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.