The Weekly Sift

I’m back. The wedding itself was everything we hoped it would be (thanks for asking), and France and Spain made for a lovely honeymoon. By chance, we were always about two days ahead of the major demonstrations and unrest, and three days ahead of the train crash on the Madrid-Seville rail line. So we did a lot of looking at the news and saying: “Didn’t we walk past that shop?”

My nominee for the most beautiful cathedral in the world is La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, where the afternoon light streams in like this:

Anyway, it’s election eve. All month, polls and pundits have been trending toward the Democrats, with the result that the once impossible — Democratic control of the Senate — is now being predicted more often than not. Trump has been unable to turn the tide for a reason I predicted before I left: He has no positive message other than denial of reality — the economy is wonderful, prices are going down, and the war is all but won.

That has left Republicans with nothing to run on other than fear: Democrats are communists and jihadists who will take away your guns, sex-change your children, and outlaw eating meat, while Republicans are manly men with great butts. That message shouldn’t work with people who are worried about affording gas or health care, and (if you believe the polls) it hasn’t.

But should we believe the polls? I mean, can a Democrat really win a Senate seat in Kansas or Texas? We’ll see tomorrow night.

Today, I’m going to put out a returns-watching guide, setting the stage with pollsters predictions and then looking hour-by-hour at what returns will best tell the story. I’m hoping to get that out by 10 EST.

The summary post actually has more than a month to cover, so I’ll center on a few big things: Trump’s ever-more-open support of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the demonstrations in France, and the elections in Brazil, Serbia, and Israel. I hope to get that out by noon.