The Ephemeric

You all know the drill by now. Break out your finest evening wear and your dancing shoes, because tonight we are all going to the big show with VIP tickets. It's the Debbie Awards, the traditional end of year showstopper that celebrates the good, the bad, and the downright dazzling of the year gone by. 

2022 was a year of highs and lows. Family health scares, war, national mourning, but on the other hand weddings, babies (not mine), family health recoveries, and more memories forged together as the world continued to reopen and return to normal. 2022 was a year of great scientific and technological accomplishment, a year of renewed creative output, and a return of spectacle as live events moved from online streams back into the real world. So get comfy, break out the bubbles, let's settle in for the night and get into this.

Without further ado, let the curtain fall upon 2022 as we begin our definitive review of the past 12 months:



2022 Debbie Awards

Cinema & TV

1. The Debbie for TV Show of the Year 
Winner: The Orville (Hulu/Disney+)
Runner Up: Stranger Things (Netflix)









The return of The Orville has been a long time in the making. Originally slated for release in 2020, the show's third season has been beset by delays as a result of the pandemic and a switch in production from Fox to Hulu/Disney. But after three rough years, it's back and it's fair to say that the wait has been worth it. Backed by the considerable financial heft of Disney and free from the commercial considerations that come with cable TV, this new season is the most narratively ambitious and creatively daring to date. Everything about The Orville season 3 is bigger and better than ever and the result is some of the most thought provoking and entertaining sci-fi we've seen in years.

2022 also marked a strong return for old Ephemeric favourite Stranger Things. Don't be fooled by the fact that this is the first entry in the series not to win a Debbie, this is the strongest season of the Duffer Brothers' joyous horror nostalgia-fest since the first one. A thrilling 9 episode arc that raises the stakes, meaningfully expands the world of Hawkins, and perfectly sets up the series for its final curtain next year.


2. The Debbie for New TV Show of the Year 
Winner: Severance (AppleTV+)
Runner Up: This is Going to Hurt (BBC)









Increasingly, this is becoming one of the most competitive categories of Debbie, with the streaming era's considerable expansion in both the quality and quantity of TV showing no signs of abatement. This year saw Apple continue their remarkable run of quality with Severance, a dark comedy/psychological thriller from Ben Stiller, of all people. Severance is a brilliantly audacious satire of corporate greed that in equal parts allures with its mystery and entertains with its charming absurdity.

This was a very difficult runner up to pick, with many worthy series excluded, but ultimately I'm going with This is Going to Hurt. This is the BBC's adaptation of the disturbing, yet hilarious memoir by former doctor Adam Kay (who you may also recognise as one half of the music-comedy duo Amateur Transplants, creator of the London Underground song). The TV series is fittingly uncompromising. Perhaps one of television's best ever depictions of life as a doctor.


3. The Debbie for Film of the Year 
Winner: The Banshees of Inisherin
Runner Up: Living









Martin McDonagh is a writer/director with a very specific brand attached to his name. Acclaimed though his work may be, one can generally expect pitch black comedy combined with pronounced, sometimes cartoonish, violence. His latest, The Banshees of Inisherin, is a tale of two feuding friends on a quiet, fictional Irish isle, loosely allegorical of the Irish civil war. This film marks something of a departure from the McDonagh trope, being that it is neither particularly violent nor as riotously funny as some of his other work. It might also be his best film to date. Blessed with sharp writing that blends just enough humour with tragedy, stunning performances throughout (both leads could easily lay a claim to Oscars this year), and probably the most spectacular visual work of any McDonagh film to date. It may be a bit of a slow burn, but it is a film most worthy of your time.

David Mitchell is not for everyone. His work tends to be ambitious, densely packed, and experimental in form. For some, the challenging nature of his writing can come as a frustration, but those with enough patience are rewarded with a remarkable literary experience. 

