Month: November 2022

Ever since it become clear that the Democrats maintained their control of the U.S. Senate in the 2022 midterm elections, it has been nagging me that I read somewhere that Mitch McConnell said he would retire under this scenario. In other words, if he wasn’t going to be majority leader he would just call it quits. The problem was, I couldn’t remember where I’d seen this reported. I shouldn’t have worried. Even though the rumor was widespread on social media over the summer, it was fake news. There is no record that McConnell ever said any such thing.

He did make preparations for an unannounced retirement, however, by orchestrating a change in Kentucky law. The Louisville Courier Journal reported on it in March 2021:

Kentucky lawmakers override veto of McConnell-backed Senate vacancy plan

The Republican-run Kentucky legislature on Monday easily overrode Gov. Andy Beshear’s veto of a notable bill that restricts his ability to fill any vacancies that arise if one of the state’s U.S. senators dies or leaves office early.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, the commonwealth’s powerful senior senator, threw his support behind Senate Bill 228. That sparked speculation that the 79-year-old statesman, who just got reelected last fall, might be eyeing the exits.

The new law strips the Kentucky governor of the right to make an interim replacement to the U.S. Senate. Instead, the governor must select from a list of three options provided by the executive committee of the party of the departing senator.

So, if McConnell (or Republican Sen. Rand Paul) were to retire mid-term, Democratic Gov. Beshear could not put a Democrat in his place. The law mirrors one in Wyoming which prevented then-Gov.Dave Freudenthal, a Democrat, from picking someone from his own party to replace Sen. Craig Thomas when he died in 2007. He chose John Barrasso as the least objectionable of three options offered to him by the Republicans.

These restrictions may violate the 17th Amendment, which says:

When vacancies happen in the representation of any State in the Senate, the executive authority of such State shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies: Provided, That the legislature of any State may empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct.

The question hinges on whether the legislatures may put conditions on the governor or if they’re restricted to either giving him or her the authority to fill vacancies, or not. I don’t expect that the conservative Supreme Court would side with the Democrats on any challenge to the law, but Beshear could test it if the issue ever arises.

On Wednesday, McConnell beat back a challenge for the top leadership spot among Senate Republicans from Rick Scott of Florida. The New York Times reports that the vote was 37-10. I imagine that any temptation McConnell might have had to retire was tempered by a desire not to give any satisfaction to either Scott or Donald Trump, both of whom he’s been openly feuding with throughout the year.

Still, he must be mightily frustrated. He thought he’d be majority leader again after the 2020 elections only to see the Democrats win both Georgia runoff elections and secure a 50-50 advantage. Then he watched Rick Scott, who headed the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), horribly botch an effort to win control in 2022 by failing (so far*) to defeat even one incumbent Democrat. How galling must it be to be challenged by Scott under these circumstances?

It is somewhat strange that McConnell retains such rock-solid support with his caucus despite these recent failures and despite being in a blood feud with Trump who continually insults his wife in openly racist terms.

What’s really sick is that I probably feel better about McConnell staying than going. He at least understands the importance of paying the government’s bills on time, and he understands the importance of helping Ukraine. I can’t say that necessarily for Rick Scott or many of the other Republican senators.

In any case, the Dems can’t pick up his seat, even briefly, so it doesn’t make much difference. It looks like he’ll stay where his is and use his considerable parliamentary talents to be a royal pain in the ass. If he prevents a default on our debts, I’ll count it as a win.

Greetings, everyone! The middle of a very long week is upon us once more. I thought I’d treat you to some live Miles Davis from 1973.

This is arguably my favorite era of Miles Davis (1970-1975). The lineup would shift slightly during that era, but the raw power of that music and its reflection of a society bereft of idealism would remain intact.

Cheers!

Everybody and their brother is trying to bury Donald Trump in the aftermath of the Republicans’ disappointing midterm elections performance. This is in no small part because he intends to announce his candidacy for president in an appearance Tuesday night at his Mar-a-Lago resort.

Attempting to put some data behind the effort, in the Washington Post, Philip Wallach examined the competitive congressional races where Trump endorsed a candidate and found that his picks almost uniformly ran below expectations, while candidates he did not endorse ran above them.

