With the pro-fascist wing of Senate Republicans threatening not to seat Mary Peltola if she’s elected to the Senate, I wanted to give you a short primer of how all this works, not just in Peltola’s case but in the larger terrain of GOP denialism.

First, the House and Senate are fundamentally different. The senate is a “continuing body”; so Republicans are in some position to refuse to seat Peltola. The House on the other hand reverts to what we might call a parliamentary state of nature every two years. When the House reconvenes in January, there won’t be a Republican majority and Mike Johnson will not be Speaker. Everyone shows up with their state certifications in hand and it’s the clerk of the House who examines those credentials on a ministerial basis. Then everyone votes on who the Speaker will be. That’s why we had that drama with Kevin McCarthy a few years ago.

I think we’ve seen all that can happen in the bizarre continuation of the Michigan Democratic Senate primary, which of course actually ended a few months ago. But given what’s happened over the last 72 hours, I guess, who am I kidding? Stevens did a new round of interviews last night, including one on CNN with Anderson Cooper. It was a further train wreck in the weeklong run of pile-ups. It was a classic case of why, in a high-stress news environment, you shouldn’t go on TV if you don’t know what you want to say. Stevens appeared to be figuring out or trying to come up with an explanation for her actions in real time on live TV. At one point she seemed to suggest she might end up voting for Abdul El-Sayed after all, though it was so disjointed that it’s hard to know just what she was trying to say. It’s for this reason that both her erstwhile friends and her current friends have been begging her to just stop talking.

First, let me remind you: be sure to join us tomorrow night starting at 8:00 p.m. ET for our TPM’s YouTube livestream coverage of the election night results. It’ll be me, TPM Publisher Joe Ragazzo and different members of the TPM team will cycle through over the course of the evening, discussing different races, sharing color commentary, answering your questions in real time, etc.

As you’ve likely seen, a final round of NYT/Siena polls came out last night and they point to the bottom falling out for the GOP in key Senate races across the country. As Kate Riga and I have discussed in numerous TPM Show episodes, the NYT/Siena poll is a high quality poll which for a variety of not terribly good reasons (largely the Times’ megaphone, but also getting closer than others in a few key cycles) has influence and impact far greater than any other poll. I saw an apt comment from Nate Silver this morning, essentially, the polls no longer say this is close. The polls, collectively, say Democrats will win the senate. They could be wrong. But what they’re saying is no longer ambiguous or too close to call.