Mitchell's first novel, Ghostwritten, is twenty years old now, but remains as bold and incomparable today as it was upon release. A sprawling series of loosely linked episodic stories that takes the reader from the subways of Tokyo, to the Irish Isles, rural Mongolia and the nightlife of London. Topics range as widely as jazz music, bioterrorism, offshore banking, and artificial intelligence, to only scratch the surface. As remarkable as its audacity, is the ability of Mitchell to strike such a different voice and tone in each chapter. With most novels you can generally tell what a writer is thinking and where they are going, with Mitchell you have an author of such baffling unpredictability that he may as well be speaking another language.

February - "The Anomaly" by Hervé Le Tellier

Hervé Le Tellier's novel sold more than a million copies when it released in its native French, back in 2020. In 2022, the long-awaited English translation was published, becoming one of the year's most anticipated reads. An Air France flight encounter some massive turbulence on its way to New York. It lands, the passengers go about their lives for some time, some get married, some die, others hit significant life milestones. Three months later, the flight lands again, an exact duplicate of the previous flight, populated by exact duplicates of its passengers, who are none the wiser that they have lost three months of time, nor that their exact doppelgangers are already landed and living their lives as normal. 

The Anomaly reads like a high concept TV series, each chapter following a different character, only revealing itself to the reader in drip-feed as we follow the passengers of this flight, the events of their lives, and their reaction to the mysterious titular anomaly. It makes for a highly enjoyable and addictive read, so long as you don't overthink it. The central mystery itself is ultimately somewhat underwhelming, undermined by an eventual reliance on silly pop-science hooks and a lack of any real resolution. The characters' stories themselves are highly engaging, but feel uneven, with some clearly more substantial than others and several stories that seem peter out and remain unfinished. Ultimately, this is a novel that wants you to dwell on its themes rather than its plotline. If you can accept that then this is very much worth reading.

March - "How High We Go in the Dark" by Sequoia Nagamatsu

April - "House of Suns" by Alistair Reynolds

May - "Bullet Train" by Kotaro Isaka

June - "Sea of Tranquility" by Emily St. John Mandel

Emily St. John Mandel is on a roll at the moment, with acclaimed novels The Glass Hotel and Station Eleven out in the last few years, one of which has been turned into a hit TV series, the other of which is about to be. In 2022, Mandel released her latest novel, Sea of Tranquility.

I won't go too deep into the plot for fear of spoilers, but this novel was a delight. A clever, witty adventure across time and space that nimbly balances its ambitious scope with intimate character-focused storytelling. It's impressive how far out there Mandel is able to go with some of her concepts without ever alienating the reader or feeling like its getting into too niche a genre. My only criticism is with the ending. For a novel that is masterfully paced throughout, the latter act of the story seems strangely abrupt. It's also very short for such an ambitious story at just 255 pages. The result is a novel that feels like it's building up to something it never quite reaches. After it does such a good job easing readers into the plot for the first 150 pages, I can't help but feel that there was more that could have been said once we got there.

July - "Perfect Golden Circle" by Benjamin Myers

Something light and breezy for a perfect summer read. Perfect Golden Circle is a folksy and nostalgic tale of two idiosyncratic hobbyists creating crop circles in the 1980s. It reminded me of an old BBC show, the Detectorists, itself a light and breezy series about two blokes mucking about in a field that strikes a very similar tone and scope to this novel.

Are they seeking fame? Fortune? Just doing it for the sake of it? Could be all of the above, but that isn't really the point of this novel. There is no grand plotline here, no run from the police, no rival cropcirclers. It's about the two men and their circles, their experiences, their friendship with one another. It's about the countryside, the folklore, the quirky locals. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. Perfect Golden Circle is an extremely gentle read, effortlessly charming and hard not to enjoy. But at the same time, it is narratively slight, more about the journey than the destination. It's actually fairly impressive that it manages to work in spite of this.

My graphic novel for the year. Stargazer is a fairly routine sci-fi story on the surface: a group of soldiers fighting in Vietnam encounter a mysterious anomaly that forever changes their lives. What makes Stargazer more than just the sum of its parts, and the reason I chose it for this month, is how this graphic novel was created.