In short, Trump remains quite popular among Republican voters, and his endorsement was decisive in plenty of House primaries this summer. But close association with the twice-impeached president was a clear liability in competitive 2022 House races, turning what would have been a modest-but-solid Republican majority into (at best) a razor-thin one.

Writing for The Bulwark, Christian Vanderbrouk notes that the Republicans have had previous opportunities to cast Trump aside, only to balk when confronted with the prospect of trying to win elections without the enthusiastic support of the MAGA hordes. Here’s how Michael Bender of the New York Times puts it:

Although his dominance of Republican politics has led to three disappointing elections in a row for his party, a solid and devoted core of conservative voters appears ready to follow him wherever he leads again — even if into defeat.

Perhaps Wallach’s study of the midterm results will provide some courage and perspective. If Trump makes it harder to win elections, how can it be that he’s some kind of necessary ingredient for electoral success?

The answer may be hard to quantify but it’s quite possible that the GOP is damned either way. Trump causes them to lose elections but the party has become reliant on his voters to win them. The reason this is plausible is because so many traditional Republicans have abandoned the party. It has drifted away from its national defense message. It has become unreliable, even hostile, on many key issues of concern to economic conservatives. These voters have been replaced mostly by former Democrats and non-voters, bolstered by greater enthusiasm from religious right.

They remain competitive with their new coalition, after all, they just retook control of the House of Representatives. But what does the coalition look like if Trump isn’t firmly on the inside of the party? Do the former Republicans come roaring back? Do the former Democrats embrace country club/Wall Street conservatism?

Obviously, the GOP could eventually revert to its norm from the younger Bush era, not that it was a juggernaut even then. But this seems unlikely in large part because Trumpism has a greater hold on the party and its elected officials than can be erased simply by deleting Trump. And even if the strategists could wave a magic wand and pursue such a path, the road would be bumpy and almost certainly involve at least one shellacking at the polls. This is because so much trust has been lost. The lack of MAGA support would be felt immediately, and the reward would take some time.

The Republicans are also wary of what would happen if Trump didn’t simply disappear but became actively adversarial. What if, for example, he told his followers that the GOP was filled with ungrateful traitors who should be punished? What if he launched an independent bid for the presidency?

Sadly, unless he wins the nomination, this is a real possibility. I could even see him doing it from prison.

So, the GOP still feels like they can’t break from Trump even if they feel like they pay a terrible price for allowing him to run roughshod over their best efforts to win elections. They’re not wrong.

The only way out is to take their shellacking.

In June 2017, I wrote a feature piece for the Washington Monthly called “How to Win Rural Voters Without Losing Liberal Values.” It was a post-mortem on how Hillary Clinton managed to do better than Barack Obama in most suburban areas and still lose the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump, and it focused most heavily on the results in my home state of Pennsylvania. I had a twofold diagnosis.

Most obviously, it was clear that Clinton’s campaign strategy, which focused on maximizing her support among affluent white professionals in places like Philadelphia’s ring counties, had worked quite well but was undermined by a massive cratering of support in small towns and rural areas where longtime Democrats and perennial non-voters had bought into what Trump was selling. On the surface, things may not have seemed so bad. After all, Clinton did win the national popular vote. But her support was not geographically distributed in a favorable way for the Democrats. It resulted in the party underperforming in congressional races and state legislative elections. Districts were too easily gerrymandered to the Republican Party’s advantage. And, probably most importantly, the Democratic strongholds had become an unnatural alliance between urban voters and the voters who had fled the cities to settle the suburbs. I feared that if the Democrats did not develop a strategy to win back a substantial amount of the rural and small town support they had lost in 2016, they’d discover that their urban/suburban coalition was susceptible to suburban defection based on traditional Republican messaging about crime, immigration, school quality, taxes, and state resources.

It concerned me that the Democrats were developing a strategy to win back the U.S. House of Representatives based almost entirely on winning suburban seats.

