It’s getting pretty hard these days to tell the political coverage from the police blotter. Like so much of our sports and entertainment coverage, we don’t get to the real stuff until after we hear the rundown of all the latest criminal charges.

But the truth is that the forces that shape elections run a lot deeper than who has a special counsel investigating them or the order of the criminal docket.

Part of the goal here at The Dispatch is to get past the momentary fascinations of the news cycle and explore the larger forces that shape American public life and politics. 

So we look for opportunities to turn away from the candidates and campaigns and look at the voters; they are, after all, the ones really deciding. But even there, the temptation is to focus on what’s trending. The political narrative is hard to escape because it’s the water in which we fish are swimming. Schooling up like so many sardines is hard to avoid.