Given the farcically erroneous, back-to-back double whammy of political polling in 2016 and 2020 there’s very little reason to get all sweaty and anuguished about the numbers here in 2022. But … if you self-identify as a liberal you are by that definition a morbid pessimist. You know full well that the grifters and fools have us outnumbered and that no matter what any poll says … things are bad and only getting worse. That’s just who we are.

That said, the current, mid-October trend lines are … all grim. Utter morons — here’s looking at you Herschel Walker — are within a “margin of error” of defeating Democrats who unlike them graduated from college, worked at serious jobs, can do basic math, study public policy and just generally don’t genuflect to a twice-impeached clown car insurrectionist or some dope who can’t remember how many children he has.

If by some miracle the polling holds up next month and the Democrats lose Senate seats they should have won — like in Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — there’s going to be some kind of reckoning over the strategy of running hard on “pro democracy” issues like abortion as opposed to counter-blitzing the usual, time-tested Republican hysteria-mongering over gas prices and “rampant, out-of-control crime.”

Last week’s New York Times-Siena College poll produced all sorts of gasping and wailing at the sight of suburban, mostly college-educated women, flooding away from Democrats and back to Republicans in reaction to (also) “out of control” inflation and … crime. While dismaying as it is every election cycle, I’ve lost to ability to find this surprising.

If you’re aware of and follow posts on NextDoor, the neighborhood site that some of us use to see who’s tossed hosta, paving bricks and used lumber out on the curb for whoever gets there first, you know that what’s indisputably rampant is crime hysteria. Every fire or police siren sets off a fresh torrent of panicked terror. Every Ring doorbell is picking up murky, horror-film scenes of “strange young men” casing the building … or maybe just looking for their dog, no one can say for sure.

I have perfectly nice neighbors who are astonished I’d dare go listen to music at the Cabooze or First Avenue. For them, downtown Minneapolis for anything other than a Sunday afternoon Vikings game is a “no-go zone”, based on what they see on TV, read on Facebook and hear from campaign ads. “Democracy” is not a life-or-death concern for them.

I can’t remember who or where, but I recall a barroom conversation where the (self-professed) social anthropologist broke down the three key phases of modern American adulthood. As he explained it, from our late teens to late 20s it’s all about getting laid. From our late 20s to late 50s it’s all about achieving status and financial security. And finally, in the years from career apogee until we drool in the Jell-O and turn out the lights for the last time, it’s all about protecting ourselves and what we’ve accumulated.

I’ve heard more elegant breakdowns of the chapters of life, but you have to admit he’s on to something.

Point being … it is a serious, fundamental mistake to think anything … and I by “anything” I mean issues as high-minded and mostly abstract as “democracy”, “Constitutional order” or “a woman’s right to choose” will ever drive a majority of older, white voters in the way $3.50 gasoline and constant, wall-to-wall fear-mongering over street crime will. And never mind nuances and the modulating statistics.

If Team Fear has the dials cranked to 11 shrieking 24-7 about “out of control” gas prices and carjackings, the general concern about a sub-culture of fat-assed authoritarians retracting basic 21st century rights — i.e. abortion — is pretty well reduced to a fringey, optional, luxury of a campaign matter. “Democracy” is something we can get back to and protect once crime and price increases are “brought under control.” (In the Times-Siena poll abortion has sunk to 5% as the “most important issue.”)

Maybe the polls will be wrong again this time. And maybe, unlike so many elections before, and to my ever-lasting amazement, worries that democratic basics are being cut apart at the seams will win the day. Maybe that fringey “democracy” issue will win out over the (nakedly implausible) assurance that packs of policy-averse right-wing politicians will somehow reduce the cost of tanking up the family Yukon or Escalade. And that they’ll flood the streets with so many (competent?) cops every black kid will think twice before trying to jack it out from under you.

Maybe that’ll happen. But being a liberal, all I see come January is the swearing in of Herschel Walker, J.D. Vance, Dr. Oz and Ron Johnson.