This strategy is rational if your primary focus is to pick up seats in the House of Representatives in 2018. Districts where Trump did the worst are the obvious low-hanging fruit. Those tend to be places like Georgia’s Sixth: metro areas with growing numbers of the “rising electorate” of college-educated professionals, single women, Millennials, immigrants, and other minorities who formed the core of the Obama coalition.

The strategy is highly questionable, however, if the goal is to win more broadly—say, the presidency in 2020.

The Democrats took back the House in 2018 and, in the end, President Trump’s performance in office completely assured that the well-educated suburbs would stick with the Democratic Party, support Joe Biden in 2020, and carry him into the White House. But Biden’s victory hid something troubling in both the House:

Leading up to the 2020 elections, the Democrats were projected by many polls to expand their majority by up to 15 seats due to the unpopularity of then-President Donald Trump. While Democrats ultimately retained control of the House following the 2020 elections, Republicans made a net gain of 14 seats…No Republican incumbent was defeated for re-election, while 13 incumbent Democrats were ousted by Republicans; also, several successful Democratic candidates won by smaller-than-expected margins.

And the Senate:

Democrats unseated four Republicans – in Arizona, in Colorado, and in two elections in Georgia – while Republicans flipped a seat in Alabama. However, Democrats under-performed expectations overall; despite record-breaking turnout and fund-raising efforts, they failed to flip several seats that were considered competitive, and lost many races by much larger margins than expected.

In the 2022 midterms, losses in suburban New York cost the Democrats the House and the suburban/urban coalition wasn’t strong enough to carry winnable Senate seats in Wisconsin, Ohio, and North Carolina.

My second 2016 post-mortem diagnosis pertained to what to do about the massive loss of small town and rural support. My main focus, now shared by people like newly elected Iowa State Rep. J.D. Scholten, was on addressing the consolidation of the rural economy by monopolies which were also stifling traditional entrepreneurial opportunities in our small town communities.

People in rural and small-town America know the dangers of industry consolidation better than anyone, having seen it strip away the livelihoods of independent farmers and local banks and merchants long before most city slickers even realized that corporate concentration was an issue.

This was a way to fix what is really ailing these communities, and it didn’t depend on adopting Republican messaging on crime, immigration, religion, human sexuality or race. And the idea was not that this would turn deep red Trump counties blue, but that going into these communities with a relevant economic message could trim the Republican Party’s growing advantages down to a manageable level.

Now, early on the 2022 midterm cycle, I pointed to John Fetterman as the type of candidate who could accomplish what I envisioned. Unfortunately, we’ll never know how he would have performed if had not suffered a serious stroke on the eve of the primary election, but I think we can all agree his victory would have been larger if he hadn’t been knocked off the campaign trail with a concerning health issue. I believe he likely would have run ahead of Josh Shapiro, the Democrats’ successful gubernatorial candidate, rather than significantly behind him. In any case, he was the sole Democratic Senate candidate to flip a previously Republican-held seat in the midterms. Now the New York Times asks:

Did John Fetterman just show Democrats how to solve their white-working-class problem?

Mr. Fetterman’s decisive victory in Pennsylvania’s Senate race — arguably Democrats’ biggest win of the midterms, flipping a Republican-held seat — was achieved in no small part because he did significantly better in counties dominated by white working-class voters compared with Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020.

These voters for years have been thought to be all but lost to Democrats, ever since Donald J. Trump turned out explosively high numbers of white voters in rural and exurban counties, especially in Pennsylvania and the northern Midwest.

The winning formula was also noted by John Nichols of The Nation:

Fetterman’s margin was built with strong showings in the historically Democratic cities of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. But what gave him that wide margin of victory, after an intense, expensive, and at times bitter contest with Republican Mehmet Oz, was a steadily stronger-than-expected showing in the smaller cities, towns, and rural areas of Pennsylvania.

In his victory speech, Fetterman described his strategy which involved competing in every county in the commonwealth:

“We launched this campaign almost two years ago, and we had our slogan. It’s on every one of those signs right now: ‘Every county. Every vote,’” the candidate told an elated crowd in Pittsburgh. Supporters chanted, “Every county! Every vote!” “That’s exactly what happened,” said Fetterman. “We jammed them up. We held the line. I never expected that we were going to turn these red counties blue. But we did what we needed to do, and we had that conversation across every one of those counties. And tonight that’s why I’ll be the next US senator from Pennsylvania.”