Stargazer may well be the first graphic novel where all of the artwork is entirely AI generated. Not a single frame of this novel was drawn by human hand, it was all created out of nothing by the AI platform Midjourney. This technology has come a long way in recent years, as many of you who frequent Twitter or Reddit will have seen. For an entire novel's worth of art to have been created by AI, with this level of consistency and quality, is a fine demonstration of just how impressive these tools can be.

September - "Yerba Buena" by Nina LaCour

This is the debut adult fiction novel from award winning YA author Nina LaCour. A story told over decades of two women and their troubled childhoods, who meet each other one day at the titular restaurant Yerba Buena, and romance blossoms.

This isn't a bad novel by any means, I just feel like it wasn't written for me. Much of the novel revolves around the upbringing each character faces in their childhood, which honestly struck me as quite niche and unrelatable. I'm sure some of these stories will be quite meaningful for some readers, but for me it just felt far-fetched and exaggerated. There's also an issue with the fact that the story bifurcates into two stories, one of which is clearly more interesting and filled with drama than the other. I found that whenever the focus switched to the one, I was really just waiting to switch back to the other. Not a bad novel, but ultimately a fairly by-the-numbers character drama.

October - "The Premonitions Bureau" by Sam Knight

Such an unusual book. The Premonitions Bureau is part sci-fi, part non-fiction, part history book. This debut novel is based on the true story of John Barker, the man tasked with running the Government's Premonitions Bureau to investigate the credibility of people claiming to have had psychic premonitions in the wake of the Aberfan disaster of 1966.

What follows is a "so crazy you can't believe it's true" account of Barker's research, the alleged psychics he met with and their stories. The novel fluctuates somewhat unusually between a descriptive historical account and a narrative depiction of these events, but while it is an odd duck of a text it somehow works. In fact this approach often feels essential, with Knight opting not to make his work any kind of evaluation of the subject matter, but rather to present the documented facts objectively for the reader to digest. Of course there are no psychic powers in real life, but some of the stories, the claims, the coincidences, are just so unlikely and so baffling, that you'll be intrigued and entertained nonetheless.

November - "Carrie Soto is Back" by Taylor Jenkins Reid

I very much have to admire the work ethic of Taylor Jenkins Reid, who has now had three novels published in the space of three years, all of which have been pretty good, one of which is an all time classic.

Her latest, Carrie Soto is Back, expands the backstory of a small side character from her last novel, Malibu Rising. Carrie Soto's blink or you'll miss it appearance in that novel was fairly nondescript. You learn that she was a great tennis player and that she has a rotten temper, and that's about it. Carrie Soto is Back expands the character greatly. We follow Carrie on her rise from early childhood to becoming a legend of the sport, her retirement, and her attempt at an unlikely comeback. At its core, this is a story about unbridled ambition and the personal cost of greatness. While it may not be as remarkable a piece of fiction as some of Reid's other work, it is a very expertly crafted tale and one that will stick with me.

December - "Illuminations" by Alan Moore

And finally we have the first published work of Alan Moore to release in seven years, Illuminations. Best known for his work in graphic novels, including Watchmen, V For Vendetta, and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, to call Moore a legend of the genre would be an understatement. His work has garnered both critical and commercial acclaim, earning a litany of accolades over the years.

Illuminations is not a graphic novel, but a first-ever series of short stories from Moore, spanning his decades-long career. Moore's writing has a reputation for intellectual complexity and psychological nuance, and this collection, to be frank, is every bit as weird as you'd expect. Surreal, enigmatic, mind-reeling. Each of these stories is wildly different from one another and probably from anything else you've read. Moore is nothing if not a true original, and that holds just as well in his fictional prose as it does in his illustrations. 

So there it is. Twelve months in books. Can I keep it going another year? You bet, because reading is awesome.

As I noted in my midterm election preview, midterm elections tend to heavily favour the opposition party. In that preview I discussed a few of the reasons why this is the case. Whatever the reason, they tend to win, and they tend to win by a lot. The average opposition party gain in a midterm election is some 30 seats in the House and 4 seats in the Senate. In recent elections the gains have been even more severe: Democrats gained more than 40 House seats in 2018, Republicans gained 60 in 2010.

