Midterm predictions

This is actually really good: https://www.state.gov/briefings-foreign-press-centers/understanding-the-american-voter-in-2022

Predictions:

• Democrats maintain majority in the Senate.
• Republicans pick up a very slight majority in the House. I.e. Not more than 30 seats.

Should do a turnout prediction…All right, I’m guessing turnout is between 2014 and 2018 numbers. Higher than 2014, lower than 2018. My reasoning for this is conspiratorial: there’s a massive marketing push for artificial political engagement among Republicans with things like the abortion ban, and this will actually increase Democrat turnout somewhat. But it’s not genuine rage and engagement like in 2018, which was in response to Trump. Marketing to Republicans will increase turnout among Democrats because Republicans vote as a matter of conscientiousness, whereas young progressives vote as personal expression. So if you imagine the election had been the day after the abortion ban, Republicans would have voted at the same rates because “it’s what you do” but you’d have the alarmingly large demographic of feral young women out baying for blood. Whereas normally, right now, with these young people not at all engaged, you’d expect them to be conked out on Xanax on election day.

The trouble for TPTB is that even though Republicans are voting dutifully, they’re very discontented. Something like 85% of them think Biden stole the election. I don’t think that’s legitimately dangerous because these people are orderly uber alles, but TPTB are scared to death of this. So they’re running a fake and gay marketing campaign to get Republicans bought into the system again. I don’t think it’s going to work because the “faith and flag” group is already bought in (i.e. Q-tards), the “committed conservatives” are becoming vaguely aware from financial market manipulation that the system is rigged, the populist right isn’t going to budge, and the ambivalent right isn’t activated by partisan issues like the abortion ban.

The only big question that might be worth thinking through is whether TPTB will throw some red meat to the disengaged Republicans by prosecuting some of the Democrat voter fraud machine. I think no, because it’s too…what am I looking for here…That would be striking at the actual business of the thing. But it’s not impossible. Sometimes you gotta make drastic moves and hurt the feelings of the managerial class. But they’ve been so reliant on pure gaslighting for so long (e.g. the “Ghost of Kiev” Marvel movie) that I think they’ve overspecialized and the golden hammer is all they know and trust.

Another possibility is the Republicans industrialize their voter fraud machine. But you need the right kind of personalities in large numbers for that, so I see it being a very localized phenomenon. GOP voter fraud machine might be possible somewhere with a large number of Peter Thiel’s smart homosexual Republicans. Anyway, the most likely scenario is everyone continues to double-down on their preferred brand of self-delusion. I think we’re riding the 2021 train to the end without any turns. 2020 was the end of plausible deniability, so it’s all Schelling points from here on out.