

Here are some things that the people who will be elected in November could directly affect:

• Abortion rights
• Gun policy
• Supreme Court appointments
• Energy and climate policy
• Social Security and Medicare
• And, most importantly, whether we have a democracy at all.

And yet the most salient issues in the election will likely be economic ones like inflation and gas prices; in an August poll, Pew found that the economy was the most important issue deciding voters’ decisions by a 15-point margin. Crime, another issue that Congress and the president can’t do much about in the near term, was the #3 issue, after gun policy.

This isn’t just the case in 2022. Many experts consider the state of the economy to be one of the key drivers of voting decisions in every election, although they differ on whether gas prices, home prices, or GDP growth is the key indicator. Economic prediction models like Nate Silver’s usually include economic data as part of their formulas.

It’s understandable that voters are nervous about the economy, and that they want to choose politicians who will make their economic situation better. But most of the time, it’s business cycles and other factors that determine short-term economic trends.

It seems that many American voters will be choosing their representatives based on issues that these representatives can’t do much about. Why?

Part of the problem is that politicians routinely take credit for good economic news, even though they don’t accept the blame when things are bad. Donald Trump loved to take credit for the stock market when he was in office, although it was hard for him to point to things he had done that would have made much difference in the stock market. Joe Biden spent much of the summer taking credit for falling gas prices; now that they’re going back up, he’s saying (more correctly) that gas prices are out of his control.

It’s fair for voters to take politicians at their word when they’re claiming credit for good economic news. Politicians should avoid doing this — what goes up must go down (and vice versa) so there’s very little real advantage to be gained from taking credit for the business cycle.

Another component of the problem is that the political media frames everything through the horse race. It’s pretty common to see articles with titles like “Inflation Is Unrelenting, Bad News for the Fed and White House” containing text like this:

Inflation is also a stumbling block for President Biden and his fellow Democrats ahead of the midterm elections. The report on Thursday was the final Consumer Price Index release before the Nov. 8 elections, and Republicans wasted little time in excoriating Mr. Biden for his handling of the economy. While Americans are keeping up their consumption, many of the nation’s most vulnerable are struggling with rising food, fuel and housing costs — and most people are seeing their paychecks eroded by the cost increases.

Mr. Biden said the report showed “some progress” in combating the increases, noting that costs have climbed by less over the past three months than they had in the prior three months. But he also acknowledged that inflation remained painfully high.

“We have more work to do,” he said in a statement after the release.

This is a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. Inflation is bad for Biden and the Democrats, but part of the reason that it’s bad is that the media frequently links Biden’s political fate to economic indicators. Biden released a statement promising to do something about inflation partially because the media pressed him for a statement on it, or he anticipated that they would do so.

You’ll note that the paragraphs from the New York Times story above say nothing about what Biden will do, or what Republicans want him to do, about inflation. That’s because there isn’t a whole lot he can do. Despite this, reporters almost always frame economic problems as political issues (frankly, they frame pretty much everything as a political issue), which reinforces voters’ perception that there’s some switch Biden can throw in the White House to make milk cost less.

It would make a lot more sense if politicians and the journalists who cover them spent more time focusing on the things that are more directly under the control of the government. America’s abortion policy, for example, is in a wild state of flux after the Dobbs decision. Whoever wins the upcoming elections will have a real chance to set the new status quo. Depending on election results, we could have anything from a national right to abortion to even harsher state-level bans in more parts of the nation. That will make a huge difference in the lives of millions of people.

There are lots of other issues for which the election really matters in the short run. Did you know that Republicans keep talking about how they will cut or privatize Social Security and Medicare if they get elected? That seems like a big deal. It’s something Congress can actually control, and it’s one of the “pocketbook issues” that people seem to care so much about. Why isn’t that a more important issue in the election?

And finally, there’s the issue of democracy itself. Imagine this scenario in November 2024:

Donald Trump claims that he won the election even though he didn’t. There are enough Republicans in Congress and assorted state legislatures to steal the election in a couple of close states. Upon assuming the presidency, Trump proceeds to turn the country in a far more authoritarian direction (he’s promised, for example, to politicize the federal bureaucracy and use law enforcement to persecute his enemies). And it turns out those members of Congress, those state legislators, and those governors who had the power to swing the election Trump’s way — ending democracy as we know it — were there because gas prices went up by 30 cents over a two-week period in the fall of 2022.

Voting for politicians based on issues they can’t control and ignoring the ones they can… it’s a hell of a way to run a country.

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