I wouldn’t say that antitrust enforcement was a prominent part of Fetterman’s message, but anti-corporatism (with an emphasis on “corporate greed” and “price gouging”) certainly was, and it got through to just enough people to make a noticeable difference. The New York Times reports:

Mr. Fetterman’s biggest gains were in deep-red counties dominated by white working-class voters. He didn’t win these places outright, but he drove up the margins for a Democrat by 3, 4 or 5 points compared with Mr. Biden.

Considering that Fetterman replaces Pat Toomey, perhaps the most pro-monopolist member of the Senate, this can be considered a massive gain for rural and small-town voters even if they still voted heavily for Mehmet Oz. And it’s important to note that Fetterman accomplished this while being aggressively pro-choice, and so proudly pro-LGBTQ that he placed a trans-rights flag in his Lieutenant Governor’s office. He’s also undoubtedly the loudest and least apologetic advocate of marijuana legalization to ever run for U.S. Senate and has a strong record on clemency and commutations for violent criminals who have served long sentences. He didn’t run away from this record in order to win a few Trump voters. He won enough of them anyway.

One can argue about whether Fetterman is really representative of the white working class voter. His family had money and he has a master’s degree from Harvard University. On the other hand, he didn’t go work on Wall Street. He served as the mayor of hardscrabble Braddock, Pennsylvania, a rough and diverse suburb of Pittsburgh. He projects a working class attitude and sensibility through both his words and his wardrobe, and he never seems out of place in a room of union workers. His campaign’s focus on campaigning in every county brought him into contact with people and gave him a better understanding of their concerns.

All of these things, except perhaps the wardrobe, are things the Democrats should emulate, whether they’re looking to recruit candidates or they are the candidate themself. But it’s not something that can be faked. You want, ideally, a platform that Democrats from rural America can proudly and unapologetically run on, and Fetterman’s campaign is a strong step in that direction.

I concluded my 2017 Washington Monthly piece by writing:

Throwing out the defensive playbook for an offensive one offers the opportunity to cast aside stale assumptions on what positions a candidate has to adopt in order to be competitive.

Donald Trump taught us that. He could buck Republican ideology on trade and entitlements. He could win over evangelicals despite his notorious sexual behavior. He could even flip-flop on core issues like abortion and nationalized health care without it making a damn bit of difference. The lesson for Democrats may be that they can get away with being pro-choice in an anti-choice district, and pro-climate in a coal-extraction economy, but only if their economic message kicks the shit out of the message coming from the other side.

The progressive left should hope this theory is correct, because the alternative is to abandon these districts to right-wing extremists and continue getting steamrolled in elections from the presidential on down.

Fetterman ultimately decided that opposing fracking was a step too far, but aside from that he tested my theory and he showed that it can be wildly successful. I had faith he could do it, and that he pulled it off despite his health setback is both impressive and a further confirmation that it’s a workable strategy.

With the Saturday night call of the Nevada Senate race for Catherine Cortez Masto, the Democrats are assured of maintaining control of at least one chamber of Congress. At the moment, they have a 50-49 advantage, which can grow to 51-49 if Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia wins his December 6 runoff election against Republican Herschel Walker. This is literally the bare minimum acceptable result for the party, the nation, and the world. The Democrats will rue not managing to get over the top in the Senate elections in North Carolina, Ohio and, especially, Wisconsin, but they did not lose control, and that’s exceptionally good news. They will have two new Senators in Peter Welsh of Vermont, who replaces Pat Leahy, and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who replaces Republican Pat Toomey.

