Last night I found myself at a political event for my friend Amy Parks, who’s running for Colorado House District 51 in Loveland. I’m going to say the quiet part out loud: you should support and vote for her. Her whole vibe is the kind of boring, grown-up competence Colorado desperately needs under the Gold Dome. Her campaign slogan is “Steady, Reliable Leadership,” and it fits.
And yes, I know. Politics and “steady” rarely appear in the same sentence unless it’s followed by “decline.”
But that’s exactly why the conversation I had with another attendee stuck with me.
This person has been around Larimer County politics long enough to recognize the smell of a manufactured dumpster fire before the match is even lit. We talked about how divisive everything is. How extreme. How a candidate will say and do nearly anything to get a headline, a clip, a retweet, or a quick little dopamine hit from some niche faction that screams loud enough to sound like “the base.”
And then we landed on the creature at the center of my current theory of the case: what I call The Great Suburban Normie.
You know this person. They are not stupid. They are not “uninformed.” They are just busy. They’ve got a job, a mortgage, kids, a back that started betraying them around 35, and about nine thousand things that matter more than watching adults in suits throw verbal folding chairs at each other.
They used to vote anyway.
Then politics became a reality show where every episode is a season finale. So the Normie tunes out. Netflix. Youth sports. Literally anything else. And when the Normie exits the building, the room gets smaller, hotter, and weirder. The reasonable middle shrinks. The loud edges grow. Candidates chase the edges because the edges show up, donate, post, and punish deviation.
That’s how you get “normal” people feeling politically homeless. And that’s how the extremes get power without needing a majority.
My friend offered an analogy that sounds silly until you think about it for five seconds: ants.
If you put red ants and black ants in a jar together, they’ll mostly do their little ant jobs. But if you shake the jar, they start fighting each other like it’s UFC Night at the Colony. The question is not “why are the ants fighting?” The question is: who is shaking the jar?
Exactly.
So let me offer two jar-shakers. Not the only two. But two big ones that profit when we hate each other.
First: the media ecosystem. What I call the Outrage Industrial Complex.
Politics is no longer just the way we argue toward solutions. It has become entertainment. Angertainment. It’s a content machine that runs on your cortisol.
And here’s the part where the receipts matter: research consistently finds that outrage and negativity drive engagement and sharing online. People share more content about opponents. People engage more when the content triggers anger. Negative news spreads. Out-group animosity spreads. In plain English: rage travels.
Even the culture is catching on. Oxford’s “Word of the Year” for 2025 was “rage bait,” which is basically the internet’s version of poking you with a stick until you bite.
Now zoom out. Fox News, CNN, MSNBC (or is it “MSNow” now), OAN, Newsmax, and the rest of the narrative vending machines. Different makeup, same pig. Their business model is attention. Attention is monetized. What wins attention is emotion. What wins the most emotion the fastest is anger. So we all get served the political equivalent of gas station sushi: cheap, addictive, and guaranteed to make you sick.
Take this all from a 40-year media guy – the media profits when you’re pissed!
Second: the Political Grift Class.
When I ran for Congress, I hired consultants. Lots of them. Not because I loved burning money, but because I did not know how to run for Congress, and the “how” is locked behind paywalls and retainers and people who talk in acronyms like it’s a second language.
There are good consultants out there (I had them – I liked them – I needed them). There are also plenty who treat campaigns like a recurring revenue stream. And the incentives are not subtle.
More chaos means more fundraising. More fundraising means more fees. More fees mean more “strategy.” And more “strategy” means more invoices.
Primary challenges, in particular, are a consultant’s favorite holiday season. If an incumbent is cruising to re-election because they’re good at the job we elected them to do, that’s boring. Boring is bad for business. But if you can light up a primary with a little outrage, a little whisper campaign, a little RINO! labeling, suddenly everybody needs mailers, media, digital, comms, rapid response, and a small army of people who can explain why your opponent’s handshake was “problematic.”
Colorado is living this right now. News outlets have reported a surge of primary challenges going into the 2026 cycle. More intra-party knife fights. More chaos. More money burned.
So the jar gets shaken. The ants fight. The dollars flow.
Meanwhile, The Great Suburban Normie is at home thinking, “You people are insane,” and they are not entirely wrong.
So, what’s the answer?
Stop playing the game.
Stop choosing tribes over outcomes.
Stop rewarding the loudest voice and start looking for the biggest heart with a real set of principles. Turn down the volume. Read past the headline. Ask who benefits from you being mad. Ask who gets paid when you share the clip, forward the outrage, and light up your group chat like it’s Normandy.
And then, do the most radical thing possible in modern American politics: show up anyway.
Show up for your community. Show up for school boards, city council, county commissions, and yes, state house races that actually change your life in tangible ways.
If you want “normal” back, you don’t get it by screaming. You get it by re-engaging the Normies and starving the jar-shakers.
Steady. Reliable. Leadership. That’s not a slogan for people who want fireworks.
That’s a slogan for people who want their government to act like an adult.
And honestly, after the last few years, “adult” sounds downright revolutionary.
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