It was a hope-filled summer for the Democrats. But it didn’t last. Summers never do.

Reality hit home hard last week, when a New York Times / Siena College poll reported that 49% of likely voters said they planned to vote for a Republican congressional candidate, while 45% said they planned to vote for a Democrat.

That piece of polling information, known as “the generic ballot question,” has historically given us a good sense of how an election is likely to play out. And with just over two weeks to go before the November 8 midterms, that four-point gap looms larger than it might seem.

For a variety of reasons, including polling bias, Republicans typically trail in the generic question. And history has shown that if Republicans are within three points of the Democrats on this question, they’ll typically take or retain control of Congress. Just prior to the 2018 midterms, Republicans trailed the Democrats by eight points, 53-45. And while that margin allowed the Democrats to win 41 House seats and control of the lower chamber, Republicans still managed to win two Senate seats and thereby retain control of the upper chamber.

That poll included some other headache-inducing numbers for the Democrats. As the Times’s house “moderate,” David Brooks, writes: “Democrats were counting on abortion rights to be a big issue, gaining them broad support among female voters. It doesn’t seem to be working. Over the past month, the gender gap, which used to favor Democrats, has evaporated. In September, women who identified as independent voters favored Democrats by 14 points. Now they favor Republicans by 18 percentage points.”

If your eyes are glazing over, we’ll cut to the chase: What we have here is a 12-point shift toward the Republicans from 2018 to today, and a colossal 32-point swing from Democrats to Republicans among a telltale voting bloc. Which means the Democrats are in for a shellacking.

How did we get here, to this moment of deep electoral disdain for the Democrats? Mostly by their own making. Democrats have steadfastly and stupidly tried to define what this election would be about. In addition to their inability to stop talking about abortion, Democrats have for the past year been beating the drum for January 6. They convened a crooked and unconstitutional “investigative” committee, and they staged an elaborate made-for-TV show trial, but to no avail.

How unhinged are the J6 Democrats? Get a load of what disgraced FBI sleazeball Peter Strzok told his fellow travelers on MSNBC last week: “If you look at the scale in terms of the threat to democracy — I mean, 9/11 was a tragedy. We lost thousands of lives in a horrific way that we still mourn to this day, but when you look at something that is an attack on democracy, something that could actually bring about a fundamental change to American governance as we understand it, 9/11 is nothing compared to January 6.”

And this guy used to work for the FBI.

How fruitless have these J6 hearings been? In a recent Monmouth poll, only 36% of respondents said they believed Trump was “directly responsible” for what happened on January 6, which is six points down from the response they got to that same question shortly after the rigged J6 committee began its hearings in June.

Talk about a waste of time. And yet here these House Democrat dead-enders are, having just Friday issued a formal subpoena for Donald Trump to appear before their rigged committee.

The other issue the Democrats can’t seem to keep from talking about is crime. As Brooks writes: “More than three-quarters of voters say that violent crime is a major problem in the United States, according to a recent Politico/Morning Consult poll. Back in the 1990s, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden worked hard to give the Democrats credibility on this issue. Many Democrats have walked away from policies the party embraced then, often for good reasons. But they need to find another set of policies that will make the streets safer.”

Good luck with that. The Defund Democrats that embraced Black Lives Matter and the George Floyd riots have zero credibility on crime.

Has a political party ever been more out-of-touch than today’s Democrats? We think not. Consider this Harvard Harris poll, which asks voters to identify “the most important issues of the day.” Republicans said immigration (37%), inflation (24%), and jobs (21%). The nation as a whole said inflation (37%), jobs (29%), and immigration (23%). So the Republicans are aligned with the issues that matter most to voters.

But get a load of the three most important issues of the day according to Democrats: climate change (23%), women’s rights (25%), and January 6 (27%).

To this we can only say: It’s the economy, stupids. Enjoy the shellacking.