With all the attention being placed on the battle for the House in 2022, realistic analysis of the battle for the Senate has been lacking, so I tried to provide some at New York:

Political handicappers looking to the 2022 midterms have focused on House races because the very predictable pattern of midterm House losses by the president’s party makes continuation of a Democratic House a real long shot (and probably a prohibitive long shot unless Joe Biden’s job-approval rating shows significant improvement soon). The loss of either chamber, of course, means the governing trifecta that has made enactment of part of Biden’s legislative agenda possible will be gone, probably for a good while (at least until 2026, by my reckoning). But there is some independent value in continued Democratic control of the Senate thanks to that chamber’s role in confirming Biden’s executive branch and judicial nominees along with the ability to control committee and floor action in a way that gives Democrats significant leverage and opportunities for conveying their message.

Because only one-third of the Senate is up for reelection every two years, there is not the sort of predictable relationship between Senate outcomes and the general political climate. In other words, a bad year for either party in presidential, House, or gubernatorial contests doesn’t mean a bad year in Senate races if the landscape is positive. We saw that most recently in 2018, when Republicans lost 41 net House seats and seven net governorships yet picked up two net Senate seats because the landscape (with 26 Democratic Senate seats and only nine Republican Senate seats at stake) was very positive for the GOP.

The Senate landscape is modestly positive in 2022 for Democrats, who have to defend only 14 seats as compared with 20 seats for Republicans. Moreover, as Amy Walter points out, none of the 14 Democratic seats are in a state carried by Donald Trump in 2020. Meanwhile, Republicans are defending two seats in states carried by Biden in 2020, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

But at the same time, Democrats are defending three Senate seats (in Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada) in states Biden carried very narrowly (he won by 0.30 percent in Arizona, 0.24 percent in Georgia, and a relatively luxurious 2.39 percent in Nevada). Republicans in the two nominally blue states whose Senate seats they control don’t have much ground to make up, either (Biden won Pennsylvania by 1.17 percent and Wisconsin by 0.63 percent). They also control an open seat in North Carolina, a state Trump won by only 1.3 percent.

To give you an idea of how much “swing” Republicans might rationally expect in a midterm, consider that Republicans won the national House popular vote by 1.1 percent in 2016 and Democrats won it by 8.6 percent in 2018. That’s a lot of movement against the party controlling the White House. Anything remotely like that in 2022 — again, controlling for state aberrations despite the trend toward straight-ticket voting in recent years — and Republicans could pretty easily sweep the six contests mentioned above, all rated as toss-ups by the Cook Political Report, and take control of the Senate by a 53-to-47 margin, assuming neither party breaks serve by winning in a less competitive state.

What may give Democrats better Senate odds is the current nature of Republican intrastate and intraparty dynamics. There are potentially fractious GOP Senate primaries in Arizona, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania that could produce nominees with real weaknesses. Moreover, in these states and others (notably Ohio, a “red” state that recently reelected a progressive Democratic senator), Trump’s insistence on turning GOP primaries into referenda on loyalty to his ludicrous 2020 election claims could interfere with the expected pro-Republican midterm trend.

Potential Trump-generated problems affecting Senate races aren’t limited to his involvement in just those races. Georgia is a classic example. Freshman Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock, who along with Jon Ossoff won by an eyelash in 2021’s unique dual general-election Senate runoff in what has become the ultimate battleground state, ought to be a sitting duck in 2022 with even a minimal midterm swing. But Trump enormously complicated Georgia politics by pushing the man Ossoff beat a year ago, David Perdue, into a primary challenge to the incumbent governor, Brian Kemp, as part of a purge effort aimed at those who didn’t support the 45th president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. The Perdue-Kemp primary is sure to be an extremely expensive and divisive affair. It could weaken the ultimate winner in a general election against Stacey Abrams and might spill over into the Senate race, where Republican front-runner and Trump favorite Herschel Walker hasn’t shaken questions about his background and temperament (or rid himself of primary opposition).

Divisive Republican gubernatorial primaries seem likely in Arizona and Pennsylvania, as well, and could extend to Wisconsin, where incumbent GOP Senator Ron Johnson is struggling with low favorability numbers.

Republicans should be considered the slight favorites to flip the Senate (and much stronger favorites to flip the House) in 2022, assuming Biden’s popularity doesn’t seriously improve by November. But Mitch McConnell should not be making big plans for 2023. His party’s lord and master, Trump, could screw things up yet, and you never know entirely what will happen in a wide array of competitive Senate races.

