Early last year, when I was writing about the 2022 midterms, I pretty much had the same

conventional view that everyone else did.

It was the first midterm for a new president whose popularity was low and it was overseeing

an economy into stress.

We'd seen this movie many times before and it almost always ended the same way.

The party occupying the White House would lose in a wave election.

It was as close to physics as you get in American politics.

In fact, some pundits and political scientists even had names for the school of thought.

We were structuralists or fundamentalists because that's what mattered, a structure or

fundamentals of the race.

If you tell them the president's approval rating and the state of the economy, the fundamentalists

could tell you roughly how many seats the president's party would lose.

And those fundamentals in 2022 said Biden would lose about 20 to 30 seats in the house.

But there was one political analyst who I read and talked to who regularly challenged

that idea.

And to the extent that I avoided the red wave prediction trap, it was because of this

person.

His name almost never appeared in the press.

His writings, which turned out to be prescient, were off the record for a private audience

that included some of the most influential people in Washington.

His name is Michael Podhorser and he just stepped down after a decade as the AFL-CIO's

political director, a job that has historically been an enormously influential position in

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