"Ring out the false, ring in the true."

Something is stirring in the country. It could be big.

Or perhaps I just want it to be. Any reporter who trusts his instincts must also learn to distrust them—especially if they flatter his outlook.

I’ve never been much of a poll guy. I mean, I read the polls like anyone else, and I watch Harry Enten’s enthusiastic breakdowns of poll numbers on CNN (though sometimes it seems to me Harry’s not comparing apples to apples in his analyses). Polls are fun; prediction markets are nuts. All the data can make you dizzy.

I don’t have the peculiar gift of politicians and pundits who can carry congressional districts, demographic groups and polling averages around in their heads and feel the electorate shifting, decimal point by decimal point. For me, it’s always been more like reading the weather. I go somewhere. I look around. I listen to how people are talking about their lives—and to what they’re avoiding talking about.

And that way, sometimes maybe you can feel a change in the weather before it shows up in the stats.

That happened to me in 2016. Many of my colleagues at ABC News were in constant contact with campaign managers, state officials, pollsters and political professionals, nearly all of whom believed Hillary Clinton would win. I thought Trump was going to win. It wasn’t because I had any particular insight or clairvoyance. It’s just that I’d been traveling around the country, and what I saw and heard didn’t match what the pundits were saying. At all.

Earlier that year, I’d covered Brexit in the UK, and it was clear to me that a similar populist-nationalist force was forming in the US, Trump was crystallizing it into a movement, and the political establishment—especially the Clinton campaign—either weren’t noticing or had no answer to this force except condescension and scorn.

The lesson: We can fall into habits in how we look at our country, and they can harden into mistaken analysis: As things have been, things remain.

Now I have begun to wonder if the weather is changing again.

The polling offers plenty of evidence of his political deterioration; it tracks his physical decline.

Trump is deeply unpopular; the Democrats’ advantage in the generic ballot grows steadily by the week. Polls are telling us that people are deeply dissatisfied.

But they aren’t telling us, as far as I can understand, that Republicans are about to get swept away. There’s not yet proof of a wave.

So we should beware of “hopium”—that intoxicating habit of mistaking what we desire for what’s about to happen. Hope is not the same thing as prediction.

I did not encounter a great anti-Trump uprising there. Democrats were clearly activated and determined. But most people I met—like most Americans, I expect—seemed weary of politics altogether.

Often, people preferred not to discuss politics at all. They spoke instead about family farms and health care, schools and faith, housing and jobs, the cost of living and the difficulty of keeping their children close to home. These were not the distractions and abstractions that consume Washington, social media, and the news industry. They were ordinary concerns.

Once again, after a feverish decade, ordinary concerns will be the basic measure by which a presidency will be judged.

What I heard in Iowa was the reservoir of common sense that the vast, muddled middle of the country (politically, and also geographically) has always held on to, or come back to after people have lost their heads for a while in some mad political moment.

In 2026, it seems Americans once again want what they’ve always wanted. Practical solutions to the real problems in their lives. A better life for their kids. A decent community. And right now, the country isn’t working for far too many people.

Political change begins when individual people, occupied with their families and their bills and their hopes for their children, quietly conclude that what they were promised is not what they received. Their judgment is shared by their friends and neighbors. Then others. The energy of it all starts building, slowly, and sometimes gathers strength into a wave.

Our poem this week is by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who is among the greatest of English poets. Here is a vision of justice and love on the horizon, of a wave of change that doesn’t simply happen, but is summoned by the poet and the citizenry, calling—demanding—that the bells ring in a new age.

—Terry

by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,

the flying cloud, the frosty light:

The year is dying in the night;

Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,

Ring, happy bells, across the snow:

The year is going, let him go;

Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind

For those that here we see no more;

Ring out the feud of rich and poor,

Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,

And ancient forms of party strife;

Ring in the nobler modes of life,

With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,

The faithless coldness of the times;

Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes

But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,

The civic slander and the spite;

Ring in the love of truth and right,

Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out the old shapes of foul disease;

Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;

Ring out the thousand wars of old,

Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,

The larger heart, the kindlier hand;

Ring out the darkness of the land,

Ring in the Christ that is to be.