I’ve spent the past week telling Democrats and #NeverTrumpers not to lose hope. Now I have to tell them not to get too overconfident.
There’s still time for the GOP to take control of the House and the Senate. In Arizona and Nevada, many votes remain uncounted. If they flip one of these Senate seats, that neutralizes John Fetterman’s stunning victory in Pennsylvania.
That said…Fetterman won Pennsylvania. And it wasn’t even all that close.
There’s a good chance the fate of the Senate could rest on a runoff in Georgia. After a few weeks when it looked like Herschel Walker could break the 50% barrier and even I had written off Warnock’s chances, the Reverend is still very much in this thing.
This could very well be a replay of 2020, when it all came down to runoff elections in Georgia. And considering that you-know-who spent much of yesterday laying the groundwork for Stop The Steal 2.0 - in retrospect, that should have tipped me off that the red tsunami wasn’t imminent - enough Republicans could decide it’s so rigged there’s no point voting a second time around.
Did I mention that Trump is likely to announce his 2024 campaign in the next few weeks, further reminding Georgia Democrats what’s at stake and forcing Republicans to find more excuses not to talk about him?
It occurred to me that being a Never-Trumper in this election cycle is kind of like being a Chicago Bears fan.
I’ve used this space to repeatedly moan about Justin Fields not showing any signs of progress. But something interesting has happened in the past few weeks: he’s been showing signs of serious progress. The NFL won’t let me embed the YouTube video, but if you’re pressed for time go here and ask yourself, “how did he do that?!?”
The thing is, the Bears lost that game, in no small part because pass interference is apparently no longer a penalty.
It was Chicago’s second defeat in a row. But I feel way more hopeful about Fields’ and the team’s future after these losses than I did after our fluke wins (against San Francisco in a monsoon, and later against Houston’s CFL team) at the start of the season.
Just as we had a “red mirage” in 2020 which made it look like Trump might be re-elected, it could be a “blue mirage” this time around and late-counted ballots could swing toward the GOP. But even if they win the House and/or the Senate, it’s a shocking underperformance under the circumstances.
After what was predicted for 2022, especially when people were talking about the likes of Don Bolduc and Lee Zeldin having a real chance of winning, a 51-49 GOP Senate and a small Republican House majority would make me breathe a sigh of relief. If they win neither, I’m buying some lottery tickets.
Nobody knows anything. That’s the one rule for which there are no exceptions.