There are better ways to understand politics than what we generally do. One is by studying groundhogs.

I’ll get back to those trundling, stocky rodents, but first more about what’s wrong with the standard approach.

It’s the beginning of “what’s going on?” time in Hawaii when people begin to pay more attention to candidates and elections. Plus, the Legislature is in session.

This is when I get busier as a political analyst. It’s a fun gig, but it involves a brief interview here, a pithy comment there.

That makes me feel shallow and deceptive because I reinforce a perspective that really does not work. I reinforce misunderstandings about politics because I perpetuate a myth about the ways time works.

The myth focuses too much on the visible and way too little on the power of the past in affecting the present.

It spends too much time on the present as the essence and much too little on the present just being a moment in time.

You can see this in the ways we commonly talk about the Democrats’ problem with Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. It’s also true about the Legislature’s new Hawaiian homelands proposals.

First, though, let’s get back to groundhogs — or woodchucks. Same animal, different name.

The day before this year’s Groundhog Day, FiveThirtyEight published a study assessing the success groundhogs like the famous Punxsutawney (Pennsylvania Dutch for “totally unpronounceable”) Phil have at predicting the weather. You know, shadow no shadow, more winter, less winter.

Sure, the study is tongue-in-cheek. But it is far from trivial because it demonstrates how much you learn by considering the big picture.

It’s not just whether Phil was right or wrong in his 2021 prediction. That’s only about one chubby, chilly woodchuck on one day. Game changer? No way. You need to know what’s happened in the past.

So the researchers looked at a bunch of predictions over many years, as well as the body of work by other famous Groundhog Day animal predictors, including California’s Chuck Wood, which is the coolest groundhog name ever.

OK, so it turns out that these animal kingdom meteorologists are generally bad predictors. Phil has gotten it right only about a third of the time while Chuck is not a predictor worthy of his name, finishing second to last only ahead of Pete from Lubbock. (It turns out that Pete is a prairie dog, and, really, what can you expect from a prairie dog?)

Thinking about politics needs to be more like thinking about woodchucks. Here — and I’m thinking that you might be saying, “finally!” — are some examples of why this is so.

Consider the adventures of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who refused to vote with their fellow Democrats to block the filibuster and in effect stopped passage of the Senate’s voting rights legislation. Man oh man, the media, the pundits, they never stopped! Why are those two doing it? What might get them to change their minds? MSNBC over and over again, whipping up indignation with the same old information.

Character analysis after character analysis, critique after critique, with the same truncated view of the situation. Today this important thing happened, which “could be a game changer,” but turns out not to change anything at all.

Here’s a better explanation, which is about political polarization and the changes in Senate norms.

Political parties in Congress have become more polarized, sorted and disciplined. That means that on important issues, Senators stick to their parties almost all the time and much more than they did, say, 20 or 30 years ago, when more cross-party voting was really in play.

Then, the Democrats would not have to worry so much about the two wayward senators because they could pick up some votes from their GOP colleagues. At the same time, some Democrats themselves probably would have crossed the aisle.

What’s really indicative is few Senators from either party crossed over. Think of the two wayward Democratic senators as today’s weather, while the polarized Senate is climate change.

Criticize the two senators if you want. In fact, I’m on your side. But the nub of it is the now fundamental, long-term process at work that makes this likely to happen.

Time is important in another way when it comes to housing on Hawaiian homestead land.

Legislators seem very interested in appropriating a big chunk of money to get more homestead housing. It’s getting a lot of play.

But passing the legislation is just one small moment in time. You cannot separate a policy from its implementation. Implementation is a difficult, adventurous long-term process even when government is good at it, which it often isn’t, sometimes for understandable reasons and other times for reasons that can make you laugh or make you cry.

Time means something very different for a legislator touting a bill’s passage, or a television station following this legislator’s lead, compared to a person who has been on the homestead list for several years.

It certainly should mean something different, more uncertain and long-term to citizens trying to get a fuller understanding of what the new policy means and when that will happen.

“What’s next? How is it going? What things are in place to make, or for that matter prevent, the thing from happening?” Those become key questions for everyone the moment the Legislature passes it and the governor signs off.

It’s no different than other policies, from affordable housing to prisons to red-light cameras.

I’ve got ideas about how local media can do better analysis, but let’s leave that for another time.

How can ordinary citizens better understand what’s going on? It’s not easy. Odd information is hard to get, and our minds prefer a good, simple story.

Given that, here are some tips:

— Be skeptical of anything that stresses the singularity of the moment — game changer, new idea, new solution. “Bold” depends on results, which depend on the future and are molded by the past.

— Don’t judge any policy only by what it says on paper.

— Always consider the role of stable fundamentals, like Hawaii’s one-party dominance, or Hawaii’s place in the global economy.

— Remember that analyzing politicians’ character and motivations may seem interesting, especially if it reinforces your anger, but it’s a fool’s errand.

Sure, this is hard to do, but so what?

You think it’s easy to have to come out of a warm burrow on a cold February day just to please some Pennsylvania Dutch small-town folk in wool caps and puffy coats trying to hold on to cups of coffee with their mittens?