There is such a strong correlation between midterm election success and being in the opposition party that it has almost become a cardinal rule of US electoral theory. In the modern era, the only times this principle has not held have been under exceptional circumstances: 9/11 and the Clinton impeachment.

This year in particular had all the makings of an ideal storm of high inflation, mediocre Presidential approval ratings and narrow incumbent margins. It should have been a bloodbath. For this reason, all the talk in the build up to election night was not so much over who would win, but by how much the Republican party would win. The phrases "red wave" or "red tsunami" were thrown around a lot.

But this is not what happened. The Democrats have held their majority in the Senate and appear set to even increase their majority. The Republicans did take a majority in the House, but by the barest of margins with gains likely to be in the single digits, resulting in potentially the smallest House majority of all time. They went into election night with their majority considered a mere formality. In the end, they are likely to have gained 6-8 seats in the House and lost 1 seat in the Senate.

This really can't be stressed enough. This was a catastrophic election for Republicans. Despite a turnout advantage and a seemingly ideal electoral climate, they barely managed a tie. This was a historic electoral achievement for President Biden and the Democrats, and 2022 will go down in the history books as one of those asterisk elections, the one that years from now people will look back at and ask if the next election could be "another 2022".

So the question now is: how did this happen, why didn't anyone see it coming, and what does it mean going forward?

Why did the GOP underperform?
Analysts will be poring over this one for years, trying to figure out how the Republicans performed so badly. Democratic turnout was as tepid as one would have expected in a midterm election, but independents broke unexpectedly for Democrats. Why?

A key early observation is the fact that the Trumpist "MAGA" candidates all fared very poorly. All across the nation, election deniers and far right extremists lost the close, toss up races. In the big contests, they fared particularly dismally. Nowhere is this more clear than in Arizona. A traditionally red state, Arizona was swept by Democrats, winning a key Senate race as well as the Governor's mansion. On the losing end? MAGA darling Kari Lake, a TV personality who in the run up to the election had been tipped as a future star and potential Vice Presidential candidate for Trump's 2024 run. 

On the other hand, Republicans fared better in states where Trump and his brand of politics were kept at arm's length, most notably in Florida under the banner of Trump rival Governor Ron DeSantis. Indeed, the Sunshine State was one of the few bright spots in an otherwise bleak spate of results for the GOP. Whatever else the data shows, it is clear that those closely associated with Trump fared worse than those that kept their distance.

An interesting datapoint is that Democrats appear to have overperformed most in the competitive battleground states, while their performances in the less competitive states falls more in line with pre-election expectations. This suggests that their campaign messaging has been particularly effective, a stark rejoinder to the commonly held wisdom that Democrats have lagged their rivals in this regard.

Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, of all people, summed it up perfectly when he said that Republicans lost the election because voters saw them as causing "too much chaos". I think he's hit the nail on the head here, but it's not the only factor.

A significant factor in the GOP's underperformance that should not be ignored is the redistricting process of the last two years. As I discussed in my pre-election preview, Republicans have had a significant structural advantage in recent midterm elections due to an election rigging process called gerrymandering (see that post for further explanation). Under the old districting, it was estimated that Democrats needed to win nationally by around 5% just to break even in the House. This is essentially what happened in 2020 when they won by that margin and held only a small majority. Under the new districts, that structural advantage has narrowed considerably and may even have vanished entirely. 

But just as other "asterisk" elections tended to be precipitated by significant events (9/11, impeachment), we also need to consider the exceptional occurrences that may have swung this election in Democrats' favour. 

Most notable among this has to be January 6. On January 6 2021, Donald Trump attempted to overthrow a democratically elected US Government by staging a desperate and ultimately deadly insurrection in Washington DC. This may well be the single most traumatic blow to the American psyche since 9/11. America was attacked on this day and for the first time since the Civil War, that attack came from within. For the first time in modern history, the very principle of American democracy was under threat. Hundreds of criminal charges have been filed in connection with that day, including multiple charges of insurrection. It's also been the subject of a major House investigation and now a Federal Special Prosecutor investigation. If anything can be said to be a significant, election swinging event, it's this.

