Normally it’s a given that the party that wins the White House will lose congressional seats in subsequent midterm elections. In 2010, Democrats got clobbered after Barack Obama’s historic 2008 victory. And a blue wave took hold in 2018, almost certainly in response to Donald Trump’s 2016 creepy-twins, blood-elevator Overlook Hotel red wave.

One notable exception was 1998, when Democrats actually picked up seats, presumably as a result of GOP overreach and hypocrisy.

Will 2022 be another anomaly? It could be, because this time the X factor is a defeated would-be dictator. A loser who refuses to go away, refuses to concede the election he lost, refuses to eat his vegetables, won’t stop spitting out his binky, and recently launched a new cutting-edge (for 2001) internet platform—because Facebook won’t let him fundraise, Twitter won’t let him post, and there’s still no Rosetta stone with which to decipher the shit-smears his fans left on the Capitol walls during his Jan. 6 bumblefuck putsch—though I’m certain Trump’s new blog will provide fresh clues for us day after day after day. (Assuming we go there to read it, which I don’t recommend.)

Then again, I’m a pointy-headed snowflake beta cuck with a concave chin and the testosterone count of a female vole fetus, so what do I know? Of course I’m going to fall into sweet reveries about a brighter future, where every Mr. Potato Head in the country is savagely gelded by machete-wielding intersectional feminists. But that’s just me. I’m a demographic group of one. 

But Frank Luntz is a conservative pollster, and he sees some roadblocks ahead for the GOP’s fever dream of retaking the Senate and House in 2022. Or, rather, one rather large, crusty, and creamed corn-colored roadblock.

From The Hill:

Yeah, what a fucking shame that would be. If they’re not all dead from COVID-19, Republicans may just decide that the system is simply too corrupt to participate in. Maybe they should all burn their absentee ballot applications again. 

Yeah. Say, remember when Trump wouldn’t shut up about voter fraud in advance of Georgia’s Jan. 5 runoff elections and we picked up two crucial Senate seats in a traditionally red Sun Belt state? Would be a shame if that happened again. 

By the way, not all of Luntz’s prognostications are quite so reassuring. He also thinks Republicans’ ugly head will rear up again in 2024.

I like the part about his losing to the Democratic nominee, but I don’t like the part about his winning the primary, because if I have to sit through another election night with his poor man’s Boris Yeltsin face profaning my TV screen, I’ll age so quickly I’ll be circling my programs in the TV Guide before the week is out. And that’s without even mentioning the months of whining, inveigling, bullying, and baldfaced lying that would inevitably follow his second electoral beatdown (see also: the 2020 presidential election and its aftermath).

Either way, we need to redouble our efforts—as Joe Biden is doing—to buck historic trends and retain our razor-thin congressional majority in 2022. And we very well may get a big assist from the elephant in the room … who won’t fucking leave, no matter what anyone says.

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