Well, that was a better week than we expected, we have to say.

The 2022 midterm elections are now over (although the counting still isn't) and the one big takeaway is that either Republicans dropped the ball or Democrats ran excellent campaigns all over the country. Or maybe some combination of the two. The red wave simply did not appear as predicted. A "blue breakwater" turned it back.

This is downright historic. As of this writing, the outcome is still in doubt -- control of both chambers of Congress is still up in the air. But no matter how the remaining races turn out, Democrats managed an expectations-defying performance.

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Reasonable Republicans now have the best chance they have had in almost two years to reclaim their party and realign it so that it is not in perpetual orbit around the whims of one unhinged man -- a man whose track record of losing elections grew much larger this Tuesday. Donald Trump is now being called the thing he fears most -- a loser -- by members of his own party. The right-wing media is even jumping on the "Dump Trump" bandwagon. The next few weeks could be pivotal for the ultimate direction of the Republican Party, in fact. It could either recede into the swamp of fawning obsequiousness towards Trump (that it has been stuck in since 2016), or it could decide that a brand new direction is what is needed right now.

A lot might depend on whether Trump actually follows through with his wink-and-nudge promise that he's going to declare his candidacy for the 2024 presidential race next Tuesday. Reportedly, he even had to be talked out of jumping in the race the day before the midterms, since to Trump, everything is always (or should always be) about Trump. To nobody's surprise, he even laid out the formulation he wanted the party to follow, no matter what happened in the midterms: "Well, I think if they win I should get all the credit. If they lose, I should not be blamed at all."

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That headline could be applicable to today's post-election situation in a number of ways, I suppose. As a movie director's cry (i.e. "We're starting take number two!"), since we are going to have a Senate race runoff election on December 6th in Georgia. It could be read literally, since at this point both parties need to take two of the three uncalled races in order to achieve a Senate majority. Or just as: "Take two and call me in the morning," the classic punchline to a doctor joke -- because it will probably take quite a while to get all the results in even before the December runoff. Or maybe even as: "I did a double-take when I heard the first results," that could work too. The funniest thing I heard during the extended post-election period in 2020 came out of the mouth of a babe -- some parent's toddler (this was passed along to me as an anecdote) said they were tired of watching television with Mommy and Daddy because "all they wanted to watch was The Map Show." And it looks like we'll all have at least a few more mornings of checking in with The Map Show before we know what Congress is really going to look like in January.

The Senate

Technically, four Senate races haven't been called yet, but in Alaska the only thing in doubt is which Republican is going to win. It has adopted a "top-four" ranked-choice slate from their new "jungle primary" system, which left one MAGAfied Trump-endorsed Republican (Kelly Tshibaka) at (all numbers are "as of this writing," of course) 44.4 percent, while incumbent Lisa Murkowski is pulling in 42.7 percent. The Democrat in the race is below 10 percent, but neither of the Republicans has hit the magic 50-percent-plus-one mark, so it will go into the at least the second round of the ranked-choice votes. Murkowski's still got an excellent chance of winning, but either way it'll leave the seat in the Republicans' column.

This means that the Senate split now stands -- with all the races called last night or today plus Alaska -- at Republicans 49, Democrats 48. Three states remain outstanding: Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia. Both parties need two of these three to assure control of the chamber.

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At this point, there's only one thing left to say:

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

The American system of holding elections is about to go through a stress test. I saw this term in the headline of a Washington Post piece today and had to agree it was the correct term to use. A stress test, whether for a piece of software or a new gizmo, is essentially the quality assurance/quality control people beating the living daylights out of it until it crumbles. For online software, this might mean simulating millions of people trying to access it simultaneously (see: Obamacare marketplace website rollout). For a new doodad, it might mean dropping it from increasing heights until it shatters when it hits. The whole idea is to push beyond the limits to find out the breaking point, one way or another.

