As the polls close in Virginia and New Jersey, it’s time to extrapolate two races into a national narrative that will shape our understanding of the otherwise completely unrelated house and senate elections happening a whole 12 months from now. It’s electoral hot take season and far be it from me to miss out on this opportunity!

Over the weekend, the period of political advertisements officially kicked off for the 2021 regional and local elections. Parties and candidates rushed to bespeckle every lamppost and public fence with placards beaming their smiling faces. It’s standard fair for every Danish election, a little over a month out, the candidates, desperately fighting for name recognition among a sea of viable candidates, hope that seeing their face every time you drive to work or take the bus to the grocery store will be enough to set a cross by their name when you step into the ballot box.

Having already been an established organization since its founding in 1982, the DSA has a leg up on the other breakaway parties. The DSA also benefits from being the only party that already counted elected members of congress among its ranks being able to swiftly establish themselves as an independent party immediately after the parliamentary split.

The 14th century chivalric romance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, is a story of values, virtues, and knightly duty. Sir Gawain takes up the challenge of the Green Knight to exchange equal blows, Sir Gawain cuts off the Green Knight’s head and, one year later, the Green Knight shall return the blow. The story centers on the value of duty and obligation. The Green Knight, being some sort of ethereal being, survives his own beheading and thus Sir Gawain must uphold his end of the bargain and allow for his own beheading.

Democracies around the world are under strain from disinformation and misinformation, economic inequality, and destabilizing populist parties/politicians. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s yearly survey of the health of democracies worldwide in 2020 found that democracies were, on average, at their lowest point since they began the project in 2006. Severe democratic backsliding has occurred in a number of former democracies including Poland, Hungary, Turkey, India, and Russia.