The common wisdom leading up to the election was that the shock of this event had already worn off. That the American public, somehow, wasn't interested or didn't care about this assault on democracy. The media was full of premature hot-takes that Democrats should have spent more time focusing on kitchen sink type issues, that their grander arguments on ideals and principles would not reach the average voter. This has proven to be well wide of the mark. Voters did, of course, care about this horrific and shocking moment in American history, and it appears to have significantly poisoned the Republican brand. A reminder to take media punditry with a pinch of salt, the people running the campaigns usually have better data than they do.

Remarkably, this was not the only such event in the build up to this election. In summer 2022, the Supreme Court voted to overturn the decades-standing precedent that a woman is entitled to bodily autonomy, the case of Roe v Wade. It sparked widespread outrage all over the country, but as with January 6 the common wisdom was that the anger had worn off by election night, that voters were apathetic and unconcerned.  Again, this was clearly wrong. The anger has persisted through to election night and it has cost Republicans big.

As I said, this is a question that will be talked about for years to come. But when all is said and done, the reasons for GOP underperformance in 2022 are likely to be a combination of poor candidate quality, losing their gerrymandered advantage, and the two opposition-rallying events of Jan 6 and Roe v Wade.

While the GOP's disappointing electoral performance will rightly remain the big story of the 2022 election, an equally worthy story is the fact that all the experts, all the forecasters and analysts did not see it coming. 

The media was unanimous in the build up to the election. This was going to be a red wave, a historic and massive victory for the Republican Party. Fivethirtyeight forecast an almost 90% chance of Republicans winning the House and a 60% chance of winning the Senate. RealClearPolitics predicted they would gain 50 seats in the House and sweep the competitive Senate races for a whopping 4 seat gain. Media all over the world were certain of this outcome regardless of their political persuasion, from the far right propagandists of Fox News to left leaning outlets such as the Guardian. They all missed it.

But not everyone missed it. On this very blog, a week before the election, I predicted that Democrats would hold the Senate at a time when few others were doing so. I also called the House race a toss up at a time when just about everyone else viewed it as a landslide, and predicted a much smaller than expected GOP majority. At the time of writing, I have correctly predicted every single Senate race that has been called. I'm not a professional by any means. So how did I, an admitted amateur, see what the professionals did not? It wasn't hope, it wasn't wishful thinking, it was there in the data, clear as day.

As I noted in my preview, the numbers really weren't that good for Republicans. Democrats were fundraising at a high level, special elections were breaking for Democrats by margins far above their expected baseline. These are very bullish signs for a party's electoral chances. Most importantly though, the polls were not good for Republicans, despite what the experts said.

For most of the summer, polls consistently predicted a close race with perhaps a narrow Democratic advantage, much to everyone's surprise. For the reputable, high quality pollsters, this was the consistent and clear picture coming from the data and it should have been a big red flag for Republicans. Then a month before the election, the polls suddenly swung in Republicans' favour. Analysts interpreted this as some late, unexplained shift in the race. There was just one problem: it was entirely fictional. 

Let's not beat around the bush. There are pollsters out there that are not serious polling firms. They are propagandists whose intent is to try and drive momentum towards their preferred side. They do it every year and yet, somehow, people keep paying attention to them. Get ready, because I will name and shame.

Look at the polls during that period of the race. Look at the actual pollsters. You will see time and time again it was the same few pollsters showing this late movement towards Republicans: Rasmussen, Trafalgar, Co-Efficient and InsiderAdvantage. None of the other pollster showed this movement. None of the gold standard, reputable pollsters saw anything other than consistently favourable Democratic prospects. 

Now look at the 2020 polls. You will see those exact same pollsters predicting a Trump victory. 2018, the exact same thing. These few pollsters do this every election cycle, and it's time we stop taking them at face value. 

