Pre-election pre-liveblog: At last our long national nightmare is at a middle

Well, somehow we made it. We made it to the midterm elections after nearly mostly two years of the Donald J. Trump post-sedition second administration, two years in which the Republican Party decided that from now on Republican presidents are allowed to take bribes, make billions, shoot Americans in the streets, send legal immigrants to concentration camps, and screw up every aspect of the American economy in 20 different ways just for funsies.

And the reward we get for making it this far is two more years of the same, but with the possibility of a new Congress predisposed to giving a damn. Possibly. If the nation's billionaires have not managed to self-fund the end of American democracy under all of our noses.

Don't come asking me for election predictions because I haven't got any. Or actually, I do have one: It's a near-certainty that in 36 hours or so we'll find out that the last few months of polls were substantively wrong, because reasons, and the surprise will be learning whether they were wrong in one direction or in the other. We've seen nothing to suggest, in this new time of stuffing "AI" in everything, and of purely fake pollsters, and of national newscasts citing internet sites catering to compulsive gamblers as useful metrics of anything, that polling firms have gotten a handle on the industrywide problem of People Don't Answer Their Damn Phones Anymore.

If we believe the polls, the most likely outcome tomorrow night will be that Democrats coast to easy control of the House and squeak their way to a small Senate victory as well. Flipping the Senate would have been a pipe dream a few years ago, but Donald Trump managed to single-handedly screw over every last American in so many different ways that even the self-indulgent twits who thought reelecting Trump would be a hoot are now, possibly for the first time in their self-indulgent Fox viewing lives, feeling regret.

But there's some big problems that prevent us from knowing how things will fall out:

• There simply aren't that many competitive elections in America. That's just how it works. Due to both gerrymandering and natural physical distributions, most Americans live in either solidly-Dem or solidly-Republican districts. It would take a true wave election to nudge any of those.
• But this is shaping up to be a true wave election! Americans are very angry, and "economic anxiety" has typically been a very good predictor of anti-incumbent sentiment. That's led to between 50-70 competitive House seats this year.
• And Republicans have spent the last few years gerrymandering states like Texas to squeeze out more Republican seats—a move now in danger of backfiring because it watered down previously deep-red districts to the point where an anti-Republican wave could well hand those seats to Democrats.

The net effect of all of this is that while best-guess polling estimates Democrats will at least win the House with a narrow 220 seat majority (not much better than the 218 seats currently keeping Republican Mike Johnson in the speaker's office) a nudge of even a few percentage points could mean as many as 20 additional flips. The difference between those two theoretical Houses is enormous; in one, Democrats have to arm-twist so-called "moderates" to take real, consequential actions against White House criminality and corruption. In the second scenario, they don't need to bother.

Latest polls estimate something like a 10 point advantage for Democrats nationwide: A true wave election. But if that 10 point number is really only 8 points, it's going to be a disappointing night, and if it's 12 points, it's going to be a shake-the-windows blowout. And nobody, no matter what they're telling you, knows which.

If you remember the 2024 elections, you may remember that many of your Democratic peers were simply dismissive of the notion that mediocre poll numbers first for Joe Biden, then Kamala Harris could truly result in a Trump victory. The man was an indicted felon awaiting sentencing. He made off with national security documents, some of which remain missing to this day. He rallied his supporters to stage a violent coup, for fk's sake!

But it only took a few hours on election night for it to become clear that not only would Trump win, he'd win handily. So remember that. Vibes are not elections.

We have no ironclad way to measure just how many Americans are truly fed up enough with gas prices to forego their Trumpian bigotries, or how many voters are horrified enough by ICE brutality to make a special point of voting against its enablers.

In exactly two days, however, you'll have access to at least 200 different pundits who will tell you that the election fell out exactly as they had secretly expected it to, for the reasons they will be eager to share with you, which will nine times out of ten conspicuously coincide with their own unprovable priors. So look forward to it.

On the Senate side, God Knows. The Senate is definitely in play, with Republican candidates from Texas to South Carolina to Ohio fading due to comical personal failings and optimistic, aggressive Democratic challengers. I've seen some Democrats pushing the claim that a Democratic majority of [not going to say it] is possible: I consider that pure wishcasting. 52 Democrats would be a godsend; 54 would be a true rout.

But we simply cannot trust that anyone has a good handle on how many percents are going to be Good Percents and how many will be Bad Percents. So, ya know: chill. Do not get wedded, right now, to any particular outcome.

My own estimations are that personality-driven Trump voters simply won't be showing up this time around. Part of that is because he is, obviously, not on the ballot. But a bigger part is that the sort of uninformed, frankly gullible voters who were drawn to politics only by the big racist buffoon are now giving many, many interviews admitting to being embarrassed and disillusioned by how things have worked out.

That's good. Voting isn't for everyone, and the people who treat it as a funny game in which they can stick it to the country by voting for whoever seems to be the biggest dirtbag should never vote because they're ignorant dipshits. They should leave voting to people who at least do enough reading to know what the issues are.

Oh—and while you'll also note that while Trump and his minions have tried a great many hail-mary plays to try to subvert the vote, in California and Alaska and elsewhere, the courts have been slamming their doors in his face every time. It is unlikely that we are going to see much successful post-election mischief from Republicans in refusing to seat Democrats. Most of the mischief has already been done in the usual way, with Republican state governments doing their damnedest to make voting difficult and time-consuming for communities they'd rather not hear from. That's their wheelhouse; that's what they've based their entire racist coalition around.

No matter how tomorrow works out, though, there is still reason for optimism. It seems difficult to believe, given [gestures around], but the United States of America has been a worse country than it is now at pretty much every point in its history. From slavery to segregation, from women's suffrage to the violent misogyny of past workplaces, from campaigns of murder on the plains to robber barons to acid rain, the nation has been a hellhole for most people most of the time and even at our worst now we still are a better place than we ever were.

It doesn't mean we'll stay that way, and in fact the Republican revolution of the present is an attempt to ratchet back a great deal of that progress, but there is still broad public agreement that fk you, nonwhite Americans do get to vote, and fk you, American women should not have to put up with serial predators no matter how much the predators think so, and fk you Elon Musk in particular, we're still all allowed to hate you no matter how much it pisses you off.

Our problem of the moment is out-of-control wealth that has transformed into out-of-control corruption, and specifically with a political party that has decided that fascism is the only remaining means of letting that wealth and corruption control us to the extent the wealthy classes would prefer. And that is a solvable problem; we just have to start either taxing rich people or eating them.

Whichever is easiest is fine. We're willing to be flexible here.

Our liveblog plans for Tuesday are going to be informal; we'll pop up to give updates on the big races and analysis of what various events might mean or what they don't mean. That's about it. But yes, we'll have a place to talk and vent and wonder.

If you haven't voted by now, go do it and then come join us in the evening if you like. Hopefully there will be reason enough to break out that bottle you've been saving.