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Yesterday Kate Riga and I held a TPM Newsmaker Briefing with Brendan McPhillips — a lot of very interesting details about how the campaign unfolded from the inside. Did it seem like a jump ball in the last week on the inside? Apparently so. What happened with that NBC interview? What about the debate? We get into all of that. If you’re a member and you weren’t able to join us live yesterday, you can watch the whole thing after the jump.

One regular refrain of the last month of the 2022 midterm was that abortion and Dobbs had faded as a driving issue in the face of economic concerns. Another was that “democracy” was, for most voters, an abstraction without much relevance to more immediate concerns like inflation. That first bit of conventional wisdom always seemed overstated at best. But the election results point to something different that many observers missed in the narrow and perhaps over-literal way these issues were siloed in polls and election commentary: abortion, election denialism and other elements of GOP whackery melded together into a broader fear of Republican extremism that was larger than the sum of its parts.

As of this morning it’s more than a theoretical possibility that Democrats will remain in charge of the House next year. Dave Wasserman of The Cook Report this morning put it this way: When you put aside the races already called and the ones in which each party has a clear lead, you’re left with six seats he considers genuine tossups — #AZ01, #AZ06, #CA13, #CA22, #CA41, #WA03. If Democrats get all six, if they run the table, they stay in the margin 218-217.

That sounds unlikely and it is unlikely. But you also have to see it through the prism of the fact that Democratic candidates have been running tables, improbably coming from behind or coming out on top, since mid-Tuesday evening. So it could happen.

Let me add one sort of odd note here. There’s actually a pretty good argument that it’s in Democrats’ political interests not to get the majority here.

Let me follow up on yesterday’s post about this quasi-revolt against Mitch McConnell. I’ve tried to look more at the whole picture. Or perhaps I was still too sleep deprived yesterday afternoon. But all of these leadership questions and battles we’re seeing now are just proxy battles over Trump. One part of the GOP blames Trump for their disappointing showing and sees this as their best opportunity in years to push him aside, in most cases lining up behind Ron DeSantis, at least for now, as the vehicle to do that. These mini-revolts against McConnell are really just attempts to open up new fronts against McConnell to defend and protect Trump.

Entirely predictably the knives are already out in the House for probable Speaker Kevin McCarthy. On cue they all come from the hard right of the caucus who believe the problem in 2022 is that Republicans weren’t sufficiently feral. More interesting is a push on the Senate side to delay the Republican leadership elections in the upper chamber. The wannabe mutineers don’t seem quite willing to say what they’re doing. They’re not coming out against McConnell, proposing an alternative leader or criticizing his management. But since McConnell’s leadership is almost universally assumed there’s only one logic and aim of delay.

ITEM One: I continue to be calmly stunned that the battle for control of the House still does not seem settled. Any Republican margin is likely to be so minuscule that it amounts to something of a poisoned chalice for Kevin McCarthy and the GOP generally. As I’ve noted repeatedly, the debt ceiling remains the sui generis, overriding thing. But if you set that aside, given that Democrats will not get 52 senate seats, in purely political terms there’s actually some real advantage in having Republicans hold the House by only one or two seats.

Democratic strategists Simon Rosenberg and Tom Bonier were the two most prominent voices telling us for weeks that the 2022 Red Wave was a mirage. They were right. We talked to them yesterday about what they saw. If you weren’t able to join us live you can see the discussion after the jump.

One of the clearest takeaways from the 2022 midterm was that Trump-backed candidates did quite poorly. Meanwhile Ron DeSantis chalked up a thundering reelection victory in Florida, just shy of 60% of the vote. That is the kind of reelection victory that cues up a big state governor for a presidential run. DeSantis can say plausibly that he essentially owns the state of Florida and that he has a politics that sells in a large and diverse state. These factors have begun to coalesce into a push within the GOP to move not beyond Trumpism, which DeSantis embodies, but beyond Trump himself. Trump is old, profoundly divisive, in deep legal trouble. Meanwhile Republicans have suffered defeat in the last three electoral cycles largely because of opposition to him.

Moving away from Trump, though, will be a lot harder than it looks.

Twice in recent history the President’s party has gained seats in a midterm election. The last time was 20 years ago. For years, I was unreasonably pleased with myself that I was one of the few people I knew who predicted Democrats would gain House seats in the 1998 midterm — the Lewinsky scandal/impeachment midterm. It wasn’t any great insight. That was what the polls actually said. They said it very clearly. But the political class had convinced themselves that the polls were not accounting for the intensity of evangelical Republicans who would swamp the Democrats at the polls. That didn’t happen. The polls had said as much.

I learned a lesson from this that, for a political observer, polls are something like a pilot’s control panel when flying in stormy weather. What pilots are taught is in stormy weather you watch the instrument panel and absolutely disregard everything else. Your sense of direction — your feel for up and down — will fool you, and then you crash. The instrument panel is right.