The Warnock-Walker runoff may seem to hold little importance now that it won’t be determinative of which party runs the Senate, but there is actually a big difference between a 50-50 Senate with ties broken by the vice-president, and an actual majority 51-49 Senate. Most obviously, in a 51-49 Senate, the Democrats will have majorities on each of the committees, which makes it easier procedurally to advance their agenda to the floor. It will be less time consuming, for example, to confirm the Biden administration’s nominees, including to the federal bench. It also makes is possible to move items that are opposed by a single Democratic senator, so Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema will see their veto power diminished. As you can see, aside from the national embarrassment that would result from seeing Herschel Walker in the Senate, we have more concrete reasons for hoping that Warnock is victorious.

On the House side, there is still a tiny sliver of hope that the Democrats will hold their majority. Many people are treating this as a giant victory, and it’s easier to see why. Aside from the expectations leading into the midterms, which saw a Republican House majority as a foregone conclusion, even a narrow loss will defy historic trends. It’s just very unusual for the president’s party to avoid a wipeout in midterms elections, and the Democrats’ majority was perceived as too small to survive even a trend-bucking good night at the polls. In truth, however, it now appears clear the Republicans, if they hold on and take control, will only have done so due to a more effective and aggressive gerrymandering effort.

Yet, however good people feel about beating the odds, losing the House, if it happens, will still be catastrophic. The country will be ungovernable. There’s a decent chance the public will understand that the Republicans are to blame for this and it could help Biden get reelected, but the damage may be immense. We may default on our debts.

“A default by the U.S. government would be substantially worse than the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, devastating global markets and the economy,” Beth Ann Bovino, U.S. chief economist of Standard & Poor’s, predicted earlier this year.

We may struggle to keep the government financed and operational. We may lose the ability to lead any coalition against fascism.

This is really my backdrop for everything, and the cause of my pessimism. The Democrats have much to celebrate, including significant wins in governors’ races and state legislatures, and success in ballot initiatives. But the country is still crippled by the current pathological condition of the Republican Party.

If the Democrats miraculously run the table on the still-uncalled House races and keep their trifecta, I will feel much, much better. If not, I will still feel like these midterms confirmed that the country has gone too crazy to be saved. The Republicans stripped us of reproductive rights and attempted a coup, and they were punished for it. But a sane country would have obliterated them.

Still, I do want to recognize the excellent work so many put into making this a very disappointing cycle for the Republicans.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of Bodiam Castle in the UK. The photo that I’m using is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas panel.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

I have now completed the surrounding landscape. The painting is now finished.

The current and final state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have a new painting to show you next week. See you then.

Hi photo lovers.

It’s been about a few months. I’ve been extremely busy, so finding time to just go out and take photos has been a bit of a stretch. I spotted this toad on the evening of Nov. 10 while doing some outdoor chores, and thought I had to try to get a good photo. Took a bit of doing, but I liked how this one turned out.

I am still using my same equipment, and am no professional. If you are an avid photographer, regardless of your skills and professional experience, you are in good company here. Booman Tribune was blessed with very talented photographers in the past. At Progress Pond, we seem to have a few talented photographers now, a few of whom seem to be lurking I suppose.

I have been using an LG v40 ThinQ for four years. My original phone is gone. The back of the phone came off. Apparently the battery began to burst. I am using a replacement (thanks to insurance) that is identical, although I suspect its near the end of its lifespan. I need more time to research smart phones, especially at the high end. I prefer to get a device and keep it for four or five years. Most of my family seems to be gravitating toward iPhones, so I suspect I may eventually have to succumb and go to the Dark Side of The Force. Given the times we live in, my default is to delay any major purchases as long as possible. So, unless something really goes wrong with my current phone, I’ll stick to the status quo for as long as possible. Keep in mind that my last Samsung kept going for over four years (the last year was a bit touch and go). Once I do have to make a new smart phone purchase, the camera feature is the one I consider most important. So any advice on such matters is always appreciated. Occasionally I get to use my old 35 mm, but one of my daughters seems to have commandeered it for now. So it goes.

This series of posts is in honor of a number of our ancestors. At one point, there were some seriously great photographers who graced Booman Tribune with their work. They are all now long gone. I am the one who carries the torch. I keep this going because I know that one day I too will be gone, and I really want the work that was started long ago to continue, rather than fade away with me. If I see that I am able to incite a few others to fill posts like these with photos, then I will be truly grateful. In the meantime, enjoy the photos, and I am sure between Booman and myself we can pass along quite a bit of knowledge about the photo flog series from its inception back during the Booman Tribune days.

