Election 2022: One Thing I'll Be Interested in Seeing ...

... is how bad the GOP's vote by mail hangover is -- or, for that matter whether there is one -- from 2020.

I issued my final predictions for US Senate outcomes ten days ago. And final means final. No backsies. I'm right or I'm wrong, but I'm not going to keep second-guessing myself. The polls continue to tighten, as they usually do, but for "election analysis bragging rights," I'm stuck with what I predicted on October 21.

One of my major assumptions in those predictions is that the Democrats still enjoy a large advantage in early voting by mail, which means many ballots will have been cast before these last couple of weeks of developments.

The reason for that assumption is that in 2020, the Trumpist line reversed the traditional Republican position in favor of voting by mail, resulting in a large Democratic advantage in mail ballot outcomes in a year when lots of people voted by mail. A lot of Republicans are still Trumpists; presumably this means a lot of Republicans still distrust voting by mail and intend to vote in person. But voting in person is more vulnerable to bad weather, personal emergencies, etc.

I could be wrong on this. Perhaps most Republicans have discarded that particular dumb idea between 2020 and now.