Rasmussen is commonly considered as the gold standard of partisan right wing pollsters. One only needs to look at their shamelessly partisan press releases, typically full of Republican party talking points and attacks on the liberal media, to see the type of operation they're running. Their data has always been suspect, not only for its consistent partisan lean, but for its unusual movement and trends that are generally not reflected in other polls. In particular they have been frequently suspected by poll-watchers of pushing right-leaning numbers, and then shifting dramatically to the left with their final polls so that they can point to a respectable final prediction. Ultimately though, the data they produce is just flat out wrong. In 2018 they predicted Republicans to win the popular vote, in a year where they lost by a landslide margin. In 2020 they were equally wide of the mark. In 2022, they predicted a landslide Republican popular vote margin in a year where they are just barely breaking even. To be clear, there is nothing wrong with pollster having a particular "house effect" or partisan lean. So long as the methodology is consistent and honest, they can still provide useful data. But what really sets off red flags with Rasmussen is the fact that they refuse to acknowledge themselves as a partisan affiliated pollster, despite their obvious political lean. If they're dishonest about that, why would anyone trust the numbers they produce? It's time we stop paying attention to these guys.

Potentially even worse than Rasmussen is Trafalgar. Trafalgar has the ignominy of having called every single battleground state wrong in 2022. Even worse, they called several states that were nowhere even close to a battleground, wrong. They predicted Republican victories in Michigan, Colorado, New Hampshire and Washington. They lost those races by double digits. To call Trafalgar's numbers suspicious would be an understatement. Trafalgar consistently come up with polls showing very narrow Republican leads in every race, regardless of state. States that look nothing alike electorally, which end up with results that differ from one another often by double digits, and Trafalgar invariably finds Republicans leading all of them by the same 1% margin? It stinks to high heaven, even more so when the pollster reveals nearly nothing about their methodology. Trafalgar's methodology is secretive, their results are incoherent and make zero sense in context, and their track record is abysmal. They are not a serious pollster and it's time to stop taking them seriously.

These are what I would consider the "big two", but there are others that are worth mentioning. Co-Efficient is a Republican affiliated pollster who made headlines for predicting a Republican victory in New York, one of the bluest states in the country. During October they furiously spammed the polling averages with an absurd volume of polls, all of which boasted similarly outlandish predictions of Republican victory in blue strongholds, none of which panned out. Then there is InsiderAdvantage, a pollster run by noted Republican propagandist and TV host Sean Hannity. Needless to say, his polls were not accurate. That didn't stop them from having an outsized effect on the polling averages though.  

I can criticise these pollsters all day, but for what? Ultimately the key point here is that these were the only pollsters showing this mythical red wave. The reputable pollsters showed nothing of the sort, but their results were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of polls that these right wing organisations churned out to "flood the zone" and manipulate the averages. They were the ones pundits and forecasters were relying on for their predictions. It was obvious that these guys were just trying to game the system, so why did the "experts" fall for it? That's a really good question.

A big part of the problem this year was the lack of high quality polls. For whatever reason, the traditional pollsters were largely MIA, while these right wing pollsters flooded the zone with their propaganda. This meant that the polling averages and electoral forecasts were generally dominated by these junk pollsters. What little high quality polling data we did have painted a very different picture, but for whatever reason the analysts ignored this, and allowed the junk polls to influence their forecasts.

I suspect a big reason for this is all the anti-polling discourse that has become fashionable in recent years. I have written frequently about how this is mostly hype: the polls weren't actually that bad in 2016 or 2020 they were just poorly interpreted, and the polls in 2018 were pretty much dead on. Nevertheless, it appears even the experts have been influenced by that hype, and the 2022 coverage has been characterised by an inherent distrust of the polls. With this in mind, it's not surprising that fewer people were commissioning polls from the mainstream pollsters, and that a disproportionate number of the polls that were commissioned were commissioned for political purposes. 

At a time when we have been (unfairly) conditioned to mistrust polls, it is not surprising that many fell back on fundamentals and historical precedent for the basis of their predictions. The problem with 2022 is that they relied on this too much, while failing to properly evaluate the data that was out there.

