Thread by @charles_gaba

Re. 2022: I agree that the prospects for Dems keeping the House aren't pretty based on history + gerrymandering, but it should also be noted that the same election experts who were CERTAIN that Dems would *expand* the House this year were dead wrong.

In 2002, at the height of GWBs approval & post-9/11 fever, NO ONE would have imagined that just 6 years later the next President would not only be a black Democrat with a "Muslim-sounding" name (including the middle name "Hussein")...

...but that he would be a 1st-term Senator who would beat a long-term, respected Senator who was also a legitimate war hero by 10 million votes.

In 2016, almost no one imagined that Hillary Clinton would be beaten a washed-up, racist, misogynistic reality TV star.

In 2018, Democrats flipped House districts in dozens of red districts including one in friggin' OKLAHOMA, which very few would have predicted.

And yes, most of the seats they just lost again were in those very same districts. Waves do tend to recede a bit later.

My point is simply that Conventional Wisdom has taken a HELL of a beating over the past 20 years.

This doesn't mean I expect a blue wave in 2022. I'm keeping my expectations muted. I'm just saying that things that "can't happen" don't...right up until they do.

One more thing: About those 300,000 absentee/mail-in ballots which "can't be found": How many of those were in House districts where the Dem lost by, say, 1,000 votes or less?

I'm assuming that won't happen with a Biden-era Post Office.
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