This will not be 2010. This will not be 2014.

We all remember 2010, when, at the behest of some on the Left, voters stayed home in the midterm elections for House and Senate in order "to teach Obama a lesson." His crime? He didn't fix decades of GOP malfeasance in the space of a few months.

Then we all remember 2014, when voters again stayed home. The crime this time? The Snowden revelations, even though the most egregious episodes occurred under the previous administration.

Needless to say, these two own-goals, aided and abetted by the purity Left, hindered former president Barack Obama from getting most of his agenda enacted. In "teaching them a lesson", all that these people did was ensure the ascension of Donald Trump.

I will hazard to aver, based on the above poll, that 2022 won't be like those two election cycles.

Yes, it's early days, and things can change week to week, much less just under two years from now. But the political landscape which obtained in 2010 and 2014 no longer exists.

After the events of January 6, 2021, the idea that the Republican Party is a mainstream conservative party has been hoisted, bloody and bent, on the pike of reality. There are still some Republicans left in office who adhere to the social compact of American politics. But they are on the wane. The party as a whole has been given over to the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene. She is not an outlier. She has either active assent, or is catered to due to fear of her master, Donald Trump. No matter how much the likes of Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger may protest, their party is now nothing but a cult of personality centered around Trump, kowtowing to the lunatics, conspiracists, and nihilists he's brought in. No one can win a primary by talking about rationality. Reason has no room in the GOP tent. In both 2010 and 2014, although quite a few of us saw the GOP for what it truly was, it was still accorded a respect and deference it didn't deserve.

Democrats, from President Joe Biden to Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, are not repeating the mistakes of 2009-2010. They don't have to contend with the political landscape which Pres. Obama had to navigate. The battle lines are clearly demarcated. This is not a contest between two parties who each want what's best for country and will compromise to reach that goal. Democrats still operate under those guidelines; Republicans merely want power, and denied it, want the country to burn. It does help to have things so vibrantly clarified. (Of course, the 2009 GOP wanted power as much as it does now; but, again, it was accorded a benefit of the doubt it didn't deserve even back then.)

The 81 million voters who elected Joe Biden, and the Georgians who gave him control of the Senate, know what's at stake. The blandishments of the likes of Cenk Uygur and his Justice Democrats will fall like a fart in church. We've already seen how bad it can get. No one will want to revisit that.

And the fact that the GOP is given over to extremism provides Democrats much more license to push through legislation. All Republicans are bad faith actors. Nothing they do—not even the pathetic Gang of Ten which Pres. Biden entertained on Monday—is for the country's benefit. The fact that their offer was to provide only a third of the relief in Pres. Biden's proposal was idiotic politically. People want help, they want the maximum they can get, and they see GOP night terrors about the deficit as nothing but an excuse to deny them that help.

Of course, you can never truly rest easy on the fickle fancies of the American electorate. But Pres. Biden has been handed an even worse mess to fix than Pres. Obama had been, with an entire political party now on record as being against the Republic and its democracy. I'm feeling cautiously optimistic about 2022.