With an unusually long and fractious electoral cycle finally reaching a climax, it’s time to once again deflate the media illusion that there are “red” stocks and “blue” stocks that will swing in a binary orbit once the votes are counted.

With vanishingly few exceptions, there were always just stocks reflecting commercial enterprises that follow their own trajectories, only interacting with policy and politics on the broadest possible terms.

In other words, Wall Street and Washington run on separate engines in our society and we wouldn’t want it any other way. When the interests of any company or sector become explicitly partisan, business considerations no longer independently determine whether the stock rises or falls.

The logic that once clearly revolved around where the numbers fit into the market as a whole gets complicated, even a little confused. You aren’t investing in a conventional sense at that point. In some ways, you’re profiting from the work of lobbyists.

Granted, specific policy initiatives can make an impact on the corporate numbers. Specific tax breaks and other incentives will motivate executives to pivot their businesses into the areas that Washington favors at the moment.

Think about renewable energy subsidies or infrastructure spending. For that matter, think about the defense industry, dependent as it is on the Pentagon budget. When the incentives are flowing, conditions get easier for these businesses. Operational constraints go away. Building or expanding a market gets easier.

But as we’ve seen over the years, a friend in Washington does not guarantee success. Bad businesses will fail either way, often before the next election tilts the policy map.

On the other hand, regulation makes life incrementally harder, but competent executives will roll with the punches and pivot away from operational pain points. Think of Big Tobacco evolving into the snack food giants we know today. Think of the legacy telephone carriers evolving into broadband and cellular networks.

But it also helps to think about buggy whip manufacturers and other obsolete business models. This is part of the corporate life cycle: when the world changes around you, you either change with it or you cease to exist.

Washington can be a vector of change. So can shifting consumer habits, competitive technologies and the simple passage of time itself. Any company that passively sits back and lets the government dictate the terms of its survival is beneath our interest here.

This is part of what the great Benjamin Graham meant when he said the market is only a voting machine in the short term. Go out past the political noise and the market remains a weighing machine, revealing objective truths about which companies are strong and which are struggling. Weight is where real winners and losers are made.

Sure, politicians and their appointees control the big macro inputs like corporate taxes and interest rates, but these decisions affect every company more or less equally. Higher taxes reduce profit margins across the board and leave less cash to distribute to shareholders or pour back into growth initiatives. So do higher interest rates. Lower taxes and lower interest rates are the tide that lifts all boats equally.

And if these circumstances change, then capitalism has broken. I am not going to say that the market economy can’t break down over time. My point here is more modest: it hasn’t happened yet in the entirety of American history and we don’t see it happening in the immediate future.

If anything, I would challenge the wisdom of investing in the market if we thought it was that fragile. Instead, I’m more inclined to argue that some people overstate the power of Washington. Anyone who has spent time in both the private and the public sectors knows that there’s a huge efficiency gap making the corporations more nimble and ultimately better able to adapt.

I’m not alone here. While about 1/3 of the CEOs who have reported their earnings so far this quarter have mentioned the election as a question mark, they’re far from universally worried about one side or the other of the political divide.

Regulations and taxes are a concern for some. Others see tariffs as a bigger potential headache. Either way, campaign promises are a long way from policy. When laws get made, we’ll adjust our sense of where various stocks are going.

For now, let’s all just get out there and participate in the democratic process. No excuses otherwise!