I returned to one of my favorite themes at New York this week in the context of the ongoing MAGA delegitimization of elections:

Donald Trump’s obsession with inflated estimates of the crowd sizes at his various live events has been a long-running joke in American politics. This was exhibited most famously in his bitter argument with the National Park Service over the number of people who attended his inauguration five years ago. But as Elaine Godfrey notes at The Atlantic, the phenomenon persists even today, and it’s central to MAGA claims that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump:

“Before the 2020 election, Trump and his fans would often ask reporters how Joe Biden could possibly win when he didn’t have rallies as big as Trump’s. Now that Biden is president, Trump-rally goers say things like Trump couldn’t really have lost. Look at all of these people! In Arizona this weekend, 51-year-old Tammy Shutts put it this way to me: ‘100 percent, 1,000 percent, 1 million percent Biden didn’t win’ her state, she said, gesturing to the hordes of people around her. ‘I’ve been in Arizona for almost 21 years. There is no way—no way—we went blue.’”

As Godfrey acutely observes, big crowds aren’t “just a bragging point” for Trump and his supporters. It’s “proof they are part of the American majority.” This both reflects and reinforces the core belief in MAGA land that more objective measurements of Trump’s popularity, like polls and election results, are unreliable and likely “rigged.” The proof? Look at those crowds!

Th preference for subjective instead of  objective standards for political strength was not, of course, invented by Trump or his followers. It’s pretty common among political groups who don’t want to accept evidence that they are outnumbered or outgunned. During the home stretch of the very competitive 2012 presidential campaign, with polls showing Barack Obama building a solid lead over Mitt Romney, there was a profusion of Republican wishful thinking based not only on comparative crowd size but on the number of Romney yard signs evident along the highways and byways of the country. This obsession with the display of popularity reached epic levels during Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign, which greatly valued huge flags and signs, boat parades, owning the libs with obnoxious motorcades through Democratic areas, and, of course, Trump’s rallies. The Biden campaign could not remotely match all this frenetic activity, in part, to be clear, because it considered it unsafe to voters, campaign operatives, and volunteers alike in the middle of a pandemic. But to an extent that leaves coastal elites baffled, the conviction has spread that Biden’s base of support was a statistical Potemkin village because it was far less visible.

Political operatives and pundits should examine themselves in the mirror before making too much fun of this hammerheaded, snail’s-eye view of political popularity. Some of its also stems from the incessantly discussed and near-universally accepted emphasis in recent political discourse on enthusiasm as a tangible election-winning asset. It does matter, to be sure, particularly in midterm and off-year contests, in which lukewarm voters often do not participate. But a candidate does not get extra votes for having supporters who are teeming with joy or fury, and enthusiasm beyond the point needed to get voters to the polls only helps if it is communicable. As a substitute for objective data about electoral outcomes, enthusiasm and its visible signs can be actively misleading.

But if your favorite president and partisan media have told you day in and day out for years that polls are fake news and elections are rigged, then direct experience of the strength of the political cause you share with so many others (in many places, with virtually all of your friends and neighbors) is all you’ve got. Add in a polarized atmosphere in which the other “team” is deemed actively evil and its supporters are dismissed as dupes or fellow-travelers in sin, and you get January 6, 2021. On that day, another crowd — “the biggest crowd I’ve ever,” according to Trump — formed to overwhelm Congress with its conviction that Biden’s victory was a lie because the Democrat didn’t command those monster crowds.

The sense that the MAGA movement feels like a majority and thus must be one is naturally growing stronger at a time when Democratic enthusiasm is low and Trump is plotting a triumphant restoration to power, whatever it takes. As Yeats famously said of post–World War I Europe just over a century ago, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” Unfortunately, some of the worst believe their passionate intensity entitles them to rule.

There’s been a lot of buzzing lately about the president’s job approval ratings, so I gave them a close look at New York:

Midterm elections almost always serve as referenda on the perceived job performance of the president. It’s no accident that just prior to the two recent midterms (1998 and 2002) in which the party controlling the White House gained House seats, which is rare, the president’s job approval ratings were in the 60s. On three other occasions (1962, 1986, and 1990), presidents with job-approval ratings of at least 58 percent kept midterm losses for their party in the single digits.

