It was all teed up to be an unmitigated disaster. The coming red wave in the 2022 midterms was going to bring 30, 40, maybe even 50 new Republicans to the House of Representatives—and an extra two or three seats for the party in the Senate. A sizable chunk of the new GOP class was poised to be raging MAGA-heads and Marjorie Taylor Greene wannabes. Joe Biden’s presidency was going to be effectively over.

The right would have had a field day, casting Biden as a senile old fool and failed president. The centrist pundits and Blue Dog Democrats would have wagged their collective finger at Biden for having gone “too far left” on economics and brayed that wokery had consumed the Democratic Party. The left would have been on the defensive, trying to prove to anyone who’d listen—which, in Washington, wouldn’t have been many people—that they weren’t the ones who cost their party the election.

None of it happened. To everyone’s astonishment, it’s now #repsindisarray as Republicans scramble to figure out how everything went so spectacularly wrong. And lo and behold, something else happened: Joe Biden’s political judgment—not accorded much respect before the election, given his underwater approval numbers—was vindicated.

Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, put it this way to me: “Joe Biden has been consistently underestimated because the political commentary culture highly values qualities that make someone a talented pundit on TV but undervalues the qualities that make someone a great national leader: wisdom, decency, and determination."