Opinion: Time falls backward. Kansas voters head to the polls for a midterm election. The cycle begins anew.

Clocks dropped back an hour over the weekend, as part of the usual shift. Likewise, voters will head to the polls today for midterm elections. (Photo by Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)

Overnight, between Saturday and Sunday, the hands of America’s clocks swept backward an hour.

Groggy Halloween partiers slept an extra 60 minutes. Young and old alike dozed into the morning, waking refreshed and ready for a new month. Sure, most of us hate the spring time change, when a vanished hour pinches schedules and circadian rhythms alike. But the fall switch — that calm relaxation into the cool months — holds a special place in our sleep-deprived hearts.

The change this year came two days before the U.S. midterm elections, those down-ballot contests beloved by political journalists and dogged partisans alike. Everyone else, I suspect, grits his or her teeth and goes along for the ride.

Both our Sunday columnist, Max McCoy, and contributor Huascar Medina have written their musings on this particular, peculiar time, two years into the term of President Donald Trump and two years away from — well, something else.

McCoy focused on the global, existential implications. Medina wrote about western Kansas and worried about what comes next. Each one quotes Emporia Gazette editor William Allen White’s adage: “When anything is going to happen in this country, it happens first in Kansas.”

Each man has bared his soul. I have little to add in explicating the fraught nature of this moment.

But perhaps I have a small contribution to make from my experience as a journalist in swing states. I’ve covered 10 elections over the years, in Florida and New Hampshire and Kansas, and I can tell you this: As certain our clocks change twice a year, so do elections ebb and flow each two years.

Politicians overstep their mandates. Scandals mushroom. Democrats spend too much, while Republicans cut too much. Voters, who have witnessed all this before, throw the bums out time and again.

New bums appear, and the cycle begins afresh.

I can already hear the outraged splutters of those dedicated progressives who follow my work. They will mention, as they should, the unprecedented destruction of President Donald Trump and his administration. Yet the most precedented reaction of all time would be a midterm sweeping out incumbents. Polls and models suggest that’s what we’ll see tonight.

Like the time change, these shifts in the body politic suggest nothing so much as the shifts of seasons and the ages the man. The year, born in the chill of winter, blossoms into adolescent spring and mature summer. Sweet senescence follows in the fall, and then the old man makes way for the baby.

Each one of us, if so blessed, trace these shifts in our own lives. Time passes, and we pass with it, yet we know that others will follow us on similar journeys.

What we must resist — passionate advocates and Machiavellian operatives alike — is taking any season of the year or life of American politics as permanent. We may claim we will be teenagers forever. We may claim that the summer can’t possibly end. We may claim an everlasting majority for one party of another.

Those claims disintegrate as surely as knee cartilage. We will age. School starts again. The opposition party adapts and wins again.

None of this obviates the necessity of fighting for the causes in which we believe. Persistent, dedicated efforts for change can pay off over time, but they require a mindset that persists beyond single years, election seasons or even lives.

Let me send you out into the maelstrom of election madness today with these thoughts from the German sociologist Max Weber:

“Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth – that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible. But to do that a man must be a leader, and not only a leader but a hero as well, in a very sober sense of the word. And even those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with that steadfastness of heart which can brave even the crumbling of all hopes. This is necessary right now, or else men will not be able to attain even that which is possible today.”

Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. His first book, “Opinionated: Kansas Journalists Who Proved Why Commentary Matters — Then and Now,” was published in September 2026 by the University Press of Kansas. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.