Let's check in six days out on the national midterms.
We find House momentum all with Republicans but Democratic hope of a tie by which it would win and still be alive in the U.S. Senate.
In an indignity that pales against the horror of a right-wing nut's brutality inflicted on her husband and intended for her, Nancy Pelosi must prepare to hand the House speaker's gavel next year to an insurrection-ignorer and Donald Trump sycophant, Kevin McCarthy.
She'll be expected to smile and shake McCarthy's hand--he having sucked it up and done that for her. I'd recommend what my tennis buddies call "the Brummett," which is, at the net after a loss, an eye-averted, scowling, transparently grudging palm brush. Bobby Petrino gave one to Les Miles once.
Every indication is that Republicans will gain 18 to 45 House seats and take the chamber over. Jim Jordan, the Trumper from Ohio, the male Marjorie Taylor Greene, would become chairman of the Judiciary Committee. He says he has about seven investigations of Democrats he'll order up, including one about any lies told us on the coronavirus, such as that it wasn't a Chinese plot hatched in the fertile partnership of a Wuhan lab and Tom Cotton's darkness.
There would be no further investigation of the attempt by Trump on Jan. 6 to steal the election by violating the U.S. Constitution with a violent invasion of the U.S. Capitol. That was no big deal, you see, though, at the time, the aforementioned McCarthy was panicked and on the phone to Trump asking him pretty-please to call down those crazies McCarthy now views as demonstrators perhaps a little out of hand on the narrow margins.
Jordan also says he'll haul in Merrick Garland to berate him because the Justice Department is looking into domestic terrorism reports against a few people apoplectic and violence-threatening toward school boards advocating the teaching of accurate history and issuing mask mandates during the alleged Chinese plot's apex.
Now, to the more interesting Senate, which is currently 50-50, thus a Democratic-controlled chamber because Vice President Kamala Harris breaks the tie--and because two independents, Bernie Sanders and Angus King, caucus with Democrats. And even with one of the 50 being Joe Manchin.
So, it's as tenuous as can be, and it's going to come down to an old football player, a TV doctor and a tattooed man who wears hooded garments and is having sad difficulty post-stroke in processing audio.
Thirty-four seats are up, but states are so polarized, either irrevocably red or blue, that four of the few swing states will decide control--Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and Pennsylvania. Wisconsin and Ohio might be in play, but probably not. Republicans should hold serve there, even with Ron Johnson and J.D. Vance.
Probably the defining moment of the midterm came on an airport tarmac when Joe Biden got met by Chuck Schumer and a Washington Post mic picked up Schumer telling Biden that John Fetterman, the stroke victim, was probably going to survive an alarmingly bad debate performance against Dr. Mehmet Oz.
Oz blew an otherwise creditable performance by saying abortion was between a woman, her doctor and her congressman.
But--unbelievably, Schumer told Biden--football hero and oddball Herschel Walker was about to overtake U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock in Georgia.
Walker had been reeling from bizarre statements and news of his hypocrisy in professing anti-abortion positions amid allegations of paying for an abortion for a girlfriend, and his advocating family values while having fathered children outside wedlock. But he kind of held up in a debate and fortified himself, even as he perhaps thought an honorary deputy's badge made him a real law enforcement officer.
A Fetterman win would be a pickup for Democrats. A Walker win would cancel that. That would leave matters to Arizona--where incumbent first-term Democrat Mark Kelly has been ahead but in a bit of polling freefall under a right-wing billionaire's independent ad assault -- and Nevada, where incumbent first-term Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto has consistently trailed Republican Adam Laxalt but only by a fraction, with both candidates around 47 to 48 percent.
But then there was on Monday a new poll from The New York Times and Siena College showing Fetterman and Warnock ahead solidly; Kelly solidly ahead in Arizona, and Masto at great risk of losing Nevada.
That would leave matters still 50-50 after all the shouting, which would perhaps be appropriate.
But then, it always could turn out 52-48 Republicans on wins by Trumpers Oz and Walker, in which case Mitch McConnell would again run the Senate and judges nominated by Biden would have difficulty getting considered, much less confirmed.
And, of course, all of that assumes close Democratic wins would be allowed to stand amid Republican denial and/or violence.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.