A special mention also needs to be made of RealClearPolitics. RCP is, ostensibly, a polling and political news aggregator, non-partisan in nature. That's all a facade though. Their political bias and fickle methodology has been widely criticised in the past. In particular they have a tendency to pick polls that favour Republicans, then ignore those same polls if the results get worse for them, and they arbitrarily set cut off dates for polling averages depending on what gives Republicans the best result. RCP has been pretty bad for years now and, much like Rasmussen, getting worse with every election cycle. 2022 marks a new low for the organisation, with a final forecast that was embarrassingly wide of the mark, predicting Republican victories in states that were never competitive and lost by wide margins. 

If there is one thing we can all take away from the 2022 election, it is that there is no reason whatsoever to listen to anything that comes from RealClearPolitics, Rasmussen, Trafalgar or their ilk ever again. They are not serious organisations and should not be treated as such. It is time we all recognise this.

There is no denying it. 2022 was a very bad year for the pundits and forecasters. They ignored the high quality data (which in fairness was lacking in quantity), allowed themselves to be swayed by trash data. They listened to the polls that supported their preconceptions and expectations and disregarded anything that didn't. The data was there. I pointed it out in my preview. They just ignored it for some reason. 

What does this mean going forward?
There's no sugarcoating it. Republicans are in big trouble. If they couldn't win in the highly favourable electoral climate of 2022, what hope do they have in 2024, a year that will almost certainly be more favourable for Democrats?

The answer is "not much". Not unless something changes. If Republicans go into 2024 still championing the crazies and conspiracy theorists, they will lose big. The question is whether they will learn the right lessons from this setback.

More immediate is the question of how Government will function these next two years. With split control of Congress it appears unlikely that much of anything will get done. The new Republican House majority has indicated that they intend to prioritise political theatre, fake investigations of Democrats and their families. First they will need to actually agree on a House Speaker, however, and with their tiny majority there's very real doubt about whether they will be able to do so. There has even been serious talk of a compromise candidate between Democrats and moderate Republicans. 

Additionally, with such a small majority, can we even be sure they will hold that advantage until the next election? Every single retirement, every death, every defection and special election going forward is going to be a matter of national import, potentially one that could swing Congressional control. We will see what happens, but this could get into some pretty murky, unprecedented waters.

In particular, this election was a disaster for Donald Trump. For the first time since his political ascent, his domination of the Republican Party appears to be in doubt. His allies and chosen candidates all fared miserably, while his political rivals did well. Many elected officials, news organisations (Murdoch in particular) and, indeed, voters, appear to be breaking with him, having finally had enough. Post election polls now have Ron DeSantis as frontrunner for the GOP nomination, with large numbers of Republican voters not wanted Trump to run at all. It will be very interesting to see what happens next. It is clear that many Republicans will no longer back him, but at the same time his diehard basis is very loyal. Whether anyone can find a way to unite this fracturing political party ahead of 2024 will be the big question.

Perhaps the most significant takeaway from the 2022 elections (in terms of electoral politics) will be the apparent end to the GOP's semi-permanent gerrymandered advantage in the House. Between 2010 and 2020 it really was the case that the House was essentially out of reach for Democrats, even in years where they were winning by wide margins. Following redistricting, those days appear to be gone. Democrats have managed to essentially tie the House race despite having little if any national advantage in the polls. It could be a fluke, but right now it appears that their gains in redistricting may have been even greater than initially thought. The result could be that the House elections are much more competitive in the years to come.

Finally, there's the question of the polls and forecasters. We need to be very clear on this. The polls in 2022 were generally quite good, but there was a lot of junk data out there muddying the waters, and the "experts" did a very poor job in critically evaluating between them. Sadly, I fear people will take the wrong message from this election and distrust all polls, rather than discerning specifically those that deserve to be distrusted. We need to do what we can to make the general public more data-literate, and start calling out the con-artists in political media for what they are.

So there it is, 2022 election is done, and the first battle lines have been drawn for 2024. This is an election that will be remembered as a historic accomplishment, as well as a potential turning point in the politics of the nation.