Welp, Election 2022 continues into its second week of counting on today's BradCast. But it's our first chance to open up the phones to listeners after last week's historic midterm face-plant by Republicans and its associated very very good news for Democrats and American democracy itself. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Before we go to the phones today, a bit of a monster "rant" on the accomplishments of Joe Biden and the Democrats after two years in office; a few updates on races called since we signed off last Friday; what they all mean; and some of the races still being tallied (which will also determine, among other things, which party controls the House of Representatives next year.)

The big races called since our final show last week include the U.S. Senate contests in Arizona and Nevada, both of which went to the incumbent Democrats in each state (Sen. Mark Kelly in AZ and Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto in NV). Those victories ensure majority control for Democrats in the upper chamber of Congress once again in January. Dems will have at least a 50/50 majority with Vice President Kamala Harris as the tie vote, even before the December 6 Senate runoff in Georgia between incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock (D) and Herschel Walker (R).

But there are a ton of reasons for Democrats in GA to not let down their guard. Dante Atkins, over the weekend, detailed just some of the reasons why a 51-49 Senate is much better for Dems (and democracy) than a 50-50 Senate.

While Dems were celebrating retaining their Senate majority over the weekend, we were celebrating the fact that the last of the 2020 Election liars running for Secretary of State in battleground states were declared to have lost. In AZ, Democrat Adrian Fontes will become the new Sec. of State after defeating Trump-endorsed insurrection enthusiast and voting opponent Mark Finchem. And in NV, Democrat Cisco Aguilar was declared the winner over Trump-backed election liar Jim Marchant, founder of the "America First Secretaries of State coalition," featuring all of those Republican SoS candidates who, thankfully, were rejected by voters in last week's elections across the country in every single swing-state in which they ran. That alone will make the 2024 Presidential election indescribably safer.

Throughout the program, we also take care to call out a few of the folks from the Republican Party, the corporate media, and the even some on the lazy, knee-jerk far-left who ignored the available data and facts in order to misinform American voters that the GOP see a red wave, or even red tsunami, in last week's midterms. They didn't. They lost a seat in the Senate; will be lucky to win the narrowest of majorities in the House; lost Governorships in Maryland and Massachusetts (and, perhaps, Arizona, which is still close); took full control of both the Michigan and Minnesota state governments and may do the same in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, just to detail a few of the GOP's remarkable failures in a year that Conventional Wisdom suggests they should have owned the night.

Also, mid-hour today, we get an update in the tallies of the very right Los Angeles Mayoral race where progressive Rep. Karen Bass just got a big boost from the latest numbers in her contest against "former" Republican billionaire real estate developer Rick Caruso.

Then, we turn to the phones for the first time since last week's midterms to get some thoughts from listeners on what the lack of "red wave" means for both Democrats and Republicans and whether any of it will help break the GOP's Trump Fever that is destroying both them and our democracy along with it (though not this week, at least!)...

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On today's BradCast: It's no surprise that Fox 'News' deluded itself for months and even years about a "red wave" or "tsunami" coming for the 2022 midterm elections. It shouldn't be a surprise that the theoretically legitimate media got it wrong as well, given that they seem to make the same errors election after election. And yet, it's both surprising and disappointing, given that the data to counter their erroneous narrative was right there in front of their face the whole time...if they simply bothered to, or had the courage to, listen to it. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

"There was nothing magical about what I did," our guest today, TOM BONIER of the Democratic data research firm, TargetSmart, explains. "It was, as you say, seeing the numbers and reporting the numbers and, in the end, trying to stay away from predictions or projections, but to say, 'Look, this is what we're seeing'."

Bonier's well-documented Twitter threads on the data over the past many months spelled out what shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone. In the face of extremism from the right and, in particular, the Supreme Court, there was a backlash against Republicans which served to boost Democrats across the board.

Prior to today, Bonier joined us twice in recent months to discuss his analysis of data and what he was seeing and tweeting about to anyone who might have wanted to listen. In late August, after voters in deep red Kansas decisively rejected a ballot initiative that would have rewritten the state constitution to allow abortion to be banned, he joined us to explain what he saw as a "jaw-dropping" spike in new voter registrations for young, Democratic women following the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision in late June, overturning Roe v. Wade. Bonier saw similar spikes in new registrations all over the map, in "red" and "blue" states alike, but particularly where reproductive rights were most threatened.

In late September he joined us again after analyzing specific voter data from that failed Kansas referendum. Hard evidence of an incredible spike in women voters that, he told us at the time, "just doesn't happen in elections." He posited that any suggestion that Democrats would be swamped in November, as the so-called Conventional Wisdom offered by pundits would have it, was simply ignoring the available data. He argued the election would be very close and almost certainly not a "wave" for the GOP.

He was right. Even though, over the past month in the run-up to Election Day, the corporate media were, largely in lock step, warning that Dems were done for, soon to be swamped by a red wave or even tsunami! How much of that erroneous punditry "blunted" the final results, Bonier laments, citing races like Mandela Barnes' in Wisconsin, where the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate fell just shy of unseating incumbent Republican Ron Johnson by a single point.

"I like to think of myself as an optimist, but it was difficult over the last few weeks and months," he tells me. "In reality, what we do at TargetSmart is we listen to the data. That's all we were doing. Along the way I was looking at the voter registration data, looking at the early vote data, looking at it in the context of the polls and trying to draw some conclusions. But mostly providing context and questioning the hard-set assumptions that were really leading everyone."

We discuss, among other things, the "flood of Republican polling" in the last few weeks of the campaign and how it warped forecasts from poll aggregation sites like FiveThirtyEight, and how his fellow traveler, Simon Rosenberg, who also had it right, was "mocked" when he highlighted how forecasts were being swamped by those bad GOP polls.

By itself, the media failure "doesn't happen. It took some level of complicit behavior from those who should be guards against it," Bonier insists. "People are mocking Fox News at this point. We know it is a very biased Republican media platform. But the bottom line is most of cable and these other outlets had a level of certainty about this outcome in a very similar way. I have to say, as I spoke with reporters in the closing weeks, I would be telling them 'Look, this is going to be a close election. I don't see a Republican wave. I don't see that in the numbers.' And I was just short of mocked by reporters."

But, why? Is it a lack of courage to stray from the pack journalism and group think? Or, as media critic Dan Froomkin argued today, a symptom of systemic "rot" in the political media? Bonier offers his frank thoughts on that and much more as we dig deep in today's discussion. I strongly urge you to tune in for it in full.

Also today, in addition to our own mocking of Fox "News", we've got plenty left over to mock folks like HBO's Bill Maher and Spotify's Joe Rogan and CNN's Fareed Zakaria and NYTimes' Maggie Haberman who all got it wrong as well --- and misled the American electorate in the bargain --- for many of the reasons discussed on today's program. And, we've also got the latest reported results out of still uncalled critical races for U.S. Senate, Governor, Sec. of State and Attorney General in Arizona and Nevada...

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