Matt Purple

The saying used to go that "Democrats fall in love while Republicans fall in line," though lately Republicans seem mostly to fall on the floor. The circular firing squad has become a mainstay of GOP politics, even when — and this is what really sets them apart — they win elections rather than lose them. Republicans seem to love few things more than turning the guns inward and squealing "fire!!" So it's been since the 2022 midterms. The circular firing began with the party's moderate wing, which is always down for a little anti-Trump warfare. Governor Larry Hogan was on CNN last weekend where he trashed Trump for allegedly costing Republicans not just this election but the last two as well.

The modern political pundit is a voice in the wilderness, a self-styled beacon of truth against a pampered and bought-off establishment. Yet to cut against the trend: I was wrong about last night's midterms. I thought it was going to be a Republican rout. Even after the Dobbs decision came down and Democrats saw a boost in the polls I still didn't think abortion would ever trump inflation and crime in the minds of voters. And while 2022 didn't see a blue wave, it sure didn't see a red wave either. Instead the scene this morning looks a lot like the status quo. If current vote totals hold, then the Senate will remain 50-50 with Kamala Harris breaking the tie, while Republicans haven't flipped enough congressional seats to retake the House.

Republican House minority leader Kevin McCarthy doesn't like Nancy Pelosi. In this, he's hardly alone — the list of those who don't like Nancy Pelosi is long and includes Republicans, Democrats, moderates, progressives, intelligence officials, hair stylists, health nuts, probably a few farm animals and single-cell organisms. America's speaker of the House is polarizing in the same way that a rocket booster might be said to be noisy. Yet in McCarthy's case, he has good reason not to like Pelosi: she doesn't much like him either. After McCarthy last year criticized a mask mandate in the House of Representatives, Pelosi called him a "moron.

It is midterm election season, an important period on our political calendar as it marks that there's only two years to go until the next presidential election. And while something called the "blue wave" supposedly took hold last summer, the latest polling shows that Democrats are in trouble. How much trouble? You do hate to wish ill on a party running a campaign based on third-trimester abortion access and an imagined threat from brownshirts. But given the choice, here are eight Democrats we wouldn't mind seeing ousted this year. 8. Representative Jerry Nadler Nadler presided over both impeachments of Donald Trump and is a fairly reliable progressive. The New York rep is not the most inept Dem out there — but then he did almost dislocate his nose trying to remove a Covid mask.

Welp, so much for the blue wave. That towering electoral tsunami, which was to deluge the midterm races in a soggy detritus of worn masks and Planned Parenthood pamphlets, has given way to a stark reality: 2022 is a Republican year. It was always a Republican year, as some of us have been pointing out. Voters simply weren't about to prioritize third-trimester abortions over rising crime and the price of beef. So it was that Jill Biden this week was dispatched to campaign in Rhode Island. Rhode Island. And while she no doubt made a pitstop at Brown to hobnob with her fellow doctorates, she was mainly there to campaign for endangered Democrats. In Rhode Island. A Democratic congressional PAC, meanwhile, is dumping money into deep-blue New Jersey.

The blue wave cometh — or does it? Contra reports that a cerulean tsunami is bearing down on Congress, RealClearPolitics still projects that the GOP will win the Senate this November, and Tuesday's dismal inflation numbers have only boosted Republican hopes. So...back to the red wave then? Or maybe the red and blue waves will combine into a purple wave, which, in conjunction with a chartreuse wave, will bury Politico's offices in a sea of multicolored futility? Midterm election predictions are always a fool's game, which is why pundits love them. Yet allow this much: the political climate right now is uncertain. And it's into this tense atmosphere that Senator Lindsey Graham has chucked what some are saying could be a game-changer.

At first, I thought Joe Biden's address to the nation on Thursday was going to be one of those Star Wars crawl-type soliloquies that liberals love to deliver. You know the kind: "It is a period of great strife. RIGHT-WING EXTREMISTS, pouncing from their TRUTH Social accounts, have struck at the very heart of OUR DEMOCRACY..." The difference, though, is that in those addresses, the speaker at least tries to sound objective, to remain above the hurly-burly he's criticizing. This was not the approach taken by Joe Biden. Joining us from what looked like a cross between Philly's red-light district and some marble Pentagon imperium, Biden jumped straight into the ring with what he called the "MAGA Republicans.

Earlier today, I went outside and threw a frisbee at a tree. Then I came back inside and the chyron on CNN read: "VIRGINIA MAN'S FRISBEE GAMBIT COULD BE GAME-CHANGER IN MIDTERMS." Yes, it is political silly season, which is to say election season, which is to say any one of the four seasons. Pundits have been hyperventilating about the 2022 midterms since approximately 1922, so what a delight that we're finally a mere seventy-seven days out. At least this cycle isn't being trumpeted as THE MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION OF OUR LIVES, a moniker that's been applied to every presidential contest since the delightfully sleepy Clinton/Dole showdown of 1996. Think of it: back then, MTV was actually worried about voter apathy! Don't ever tell us '90s kids we have nothing to be nostalgic for.