More from the analysis ...

... Instead, it was one of the strongest midterm performances by a governing party in decades. Republicans gained only nine House seats, failed to retake the Senate, and spent the next four years arguing about why.

That story should haunt Democrats heading into 2026. The mirror image of the 2022 environment is now setting up around them: Trump's approval underwater, inflation cooking, Democrats overperforming in special elections, the generic ballot tilted blue.

The lesson of 2022 wasn't that wave conditions don't matter anymore. They still do. It was that they don't reliably translate into wave results. And, what's more, the infrastructure for blunting waves has changed since then.

Just after midnight on May 20, the South Carolina House voted 74-37 to redraw the state's only Democratic-held congressional district, a move urged personally by President Donald Trump, replacing it with one designed to elect a Republican in November.

That is only one piece of a much greater national effort underway. Democrats are waiting for the wave. Republicans are building the sea wall. ...