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A Referendum On Crazy*
Voters Prefer Rights, Democracy, and Stability Over Tyranny, Chaos, And Dysfunction
For years to come, experts will study the factors combining for Tuesday’s history-defying midterms. With rare exceptions, midterms end with the president’s party suffering significant losses in Congress and down the ballot. In 2010, Democrats lost 63 seats and control of the House in what President Obama characterized as a “shellacking.” Mr. Obama owned it, confessing that the lessons learned from the “thumping” would guide him going forward. “In the rush of activity, sometimes we lost track of . . . the ways that we connected with folks that got us here in the first place.”
Expecting history would inevitably repeat, gleeful pols and pundits on the right relied heavily on fear centered in the economy and crime and on President Biden’s weak approval numbers for the anticipated Trump Party landslide. They prognosticated with a variety of crimson metaphors (video clips compiled by Chris Hayes): a red wave, a massive red wave, a red wave the likes of which this country has never seen, a red tsunami, a red tidal wave. As she does, Margorie Taylor Greene chimed in on Twitter (deleted an hour later), claiming “[t]here is a title wave of truth that is about to come out. The people that suppressed the truth to begin with should go to jail for what they have done.” Some even referenced Stanley Kubrick’s…