With Democrats currently holding a five-seat margin in the House, President Joe Biden would probably need one of those very-high-job-approval moments to save his party’s control of the House in the 2022 midterms. Unfortunately, in this era of partisan polarization, a Biden boom in popularity is improbable. According to the FiveThirtyEight polling averages, the president’s approval rating peaked at 55.1 percent on March 22. It’s currently at 42.1 percent, and it is “underwater” (below his disapproval rating) by 9.8 percent. If Biden can turn the fairly steady downward drift in his approval ratings around, he can certainly help Democrats mitigate midterm House losses. On two occasions, presidents with pre-midterm approval ratings in the 40s lost only a handful of seats: Carter’s party lost 11 seats in 1978, with a Gallup rating of 49 percent, and Obama’s party lost 13 seats in 2014, with a Gallup rating of 44 percent. On the other hand, Democrats lost 53 House seats when Obama was at 45 percent in 2010 and 63 House seats when Clinton was at 46 percent in 1994. So Democrats can almost certainly kiss their trifecta goodbye, barring something unforeseeable.

The Senate is invariably another matter, since the particular “class” of senators up for reelection in any midterm has a huge impact on partisan performance. In 2018, to cite the most recent example, Republicans managed to gain two net Senate seats despite losing 40 net House seats, mostly because Democrats had an incredible 26-9 disadvantage in seats they had to defend. It was a terrible Senate landscape for Democrats, who, by contrast, face a marginally favorable Senate landscape in 2022. Still, a pretty reliable Senate model devised by Sean Trende projects that Democrats are likely to lose control of the upper chamber in 2022 if Biden’s job-approval ratings haven’t rebounded to the high 40s by Election Day.

In the longer term, there is a definite silver lining to Biden’s current popularity woes, reflected in this ostensibly very negative headline at FiveThirtyEight: “One Year in, Biden Has the Second-Lowest Approval Rating of Any President.” Guess who had the very lowest at this point in his presidency? That’s right: Donald J. Trump, whose approval rating was at 39 percent a year after his inauguration. If, as is currently more likely than not, the 2024 presidential election is a Biden-Trump rematch, you have to like Biden’s odds for a second term if he can improve his public standing even slightly between now and then. Yes, ex-presidents usually become more popular after they leave office. But they generally don’t insist on making the low point of their presidencies a signature moment, and defense of it a litmus test for their party, as Trump is doing with the Capitol riot and his broader campaign to steal the presidency. It’s as if George W. Bush had tried a 2012 comeback (and hadn’t been term-limited) based on the eternal righteousness of the Iraq War.

With better skill than he has showed lately and a bit of luck, Biden can make the midterms a nick rather than a grievous wound to his party. Then, like his friend and former boss Barack Obama, he could win reelection two years after being underestimated.

I read a Thomas Friedman column this week that really required a smackdown. So I supplied one at New York:

How much political capital should Democrats invest in a probably doomed effort to save the political career of Liz Cheney? Earlier this week, Never Trump Republican Linda Chavez penned a column urging Wyoming Democrats to take a dive this November in order to give the incumbent a chance to survive as an independent, assuming (as it safe) that Cheney will be purged in her own party’s primary. And now, in an apparent coincidence, in comes New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman suggesting a far more radical step by Democrats to align themselves with the small slice of Republicans who follow Cheney’s example in repudiating Donald Trump. He wrote:

“Is that what America needs in 2024 — a ticket of Joe Biden and Liz Cheney? Or Joe Biden and Lisa Murkowski, or Kamala Harris and Mitt Romney, or Stacey Abrams and Liz Cheney, or Amy Klobuchar and Liz Cheney? Or any other such combination.”

Friedman phrases this as a question, but clearly he thinks it’s a good idea given the “existential moment” America would face if Trump is allowed to regain the presidency in 2024. It’s a bit of a loaded question, too, since it postulates that nothing short of a previously unimaginable “sacrifice” by Democrats and Never Trump Republicans alike can stop Trump — and that it would, in fact, succeed in stopping Trump.

I certainly agree that Democrats dumping Kamala Harris to give their vice-presidential nomination to a conservative Republican who opposes legalized abortion and is a militarist by conviction and heredity would be a “sacrifice,” to put it very mildly. It would also be very, very weird. Friedman cites the recent establishment of a mind-bending coalition government in Israel to thwart Bibi Netanyahu as a development comparable to what he is suggesting. But as he acknowledges, Israel has a parliamentary system in which multiparty coalitions are the rule rather than the exception. A presidential system in which parties invariably run separate tickets for the top job is another thing altogether.

The U.S. has had exactly one example of multiparty fusionism in a presidential election. In 1864, in the midst of the Civil War, Republicans nominated Democrat Andrew Johnson of Tennessee — then serving as U.S. military governor of Tennessee — to run with Lincoln on a “Union” ticket. The experiment did not turn out well, beginning with Johnson’s drunken inaugural address in 1865 and continuing with the racist solidarity he exhibited toward ex-Confederates after Lincoln’s assassination, culminating in his impeachment and near removal from office. There are important reasons politicians sort themselves out into major parties, which should be apparent in an era of polarization over issues other than the scofflaw behavior of Donald Trump.

