How much went right with last Tuesday’s midterm election? A lot.

Violence at the polls, much feared, didn’t happen. Nor did widespread intimidation. For all the talk of voter suppression, poll access was healthy and uneventful in the state of Georgia and pretty much everywhere else. Nearly all candidates who’d expressed distrust in the electoral process did in fact concede in a timely way on losing their races. (On this last, Benjy Sarlin offers one plausible explanation, which is that former President Donald Trump simply is unlike most persons in his willingness to commit with total intensity to a storm of lies: it all helps underscore “just how much Stop The Steal was a one‐man, top‐down phenomenon in 2020.”)