I notice that the corporate media refuse to speculate on THAT "narrative" and prefer to help 45 and Johnson to measure the drapes.
They don't want to entertain that because it "wouldn't fit past history", so the possibility would be remote in their minds (the MISTAKE they made in 2022) -
What I Got Wrong In 2022
By Nathaniel Rakich
Dec. 28, 2022, at 6:00 AM
Heres a prediction that 100 percent, absolutely, positively will come true: I will get something wrong in 2023. Here at FiveThirtyEight, we make a lot of predictions every year; some of them work out, but we cant get every single one right. We can, however, learn from our mistakes. Thats why I like to write about everything I got wrong in the previous 12 months.1 I do this for two reasons: First, theyre often unintentionally hilarious (and when youre a politics reporter, sometimes you need a laugh); second, identifying my blind spots has helped me become a better analyst.
And theres no shortage of material for this years installment.
Lets start with a tweet I wrote on Nov. 6, 2020, shortly after it became clear that Joe Biden had won the presidential race: Congratulations to Republicans on their victory in the 2022 midterms! This was obviously meant to be snarky but also to communicate a political tenet: that the presidents party almost always has a bad midterm election. Of course, that tweet wasnt from 2022, but I also made this argument in January of this year. And for several months thereafter, my analysis was colored by my expectation that 2022 would be a good election year for Republicans. As everyone knows by now, the midterms were a disappointment for Republicans. They won the House but only barely (they gained just nine seats on net). Meanwhile, Democrats gained a seat in the Senate.
Clearly, I was overly confident in my early prediction. While it is true that the presidents party almost always has a poor midterm, there have been exceptions. And the 2022 midterms turned out to be one of these asterisk elections, thanks in no small part to the Supreme Courts decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization to overturn the constitutional right to abortion. This year I should have been more prepared for the possibility that the ruling could throw a wrench into the election, especially after a draft of the decision was leaked in May. And even after the decision, it took me a while to become convinced that voter anger over Dobbs would prove durable enough to last until Election Day.
It wasnt until the fall that I revised my expectations from a red wave to a red ripple.
My biggest mistake here was not realizing just how common an asterisk election actually is. I often quoted one key stat: that the presidents party had gained House seats in only two of the previous 19 midterm elections. But there were four other midterms where the presidents party lost fewer than 10 House seats so what happened in 2022 isnt that rare. I also neglected to remember that the presidents party had lost Senate seats in only 13 of the last 19 midterms. In other words, midterms like 2022 happen about a third of the time way too frequently to count them out.
(snip)
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/2022-predictions-i-got-wrong/