I warned you that things would get dumber for the election, and things are most certainly getting dumber. With the generic ballot shifting firmly in favor of the Republican Party and the toss-up senate races also looking better and better for the GOP, a new cope has emerged. Actually, several new forms of coping have emerged on the left, all of them absurd.

For starters, the goalposts themselves are getting tossed into the sea. Here’s a professor of political science from Vanderbilt announcing that if Republicans don’t win 40-45 House seats, that signals a Dem “overperformance.”

In advance of election night, I think it's useful to calibrate expectations to the fundamentals, not to polls or vibes.

So, a good calibration:

House: Dems lose ~40-45 seats
Senate: Dems lose 1-3 seats

Anything significantly less = Dem over-performance. Here's why.

— John Sides (@johnmsides) October 21, 2022

Apparently, this guy gets paid to share his political expertise with young minds full of mush. Perhaps that’s an arrangement that should be ended because suggesting that Republicans need to secure 255+ seats is absolutely insane. Remember that 2010 only resulted in 247, and that was one of the best outcomes for a political party since before World War II. If the GOP takes 240+ House seats this cycle, that is absolutely a wave, and while I get that Democrats want to make themselves feel better, I’m not sure leaning into “Yeah, Republicans blew us out, but not by quite as much as they could have” is going to provide much comfort.

But the real cope is coming from people obsessing over early voting returns.

The Fetterman campaign is banking some mail votes in Pennsylvania 👀 pic.twitter.com/Ljmy0iTBsz

— Michael McDonald (@ElectProject) October 21, 2022

O M G…

PA voters have already cast 294,809 ballots vs 30,483 in 2018 & these numbers don't include ballots cast in Philadelphia county yet…nearly 10X more early votes!

Also, Dems are 72% vs 24% Reps (in 2018, it was 44% Dems & 48% Reps) #BlueWaveComing if we keep this up pic.twitter.com/5yVw8qQyjt

— nataliehb (@nataliehb) October 21, 2022

There are two things to note here. One, that post claiming that Fetterman is “banking some mail votes in Pennsylvania” doesn’t seem to understand that the current split is actually worse than 2020. What happened in 2020? Joe Biden only won the state by one percentage point. Any small shift towards the GOP in early voting there would not portend good news for Democrats. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Then there’s the second post plugging the total number of mail-in ballots returned in Pennsylvania while comparing it to 2018. Guess what the state didn’t have much off prior to the pandemic. That would be mail-in voting. Any comparisons to 2018 are completely irrelevant.

Now, some of you may be old enough to remember the 2012 election, where Republicans actually did fairly well in early voting. Well enough, in fact, for some to suggest that election day turnout could push Romney over the edge. Instead, he got blown out. Why? Because early voting data is largely useless. People trying to make grand predictions off of it are kidding themselves. Even those that report party affiliation don’t show which candidate was voted for, which makes it a total crapshoot.

We can also look at the 2016 election, where Democrats did much better in early voting, leading outlets like The Washington Post to assert that Hillary Clinton was on track to win. How’d that turn out?

Remembering this banger from the 2016 election as Democrats once again convince themselves early voting data means something and is predictive. pic.twitter.com/a5mOTfOjYB

— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) October 21, 2022

I can’t be any clearer. Early voting data tells us nothing, one way or the other. Republicans shouldn’t use it to suggest a red wave and certainly, Democrats shouldn’t use it to suggest a blue wave, as happened above.

Meanwhile, every poll and fundamental continues to shift and favor the Republican Party in the final stretch. I’m running out of ways to say “I told you so,” having predicted all this back in the summer while many in the GOP were dooming. Ignore the noise and get out there and vote.