I heard from a reader last night who thanked us for the latest episode of the podcast because of how it focused on possible scenarios after a GOP win on Tuesday. Then I heard from TPM Reader FT who essentially said, Okay, there’s all the polls and the election in Israel. And basically it looks like the right is winning and will win everywhere. What then? What comes next?

I’ve always been unashamedly into polls. As longtimers know, we ran PollTracker for years and only really stopped it because the other aggregators had such a total focus on polls that we simply couldn’t keep up with the state of the art when it was only a side assignment. People who read TPM are political people. And we’re interested. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But I take FT’s point.

I have been giving this quite a lot of thought and there aren’t easy answers. There aren’t a lot of pleasant answers. Let me kick off the conversation with a bit of big picture and then some specific points about how I see the next couple years.