It was all teed up to be an unmitigated disaster. The coming red wave in the 2022 midterms was going to bring 30, 40, maybe even 50 new Republicans to the House of Representatives—and an extra two or three seats for the party in the Senate. A sizable chunk of the new GOP class was poised to be raging MAGA-heads and Marjorie Taylor Greene wannabes. Joe Biden’s presidency was going to be effectively over.

The right would have had a field day, casting Biden as a senile old fool and failed president. The centrist pundits and Blue Dog Democrats would have wagged their collective finger at Biden for having gone “too far left” on economics and brayed that wokery had consumed the Democratic Party. The left would have been on the defensive, trying to prove to anyone who’d listen—which, in Washington, wouldn’t have been many people—that they weren’t the ones who cost their party the election.

None of it happened. To everyone’s astonishment, it’s now #repsindisarray as Republicans scramble to figure out how everything went so spectacularly wrong. And lo and behold, something else happened: Joe Biden’s political judgment—not accorded much respect before the election, given his underwater approval numbers—was vindicated.

Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, put it this way to me: “Joe Biden has been consistently underestimated because the political commentary culture highly values qualities that make someone a talented pundit on TV but undervalues the qualities that make someone a great national leader: wisdom, decency, and determination."

An estimated 35.5 million Americans have already cast their votes in the 2022 midterms, and recent trends suggest turnout by Election Day could be even higher than in the past.

Contentious elections in Georgia have seen over 1.8 million votes – around 400,000 more than at this time in 2018. During the primary season, many states also saw increased participation, including North Carolina (up 50%), Arizona (21%) and Maryland (19%), all hinting that constituents want their voices heard now more than ever.

It’s a continuation of record-breaking turnout in recent years. The nonpartisan data center USAFacts reports that midterm turnout reached a 40-year high in 2018 at 49% of the total voting-age population, a dramatic uptick of over 10 percentage points from 2014. Two years later, the presidential elections experienced a 30-year turnout high, with 61.3% of Americans of eligible age making it to the polls.

In both the 2018 midterms and 2020 presidential elections, it was the age 18-24 demographic that made the largest jump in turnout. According to the USAFacts analysis, youth voter turnout increased by 10 percentage points from the 2016 to 2020 presidential elections, and, while midterm voter demographics tend to skew older, the youth vote nearly doubled in 2018, increasing from 15.9% to 30.1%. In Georgia, that same age group now makes up the highest share of registered voters in this year’s election, and the state’s data hub shows they’re also expected to be the most active.