Is the threat of Trump’s return to the White House the equivalent of the U.S. Civil War? Not in itself, I would contend, though that horrific development could lead eventually to grave conditions comparable if not equal to a civil war. The premise that a Biden-Cheney fusion ticket would uniquely doom Trump to failure is even more dubious. There has never been much evidence of a mass following for Never Trump Republicans, and such as it is, it is mostly composed of people who would (and did in 2020) gladly vote for Biden and Harris. The baleful effect that replacing Harris with Cheney on the ticket would have on Democratic turnout could easily offset or exceed the alleged benefits of bipartisan and trans-ideological fusion.

So Democrats should say thanks, but no thanks, to Friedman for the idea of submitting their party to some sort of unwieldy and unnatural coalition of national salvation, so long as there is the slightest possibility of beating Trump the old-fashioned way. Liz Cheney deserves great respect for the courage she has shown in defying Trump at the expense of her own career, and if Biden is reelected with her support, perhaps she deserves an ambassadorship, a minor Cabinet post, or a major sub-Cabinet position. But she has no business being at the top of the line of succession to a Democratic president.

I have been very involved in warning Democrats about the strong possibility of another attempted Trump election coup In 2024, and wrote up my latest advice on the subject at New York:

As someone who spent months before the 2020 election warning that Trump was planning an election coup, then had to watch and write about his efforts that were finally foiled on January 6, 2021, I felt the anniversary of that day brought back in sharp relief bad memories that had never really faded. I realized that the fire we avoided last time might in future require more than a beefed-up Capitol police corps or resolute judges or a smattering of responsible Republicans. Like my colleague Errol Louis, I accepted that we might each need more of a personal commitment to democracy than just a willingness to vote and hope for the best.

But the most galvanizing January 6 meditation yet came in a New York Times op-ed by election-law expert Rick Hasen. This sober analyst of developments threatening the right to vote and subverting impartial election administration is clearly convinced that one of our two major political parties has sufficiently abandoned the causes he holds dear that they have gained a veto power over any remedial action in Washington and many crucial states. This leaves Democrats and the remaining responsible Republicans with few options going forward, particularly since the power they do hold in Washington and in the states may soon be significantly diminished.

Paradoxically, that means Democrats cannot afford to spurn any Republican efforts to help them prevent a 2024 coup. Hasen writes:

“A coalition with the minority of Republicans willing to stand up for the rule of law is the best way to try to erect barriers to a stolen election in 2024, even if those Republicans do not stand with Democrats on voting rights or other issues. Remember it took Republican election officials, elected officials, and judges to stand up against an attempted coup in 2020.”

It’s understandable that Democrats distrust the feelers some Republicans are putting out for cooperation on legislation to fix the Electoral Count Act of 1887, the hazy and confusing law that Team Trump tried to exploit to overturn Biden’s victory with the help of a mob. If the offer comes with the precondition of Democratic abandonment of voting-rights legislation, it may rightly be rejected. But at some point, accepting just enough Senate Republican help to close off one avenue to a stolen 2024 presidential election may be vital for Democrats, unfair is it may seem from a partisan point of view.

A more vexing problem, however, is what happens if the stolen election attempt occurs not in Washington but in the states. That’s where Trump is busily working to install loyalists in key election offices and where he may expect better and quicker complicity from Republican state legislators who could be in a position to control the certification of presidential electors. Hasen offers a specific scenario:

“What happens if a Democratic presidential candidate wins in, say, Wisconsin in 2024, according to a fair count of the vote, but the Wisconsin legislature stands ready to send in an alternative slate of electors for Mr. Trump or another Republican based on unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud or other irregularities?”

In that contingency, he argues, “widespread public protests made up of people of good faith from across the political spectrum” may be the only effective recourse. Indeed, says Hasen: “If the officially announced vote totals do not reflect the results of a fair election process, that should lead to nationwide peaceful protests and even general strikes.”

That last resort of labor protests, the general strike (a work stoppage not confined to any one industry or segment of the population), is not something that has ever been successfully deployed as a political weapon in the United States. The potential need to attempt one — even if it’s confined to a single locale like a state capital where a legislature is engaged in subverting a democratic election result — shows the gravity of the situation we may face in 2024 based not on paranoid fears but on what we witnessed this time last year and what we can see happening in MAGA-land right now.