Since this post usually runs only a day, I will likely keep it up for a while. Please share your work. I am convinced that us amateurs are extremely talented. You will get nothing but love and support here. I mean that. Also, when I say that you don’t have to be a photography pro, I mean that as well. I am an amateur. This is my hobby. This is my passion. I keep these posts going only because they are a passion. If they were not, I would have given up a long time ago. My preference is to never give up.

Believe me, I definitely do not enjoy being the bearer of bad news. But sometimes I have to do it. The Democrats just lost relatively close races for U.S. Senate in Wisconsin, Ohio, and North Carolina. They got embarrassed in Iowa and Florida. Hopefully, they will hang on to win the races in Arizona and Nevada. Do you know when the Democrats have a reasonable chance of winning a Republican-held Senate seat again? The answer is 2028, and it’s from this same set of seats.

First let’s look at the seats up for election in 2024, a presidential year that usually provides a more positive environment and higher turnout than midterms. There is almost no imaginable way the Democrats can win a statewide election for federal office in Wyoming, Utah, North Dakota, Nebraska, Missouri, Tennessee, or Mississippi. That makes Texas and Florida the Democrats’ only hopes in 2024, and we all saw what just happened in Florida, where the Republicans carried Miami-Dade County while Gov. Ron DeSantis was reelected by more than a 19 point margin and Sen. Marco Rubio was reelected by more than a 16 percent margin. In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott won by eleven points.  Meanwhile, the Democrats will have defend seats in Montana and West Virginia, not to mention Ohio, and in Arizona and Nevada again.

So, how about in the 2026 midterms? Here we see at least a couple of targets. Yes, actually just two: the seat held by the always elusive Susan Collins of Maine, and a seat in North Carolina where we always seem to come up just short. I supposed we can throw Iowa in the mix since we can at least remember winning there sometime in the recent past.

There’s nothing on either of these maps that compares to the Wisconsin race we just lost. The reality is that we’re basically capped out in the U.S. Senate at 49-51 seats for the next six years. It’s immeasurably more likely that the Republicans will pick off some of our seats in that time that we will pick off any of theirs.

Now, I know that things can change in American politics, sometimes quite rapidly. During the Bush the Younger years, the Democrats held Senate seats in the Dakotas and Nebraska, and even held both of Montana’s seats. When we lost those, we gained seats in Virginia and most recently in Georgia. When I look at the 2024 map, in particular, I don’t see any hot prospects for this kind of partisan change. Texas would be the best bet.

I also know weird things can happen, like the Democrats briefly holding a Senate seat in Alabama due to scandal. Sometimes, open seats due to retirements can be vulnerable when the political mood turns sharply against the incumbent party. I don’t rule out a fluky seat pickup over the next couple of election cycles.

But what I can say fairly confidently is that the odds are that the current composition of the Senate is as good as it’s gonna get for the next six years. The only way that changes is if the Democratic Party changes in anticipation of the challenge it faces in winning these seemingly unwinnable elections.

But, to be honest, no amount of change is going to make Wyoming a plausible pickup. Only something external, like a war or some other earth shattering event could turn the deepest red states into purple states.

If your a political strategist for the left and you don’t want to be paralyzed by these facts, you may need to start thinking completely out of the box about how to win power. It can’t be through clever slogans or think tank-generated policy gimmicks. It can’t be by raising money, registering voters and knocking on doors. It’s got to be more systematic, like looking at how people receive information, how the right achieves its hold on so much of the country’s culture. The whole dynamic has to be shifted, because electoral politics as they stand are just too jammed up for the left to have hope. And if you can’t honestly provide an avenue for progress, then progressive politics will quickly become a bunch of empty and delusional promises, and the home for scammers and charlatans. I don’t want to be a part of that kind of movement.

Kerry Eleveld, who I greatly respect, makes some very important points that I agree with and one which I don’t. Let’s begin with his formula for doing political prognostication.

