When you’ve been consuming and producing political commentary for many years, you get used to certain recurring themes. One is the imminent disappearance or relegation to permanent minority status of the Republican Party.

This was widely predicted after the Goldwater defeat in 1964, after Watergate in the 1970s, and after the elections of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in 1992 and 2008, with considerably larger Democratic congressional majorities (57-43 and 259-176 for Clinton, 58-41 and 257-178 for Obama) than President Biden now enjoys in 2021 (51-50 and 222-213).