What, if anything, did the midterms tell us about the country -- other than underwhelming Republicans could still take the House and Senate albeit barely?

During the COVID-19 lockdowns, American elections radically changed to mail-in and early voting. They did so in a wild variety of state-by-state ways. Add ranked voting and a required majority margin to the mess and the result is that once cherished Election Day balloting becomes increasingly irrelevant.

Election Night also no longer exists. Returns are not counted for days. It is intolerable for a modern democracy to wait and wait for all sorts of different ballots both cast and counted under radically different and sometimes dubious conditions.

The Democrats -- with overwhelming media and money advantages -- have mastered these arts of massive and unprecedented early, mail-in, and absentee voting. Old-fashioned Republicans count on riling up their voters to show up on Election Day. But it is far easier to finesse and control the mail-in ballots than to "get out the vote."

Vote Counting by Thomas Nast (1871)

Well, that was disheartening, dispiriting, and demoralizing.

We went into the party with a president with some of the lowest approval ratings in history and Americans (at least according to the polls) focused like lasers on issues that could be chalked up to Democrat policy failures — namely, inflation and crime.

And yet Republicans are hanging on by a thread, and, as of this writing, it's still possible that Democrats will retain their majority in the House and gain a full majority in the Senate.  If that happens, the American experiment is over, and the Marxist experiment truly begins.

So how did we get here?

Life in Normalville

Normalville PA. Yes, there really is a town named Normalville, in Pennsylvania about 60 miles south of Pittsburgh with a zip code of 15469. It was founded in 1843.

If there were a way to illustrate the beginning, middle, and end of this election cycle in four powerful moments, I’d start here with the faces of the men and women working on the construction of the Keystone pipeline, and the owners of the small businesses who supported them, that I witnessed days after President Joe Biden terminated their livelihoods.

These are people who work with their hands in the harshest of weather conditions digging trenches, cleaning feeder pipes, laying concrete, ensuring the proper fittings on the connecting pipes, and loading and unloading heavy materials by hand. That's not including the faces of the people who run the motels, diners, machine shops, and barber shops and the mechanics who make sure they are fed, housed, cleaned, and able to get home when the job is done.

What Joe Biden and the Democrat Party did to the people of Normalville will break your heart. Do you think Biden and the Dems care?

The polls all say the same thing: Republicans will reclaim the House and Senate.

The Republican know this.  The Democrats know this.  And most alarming, the political operatives know this.  They also know what the internal polls say, which are inevitably worse for Democrats because such things aren't push polls done for public relations purposes.

What's a Democrat to do?  We know that the Democrats are determined.  They are fighting.  They've got the big guns of their party, President Obama, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, and Joe Biden, out there on the campaign trail, each unwittingly blundering it up in his own way.

Based on their common talking point about "saving democracy," it's pretty obvious they feel "entitled" to win, too.  By their argument, the opposition is evil. And when you’re fighting evil, that gives you the moral right to cheat, right?