We are now just four nights away from election day as of this writing, and things could not be more contentious. Alright, that’s probably an overstatement because things can always get dumber in our political environment, but I digress.
Polling is showing a clear shift towards Republicans, vindicating those of us who told the doomers in August to chill the heck out. Summer polling is notoriously trash and the fundamentals have been heavily in favor of the GOP since the beginning.
Nothing can ever be certain, and turnout shifts defying history aren’t unheard of, but all signs point to a red wave of massive proportions on November 8th. That has the White House already preparing its spin on the coming obliteration.
“Biden allies are preparing to spin even a defeat as a win for the president, since President Barack Obama lost 63 seats in 2010 and President Donald Trump lost 40 in 2018, and Biden is not expected lose as many.” — @ToluseO https://t.co/ek9KssFR3j
— Azi™️ (@Azi) November 4, 2022
I shouldn’t be surprised that’s the line Biden’s handlers are going to go with. It’s so transparently ridiculous and misleading, yet exactly in the wheelhouse of past claims they’ve made on a variety of topics. “Biden has cut the national deficit in half” they scream without noting Biden ran the deficit up in the first place. “Gas prices are down” they shout without noting they are way up compared to when the president took office.
Everything this administration says is premised on the assumption that you are an idiot, and in this case, the assumption is that you can’t do basic math.
Yes, past presidents have lost more seats than Biden will likely lose on Tuesday, but that’s an irrelevant statistic because it only indicates the size of the correction. You can’t know what that means in context, though, without knowing where the starting point is. The larger the deficit before an election, the more headroom an out-of-power party has to run up the total seats won.
The problem with that is obvious because what matters, in the end, is the size of the majority. Democrats did reasonably well in 2018, though they lost the senate and blew major races in Florida and Texas (gifting us Ron DeSantis). Yet, they only ended up with a 235-seat majority. That’s a far lesser majority than Republicans ended up with after 2010. It’s also a smaller majority than Republicans are likely to end up with when everything is made official this cycle.
Further, if Democrats also lose the US Senate this cycle, which is a high probability, then there will be no way to claim Biden did better than Trump in 2018. Any attempt to do so will come off as asinine. Still, you can expect the White House to go with that line no matter what happens. Democrats are not going to admit they screwed up and change course. Instead, they will do what they always do, which is to double down on their failing political message, insisting that “disinformation” and voters just being too stupid to know better cost them the election.
But what the White House does and what the press does will likely be two different things. I predict that Biden is going under the bus hard in 2023. They can’t allow him to be their next presidential nominee, and they know it. The problem remains that the radicals control the Democratic Party and will simply insist they didn’t go far enough to the left. Get ready for some fireworks.
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