The November Midterms Will Defy Conventional Wisdom

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get it. Conventional wisdom says an incumbent first-term president’s party will get trounced in the midterms and likely lose whatever Congressional control it has. But not this time. Because everything in the last seven years has utterly defied conventional wisdom. Everything.

Oh sure, the nerds will cite plenty of statistics from past midterm elections that support this prediction. And they’re right. Many presidents from Ulysses S. Grant in 1874 to Barack Obama in 2010 got absolutely crushed in the midterms.

But these are not normal times. Conventional wisdom needs ‘convention’ to thrive. But when there’s unprecedented instability, chaos and existential threats to democracy, the normal predictors don’t mean a damn thing.

An overwhelming majority of Americans are exhausted and scared. They’re frustrated and fed up with the autocratic threats from former president and self-serving, violence-inciting shitbag Donald Trump and Trumpism. As recent polls indicate, “preserving democracy” is now Americans’ top priority for the midterm elections.

Remember, before all the certifiably insane ‘Big Lie’ election-denying batshit craziness following the 2020 election, Trump lost in a landslide by 7-million popular and 74 Electoral votes. He also cost his party the House, Senate and saw Democrats flip Georgia and Arizona.

This was before insurrection. Before his second impeachment. Before the shocking revelations of the January 6th Committee hearings this past Summer. Before the Justice Department’s federal grand jury investigation into Trump’s massive criminality and treason. Before the unfathomable stolen top-secret classified documents scandal. Before the Republican Party’s shameless democracy-raping madness and virtually universal support of this unconscionable corruption and espionage in service to “Orange Jesus”.

And perhaps even equally significant, before the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade in June after 50 years of being twice-settled law of the land. Before religious extremist white men told 10-year-old girls they must carry rapists’ babies. Before Sen. Lindsey Graham put forth a national abortion ban bill. Women are fucking outraged. We witnessed the manifestation of that anger in the nearly 20-point stunning defeat in August of the Kansas state constitutional amendment that would have banned abortion. As the saying goes, if ya can’t win an abortion battle in Kansas…

Throw in the growing fear parents experience every morning that their children will be massacred in school mass-shootings because of Republican fealty to the NRA; a slew of devastating, foreshadowing special-election losses; a pathetic roster of Trump-endorsed fringe lunatic Senate and House nominees that give Mitch McConnell and the mainstream night terrors…and this year’s midterms should spell d-i-s-a-s-t-e-r for the Republican Party.

‘It’s the democracy, stupid…’