Primary season is almost over, and it’s given us a taste of how we’ll vote come November. Here in Washington, we’ve been thinking about this upcoming midterm as a big-issues election—one in which voters will express their dismay with corruption and sleaze in Congress, their disappointment with the president’s warrantless wiretapping program and their anger about our foreign policy in the Middle East.

“[I]t’s ‘issue-framing’ time, when the parties furiously battle to position themselves on what they think will be the winning side in November,” Al Kamen wrote in the Washington Post this month.