No journalist, reporter, or analyst is going to get everything right all the time. Your best hope is that your body of work generally holds up when the dust settles, though it will inevitably include a few outliers. And in the event that your body of work falters, you hang on to the knowledge that you honestly did your best to follow the facts…

…The truth is no one knew exactly what Election Day would bring, but pundits, analysts, and reporters rarely exhibited the humility to acknowledge that very simple fact. If they had more boldly and honestly declared their own uncertainty, the body of work they produced would have looked far less one-sided—dare I say, biased—in the wrong the direction.

In this midterm cycle, there was simply too much uncertainty and noise to make confident predictions. That’s what the available facts told me, and it’s why I decided not to, as I have done in the past, provide estimates of how many House and Senate seats would change hands.

What I focused on instead was the dire stakes. What mattered was not the absolute numbers but that the Republicans not win control of either chamber of Congress. What the available facts told me was that it was extremely unlikely that the Democrats would hold the House and that holding the Senate was a complete toss-up. To me, that was catastrophic, and I wasn’t interested in setting an expectations game.

Doing much better than expected and still losing wasn’t going to be good enough, and once I realized the slim possibility of a good enough result, my outlook turned extremely sour.

There were two things that stood out that really concerned me. The first was not the absolute numbers in the average of polls, because I was well aware that they were potentially being skewed by the mass inclusion of Republican-sponsored or aligned surveys. Rather, what had me spooked was the overall drift or momentum of the polls, which showed the Democrats moving from a strong position in early September to a very unhappy one by early November. In my experience, momentum often carries into Election Day and overruns the last polls. For this reason, I assessed that there was a possibility that things could be even worse than they appeared.

The second thing that freaked me out was the consistency of issue polling that showed abortion and democracy as significantly lower on voters’ list of priorities than inflation and the economy. These issue polls were the only data points on this I had, and they were incredibly disappointing. When the Exit Polls were published on Election Day, they told a different story, and one that aligned more with what I had hoped and initially expected. Abortion, in particular, rated much higher, and this difference probably explains the bulk of the disparity between expectations and actual results.

By the way, my wife fairly consistently tried to buck up my spirits on this topic by insisting that the issue surveys must be wrong, but since she had nothing more than her intuition to base this on, I could hardly incorporate it into my analysis.

So, I really had two problems. The first was the even the best case prognosis appeared catastrophic, and the second was that everything I had to look at pointed away from the best case.

Now, in a sense, all the bullishness on the Republicans’ chances that was pushed by the media and by the Republicans themselves, wound up being a gift to the Democrats. As of right now, the odds heavily favor the Republicans winning the House, even if it’s by a much smaller margin than many anticipated. And depending on results from Nevada and Arizona, there’s a possibility that control of the Senate will depend on the winner of the December 6 runoff between Sen. Raphael Warnock and challenger Herschel Walker in Georgia. This is a disaster for the country, and the only question is how big of a disaster. Yet, Democrats are mostly gleeful because they’d already internalized much bigger losses.

To be sure, there is plenty to celebrate, from successful gubernatorial races in Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin to the election of John Fetterman, to flipping some state legislatures. A handful of particularly loathsome Republicans candidates lost, which is nice, and lots of good results came from ballot initiatives.

But President Biden is mostly left with a pile of shit. He needs to lead the West in a battle against fascism while depending on a fascist party to finance the effort. To avoid a worldwide economic meltdown, he has to find a way to pay the country’s bills on time, and the Republicans seem incapable of doing it. It’s quite possibly that having Republican foils in charge in Congress will help him win reelection, a la Harry Truman in 1948, but in the meantime he will be in an impossible situation.

That’s why when Eleveld says, “Freedom proved the biggest winner of the 2022 midterms,” I could not more strongly disagree.

We’ve been through a rough mid-term period, and a vote count that still leaves some uncertainty. So this time, I offer a live performance of “The Sheltering Sky” by King Crimson. There’s something about a band with two potential lead guitarists who can rock out and still becalm an audience at the same time. The amps go all the way up to eleven. Just sayin’.