Chuck Todd has a tell. It’s a subtle tell, but when he’s delivering news that he doesn’t like, the stalwart Democrat slappy and NBC News anchor puts on a bit of a forced smile, and he gets a look like the Grey Poupon has gone bad. Or like there’s a Mahi Mahi bone lodged in his esophagus.

If you’re a conservative, this look is a thing of beauty. Sometimes, you’re nearly brought to tears by it — like DeNiro’s Al Capone during that opera scene in “The Untouchables.” See here:

And so it was on Wednesday, when the Chuckster grimly went to his telestrator to wave his rolled up talking points at the latest polling numbers from NBC News. His conclusion? Democrats are headed for a “shellacking” in the upcoming 2022 midterm elections.

Breaking it down, Todd pointed to three key metrics that spell “Danger Will Robinson” for the Democrats:

• 71% of Americans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction
  
• President Joe Biden’s job approval rating is only 40%
  
• Republicans hold a lead over the Democrats on the all-important “generic” ballot question, which indicates that voters favor the GOP over Democrats for the upcoming election

“When you start dipping below 45%” said Todd, “you’ve got a problem. And you’re gonna have midterms that are in the bad-to-shellacking ratio. President Biden is at 40. George W. Bush was at 39% in 2006. We know how that turned out. So, you see, that’s also in shellacking territory.” (Don’t ever say Barack Obama left without a legacy. After the 2010 midterms, he gave us the delightful term shellacking. And then he sicced the IRS and the ATF on conservative nonprofits, and he got back to wrecking the country. But, still, shellacking.)

“Not a good time,” said Todd after he’d slogged through the abject awfulness of his party’s prospects. To which we’d reply: Not a good time for whom?

To be clear, our country is indeed in the crapper. Our southern border is wide open, inflation is at record levels, a recession may be coming, and our president is an international laughingstock. None of us can be happy about any of that — well, okay, maybe we can smirk at the laughingstock part —but what we can be happy about is that the American people seem to get it. And they’re not happy about it. According to one poll after another after another, a near-biblical smiting is in the offing for the Donkey Party in November. As for the latest NBC News poll — the one that has Chuck Todd buying his Maalox by the carton — here’s how they broke it:

Amid Europe’s largest land war since World War II, 7 in 10 Americans expressed low confidence in President Joe Biden’s ability to deal with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in a new NBC News poll, and 8 in 10 voiced worry that the war will increase gas prices and possibly involve nuclear weapons. And during the nation’s largest inflation spike in 40 years, overwhelming majorities said they believe the country is headed in the wrong direction and disapproved of the president’s handling of the economy.

“It’s the Inflation, Stupid,” blared the headline from National Review’s Rich Lowry. “Joe Biden is engaged in the most extensive test of whether an American president can survive elevated levels of inflation since Jimmy Carter, and it’s not going well.”

“DO SOMETHING!” screamed the Democrats back and forth at each other, like the Duke Brothers in “Trading Places.” “Sell, sell, sell!” Yep, that’s the sage advice from Democrat “strategist” Chris Moyer, who says that Biden “should get out to places with the most important races and sell, sell, sell.” Great work if you can get it.

One last caveat: The midterm elections of November 8 are still 221 days away. That’s two cats and a Rasputin in terms of political lives. We as conservatives, constitutionalists, Republicans, libertarians, and right-minded indies need to be relentless in our willingness to engage with our friends and families between now and then — and to ask them a variation of the question that Ronald Reagan asked the American people back in 1980, during the depths of the Carter years:

Are you better off today than you were two years ago?