The 2022 Midterm Dunk Contest
Plus: A look inside the Conservatism Inc. bubble.
Thanks to everyone who joined us on the livestream last night. It was one of the best shows we’ve done. Substantive and fun at the same time.
Sarah, Tim, and I are taping our post-election The Next Level show this morning and Charlie will have A.B. Stoddard on The Bulwark Podcast this afternoon. Look for both of these later today.
Today we’re going to do something a little bit different. I’m going to let us all indulge in some NBA Jam-level dunking. Enjoy.
1. The Good Stuff
Before we get to dunks, I want to explain why last night was encouraging. It was because of stuff like this:
This is what we’re all striving for: NORMAL.
An election in which some people win, some people lose, and everyone acts like a grownup. We move forward to the next moment knowing that we get to run it back in a couple years. That both victories and defeats are temporary.
Because when everyone is playing by those rules, then we’re not in existential crisis territory.
We can all live with a world where Gretchen Whitmer and Brian Kemp both win their elections. You probably prefer one of them over the other and that’s okay. Maybe life under one of them will be better than life under the other. And surely, neither of them will be perfect public servants. But also: Neither of them is going to try to short-circuit the democratic process for the next election.
Not everyone was Tim Ryan last night. And J.D. Vance, who has already told us that he wants an authoritarian president to provoke a constitutional crisis, will become a U.S. senator. Kari Lake might become the governor of Arizona.
But on the whole, voters chose politicians from both parties who play between the 40 yard lines when it comes to democracy.
We should celebrate that.