Some interesting polls suggest elections today could resemble a game between two last-place teams at the end of a frustrating season.

Here, the sport is politics, though comparing it to football is an easy enough comparison. But the 113th Congress is not exactly the defending Super Bowl champ or in any playoff of any kind. The final Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll revealed 46 percent of likely voters favored a Republican-led Congress, while 45 percent said they want a Democratic-controlled legislative branch.

Polls in about 10 states thought to be most competitive (Louisiana, Georgia, Kentucky, Iowa, others) showed a lead of about a single point for the GOP. Republican pollster Bill McInturff characterized the election as a close football game.

In a WSJ story over this past weekend, he said while “2010 was a kind of two-touchdown, embarrassing loss” for Democrats, “this is more, Republicans win on a field goal.” He predicted a GOP takeover of the Senate and enough gains in the House to throw a party tonight.

I’ll predict this will be a close game alright, but we’re not talking between top-notch programs here. With a queasy mix of issues seemingly beyond reach of those in power (how to make Obamacare workable, dealing with ISIS, dealing with Ebola, dealing with immigration), I’d say this resembles a battle of teams who just want to have next year’s top draft pick.

Letting the air out a football or simply holding our nose at the might well be the dominant image for many of us fatigued with the two major parties. In another time in U.S. history, and indeed in the history of mass communication, an influential cartoonist had his way with the status quo in a way that today would be lambasted as overly partisan.

Thomas Nast’s cartoons in Harper’s Weekly in the latter 19th century was to print as the nightly talking heads are to cable TV news. They’re partisan as all get-out, but they keep issues on the front burner. So was Nast. Credited with creating the elephant as the Republican party symbol and popularizing the donkey as that of the Democrats, Nast was credited with influencing with his cartoons every presidential race from 1864 to 1884, according to biographer Albert Boime.

His characterizations were brutally one-sided, and likely unprintable by today’s PC-standards. But, they were enduring. He depicted the corrupt William M. “Boss” Tweed, head of the Tammany Hall political machine that controlled New York City politics at the time, as a large, fat man with a money bag for a head. His take on religious influence on public schools at the time — done so with clergy depicted as crocodiles about to attack children on a beach — would make the editor of the most partisan blog cringe.

Nast would make cartoons of today that mess with such supposed holy grails as pit bull policy look quite silly. It’s been disproven that the origin of the word “nasty” was due to the tone his cartoons took. Too, no more appropriate word describes the mood of the electorate these days as the two major parties stumble across the goal line tonight.

•

Danny Barrett  Jr. is a reporter and can be reached by email at danny.barrett@vicksburgpost.com or by phone at 601-636-4545.