My father always maintained that there is no shame in admitting an honest mistake. On November 3, the writer of this blog happily ate crow and admitted that – thank God – he was wrong in his prediction that Vladimir Putin would use a tactical nuclear weapon against Ukraine by the end of October. And I’ve never been so happy to be wrong.
But like all people, I’d rather be right, and after last week’s U.S. midterms, Greymantle is going to shift gears a little bit and gleefully take a deep bow. Because, dear readers, this blog was among the first to accurately predict how the 2022 midterms would shake out – and last December (2021) no less. So, we are going to take a little victory lap.
I know – it’s egotistical. But I promise to keep this post – ‘Greymantle Takes a Bow as Dems Sweep 2022 Midterms’ politely short.
GREYMANTLE’S CRYSTAL BALL
We began to formulate our thoughts about the 2022 midterms the week after the 2021 off-year elections. In our November 8, 2021 posting, we put forth the argument that limited Republican gains in the off-year were little more than a swing back to the middle in favor of moderate candidates after the histrionics of the Trump presidency.
In fact, we observed that moderate candidates won the 2021 off-year elections overall, with centrist Democrat Eric Adams winning the New York City mayoral race and moderate Democrats and Republicans prevailing against more progressive/ socialist candidates on the Democratic side and against Trumpier primary challengers on the Republican side.
All in all, our assessment of the 2021 off-years was the launching pad for our first predictions about 2022. To whit: Democratic ‘voter exhaustion’ in the 2021 off-year elections did not presage a collapse of Democratic turnout in 2022. Quite the opposite: Greymantle’s view was that some Democrats were taking a short break from the intense political engagement of 2020 so that they might better be able to ‘reset’ in time for the 2022 mid-terms.
Where this prediction is concerned, the events of the last week beginning on Nov. 8, 2022 (election day) have amply supported Greymantle’s thesis. New York City’s restrained 2021 election and election of Mayor Adams did indeed ‘point the way’ to the 2022 midterm results.
SPECIFIC ELECTION CALLS VINDICATED, E.G. WHITMER, EVERS
Since I am tooting my own horn here, it’s better to go all in and just mention every election call that Greymantle got right. A list follows:
On November 22 of last year, we predicted that Tony Evers, Kathy Hochul and Josh Shapiro would win their gubernatorial races in Wisconsin, New York and Pennsylvania, respectively. And nearly 12 months before the elections, we were right on all counts, including the relative narrowness of Hochul’s election victory.
We will admit that our November 22, 2021 post predicted that Michigan Governor Whitmer and Pennsylvania Senate candidate John Fetterman would narrowly lose their elections…but, we revised those predictions by the time of our December 30, 2021 post and changed our view on Whitmer’s chances to a strong positive prediction that the Michigan governor would be re-elected. And we were right.
Likewise, last December we predicted that Kansas Governor Laura Kelly would beat the odds and be re-elected governor of her solidly red state. We also predicted the Mathew McConaughy would pull out of the Texas governor’s race, that Beto O’Rourke would win the Democratic nomination for Texas governor, and that O’Rourke would lose in the general election against Greg Abbott. Again, all were correct.
Outside of specific midterm races, we predicted last last year that Democrats would hold a substantial fund-raising advantage over Republicans in 2022 and that a likely over-turning of Roe v. Wade by the US Supreme Court would completely scramble the midterms, providing the Democrats with a distinct edge in many blue and purple jurisdictions. And once again, we at this blog site were correct in our prognostications.
Though we never took the time to revise our view of the Pennsylvania Senate race on the pages of this blog, we had, in fact, shifted our view by June 2022 toward a Fetterman victory once we knew his opponent would be celebrity doctor, Mehmet Oz. But that’s an easy thing to say. We should have done so in print over the summer. Our bad!
EVEN WHEN WE WERE WRONG, WE WERE RIGHT
Even in instances where our predictions were slightly off, this blog still managed to correctly discern the overarching patterns. For instance, we predicted on Nov. 22, 2021 that the Republicans would narrowly recapture the Senate but fail to win the House.
In actuality, the Republicans as of this writing on Nov. 13, 2022, remain on track to take the House based on the latest vote tabulations, but the Democrats seem likely to increase their margin in the Senate by at least one seat (which we had predicted first before revising our view to a narrow Republican capture in late December) as Senator Cortez Masto of Nevada has been re-elected by a thin margin.
So, a shift of big donors toward Democrats and a final result yielding divided control of Congress were our decided views, even if the specifics did not shake out precisely as we had envisioned.
GRATEFUL FOR MINOR MISSTEPS
The one race that we emphatically did not call correctly was the Arizona governor’s race. Greymantle predicted a Republican victory last November, but it now appears that the Republican candidate, election denier Kari Lake, is set to lose the election as the final mail-in ballots are counted.
Greymantle does not lament that outcome. Kari Lake is a menace and we are happy to see her lose, even if it means we were wrong. As a former journalist, Lake has acted a disgraceful part in casting doubt on the 2020 election results and attacking the integrity of poll workers. She deserves to be cast into a pit of iniquity reserved for American history’s worst villains.
It goes without saying that President Biden will benefit enormously in 2024 from the defeats of election deniers in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin in 2022. And Donald Trump is, as the Wall Street Journal has already dubbed him, ‘The Biggest Loser” from these events.
‘THE WHY’ IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN ‘THE WHAT’
Because I promised to keep this post short, I will wrap it up below with a final couple of thoughts on the ‘Red Ripple’ election of 2022.
Here are my five take-aways:
- The Republicans performed poorly for reasons that we identified in 2021, namely because they faced their own headwinds. Voters are getting sick of performative antics and conspiracy-mongering.
- The downfall of Roe really hurt the Republicans. This may have been partly the intent of the SCOTUS majority who voted to overturn it. While these are right-leaning people, they were surely dismayed to see Trump take over the Republican Party and wanted to do their bit to break his hold. They knew the likely electoral result.
- The Democratic voter base remains deeply engaged in the political process and understood how important the 2022 midterms were going to be for 2024. They acted accordingly.
- Electoral reforms such as ranked-choice voting and other measures advocated by the Forward Party are starting to bear fruit. Look at the Alaska House race where a Democrat won. Expect to see more things like this in 2023 and 2024 as more reform efforts succeed.
- It’s in the wind: we are two to six years away from a major political re-alignment a la 1932 to 1936, and in favor of the Democrats. The stalemate of 2008-2022 is finally starting to break.
‘Once more into the breach, my friends!’
– Henry V, William Shakespeare
Until next time, I remain my cocky self —
Greymantle