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Some weeks, we pre-empt our own talking points here and just deliver a rant (because sometimes the circumstances seem to almost require it). This week, however, we're going to pre-empt the entire Friday Talking Points column. For some reason, we just don't think handing out awards to Democrats (good and bad) or providing talking points is the important thing, this week. At this point, the Democratic talking points are kind of set in stone; new ones wouldn't do much good with such little time between now and Election Day.

America will head to the polls next Tuesday, and the portents do seem rather ominous. In the early-morning hours, a full eclipse of the moon will be visible coast to coast -- or a "blood moon" as it is sometimes called (because it is going to turn blood-red). Anyone susceptible to superstition and reading omens has got to be a little concerned by that, right?

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Two years ago today, we were all glued to our television sets to find out who had won the 2020 presidential election. We didn't find out that night, of course, we had to wait days and days before the final results were in: Joe Biden had decisively beaten Donald Trump, with the exact same Electoral College split as happened in 2016 -- an election Trump had always liked to refer to as "a landslide."

Since then, Trump stopped merely previewing his Big Lie and instead made it his monomania -- because the one thing he cares more about than anything else in this life is that he is never called "a loser." If Biden had somehow won, that must have somehow meant "the election was rigged," because no other answer was acceptable to his planetary-sized ego.

And we have all paid the price for that narcissistic obsession ever since. It culminated (to date) with an insurrectionist takeover of the United States Capitol on January 6th, 2021 -- a date which will indeed live in infamy in American history. The violent mob wanted to hang the vice president for not somehow magically assuming powers he was not entitled to, in order to stop the official count of the Electoral College's votes and somehow hand the election to Trump -- even though he had clearly lost.

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In the past week or so, the Democratic Party has been doing an excellent job of getting out on the campaign trail and making a closing political argument. Both Barack Obama and Bill Clinton have made or will make appearances. President Joe Biden's speech today is a part of this full-court press, but one has to wonder why it took the Democrats so long to get so engaged with the process.

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Perhaps things aren't quite as bad for Democrats as the storyline the entire political media universe has been echoing for the past week or so. That's the message today, and it is an interesting one indeed for Democrats to see. For a while now, the political press has had a rather gloomy outlook: "Democrats peaked too early on the abortion issue and the momentum has now officially shifted to the Republicans in the midterm election races." Now, I'll admit I haven't been following the polls as closely as I do during presidential election years, so I didn't notice something that has apparently been happening (but, to be fair, few others had commented on it either) -- virtually all of the polling done in the past couple of weeks has been from Republican pollsters, not independent, nationally-known polling organizations. Which could explain the whole "momentum shift" as nothing more than bias induced into the polls themselves.

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Normally, I'd do my cheesy Vincent Price imitation here, with lots of spooky talk and Hallowe'en jokes. But this year's stories are a little grim -- or perhaps "a little closer to reality than usual" is a better way to put it.

I almost didn't do a Hallowe'en column this year, because it's pretty obvious what both sides of the aisle would be frightened by. Who controls Congress after the midterms would have (as always) been the easy way to go with today's stories. I could have easily written the basic tales in one tweet: "Republicans win, Democrats horrified... or Democrats win, Republicans horrified."

But the current political situation is grim indeed, even beyond who controls the House and the Senate in January. One of our major political parties either openly encourages or mocks and makes fun of violence directed against politicians of the other party -- all while insisting on their "both-sides-ism" view that both parties are equally responsible.

Which all made me wonder if writing "horror" stories for Hallowe'en was a little... redundant, maybe, this particular year? We've already got enough political horror in the world, what with the man who may be about to become speaker of the House saying in the past he would have to restrain himself when the handover happened between him and Nancy Pelosi: "I want you to watch Nancy Pelosi hand me that gavel. It will be hard not to hit her with it." To date, since Pelosi's husband was brutally attacked with a hammer, I have not heard a single Republican (much less McCarthy himself) asked about this remark. This is the political reality we live in.

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