I’m going to say something that probably disqualifies me from writing about politics ever again: I don’t care who wins the midterms.

Not the House. Not the Senate. Not the state legislature, not the city council, not the dogcatcher, if that’s still a job anybody runs for. I have spent weeks — weeks — digging into what happens if Republicans lose big in November. I have an outline. It has Roman numerals. I know the money in the Texas Senate race down to the dollar. And I am telling you honestly: at this moment, I cannot make myself care which way any of it lands. I just want it to be over.

It’s the ads. Lord, the ads. They started in the summer. The summer. Months of grainy black-and-white photographs of some poor candidate looking like a mug shot, while a voice out of a movie trailer reads his alleged crimes in a tone usually reserved for serial killers. Then his opponent answers with an ad of her own, equally grainy, equally ominous. Back and forth, the same five accusations wearing different hats, until I can’t remember which one is supposed to be the socialist and which one is the felon, and I’ve stopped trying.

And they lie. Not spin — everybody spins; I was a teenager during the Nixon years, I know what spin is. They lie, or at the very least they stretch a vote or a sentence until it says the opposite of what it said, and then they put it on television forty times a day. So here’s my question, and I’ve asked it out loud to an empty room more than once this fall: why is there no law against that? A candidate who lies in a debate at least has to do it with his own face. These people hire a narrator to lie for them, by proxy, on every channel my remote reaches.

Take my district, AZ-06: Juan Ciscomani versus JoAnna Mendoza — a race nobody outside Arizona is watching. An outside group backing Mendoza says his vote will leave more than 34,000 people without health coverage. Arizona’s Medicaid agency estimated that up to 34,000 lawful immigrants statewide could lose full eligibility; when the change took effect, the identified count was about 20,000. The ad drops the qualifiers and turns a projected statewide upper estimate into a local certainty.

Mendoza plays the same game in reverse, taking the roughly 417,000 Arizonans subject to the bill’s work requirements and calling them 400,000 people who “will lose coverage.” Ciscomani’s side answers with a tax quote his campaign has never sourced, and by turning a $400 county tax-credit error — one Mendoza was already having corrected — into proof she was “pocketing” a tax break. Both campaigns start with something real. Then they remove the context and sell you the scary remainder.

Then there’s the money. Add the campaigns’ spending to the outside groups, and this one nationally ignored race is already at roughly $28–$32 million, depending on which tally you use — with twelve days still to go. Remember the Thomas Massie primary in Kentucky last spring? Some $33 million got spent beating one congressman in a primary — the most expensive House primary in American history — and it was national news for weeks. This isn’t a primary. It’s for the seat. And nobody outside Arizona is even talking about it.

For scale, here’s what some other House races around the country are running:

• Wisconsin’s 3rd District: about $29 million
• New Jersey’s 7th: $17–20 million
• California’s 22nd: about $14 million
• Texas’s 15th: about $13 million
• Oregon’s 6th: about $2 million
• Iowa’s 4th: about $1 million

Same House. Same one vote. Wildly different price tags.

I know. I know. First Amendment. Money is speech — the courts settled that, and I’m a skeptic; I don’t get to pretend the Constitution says something it doesn’t say. I’m not even really proposing it. I’m just a tired man saying it anyway: something needs to be done.

Here’s my modest proposal, free of charge to any legislator too exhausted to think of his own. You want to spend two billion dollars telling me your opponent kicks puppies? Fine. Do it in the last thirty days. Cram every grainy photograph and every ominous voice-over into the final month, and I will sit here and take it like a citizen, because at least I’ll know when it ends. But this business of starting in July — of carpeting one season, then two, with attack ads for an election that’s still a rumor — no. Nobody’s mind is being changed in August. The only thing being accomplished is the slow conversion of the whole country into people who mute the television and hate everybody equally.

Election Day is November 3rd. On November 4th, somebody will own the House and somebody will own the Senate, and the republic will go on being the republic, which it has managed through worse lineups than this one. And there will be no ads. That’s the part I’m holding onto. No ads. Well, until January, anyway — that’s when the presidential campaign starts, if it ever really stops. We won’t be seeing the ads yet, but we’ll be hearing about it, because the campaign in this country isn’t a season anymore. It’s a permanent condition.

So tell me: am I alone in this? Because from my chair, this doesn’t feel like a partisan feeling anymore. It feels like a national one.