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To be clear, I'm not predicting a wipeout, just saying that I'd now put it within the realm of possibility where I wouldn't have earlier. I understand what you're saying, but one of the reasons I see this as a possibility is that each of the wipeouts I've seen in my lifetime—1994, 2006, and 2010—has been preceded by people from the party that got soaked saying that it wasn't going to happen. In 1994 the Republicans had a national strategy of opposing Clinton, and the Democrats insisted that this wouldn't work because people voted for their reps based on local issues and not national ones, certainly not to "send a message" to the administration. In 2010 the Democrats had a supermajority and failed to appreciate the pressure they were putting the Blue Dogs under with the Obamacare negotiations. They had a broad mandate and assumed that the president doing what he campaigned on wouldn't be a liability, and they underestimated the Republicans' ability to regroup after taking a drubbing.
But I want to focus on 2006, because I think it has more parallels with what's going on right now. After the 2004 election everyone thought that the Democrats were dead because they couldn't win any states outside of the Northeast, the West Coast, and parts of the Upper Midwest. Then a series of seemingly minor incidents compounded to make Bush broadly unpopular a year into his second term. With Bush's approval rating in the toilet and polls showing Democrats leading in certain races, Republicans were confident that this wasn't a problem. The districts were gerrymandered to such a degree that there weren't nearly as many competitive seats as 1994. They had a better ground game. They had done all kinds of computerized analysis to show which campaign methods were more effective. They had the greatest number of high propensity voters. It didn't matter; they got shellacked. I see the following items that the Republicans seem to be outright ignoring:
Again, I'm not saying that it's going to happen, but the history of the past 20 years has shown that when parties think they have things wrapped up they get overconfident and start making excuses for minor failures rather than treating them seriously. I've seen no evidence that anyone in the republican party other than MTG seem to be concerned about what could happen if they stick to their "Trump's way or the highway" approach. The stakes are even higher than normal because, for the past decade, the party has been reliant on Trump to a degree that's unprecedented, and it's hard to see where they go next. Finding a successor was going to be hard enough, but it's going to be even harder if they have to reinvent the party.
I never considered the fact that Mandami was lying about the totality of his platform to get elected and he'd govern like any other neoliberal. If that's what you mean by 'be more pragmatic', then yes, that was not in the scope of possibilities I was thinking about. But unlike the other DSA dogcatcher positions, he's made big promises that require big money and big buy-in from the institutions, and there's no way to 'pragmatically' magic up billions of dollars or defy the laws of supply and demand, so I don't know what you're going on about.
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More to the point, would NYC going to Hell even hurt the Democrats? Granting that John Lindsay was something of an inverse Bloomberg in terms of party affiliation, his tenure as mayor actually being a disaster didn't hurt the Democrats. They held the Mayorship continually until Giuliani, won the Governorship of New York immediately following his tenure, and Carter won New York in 1976.
I do think that the GOP is at risk of reading too much into '24 as it did in '04. '24 in particular was weird. Between the Biden drama and inflation the election was arguably the GOP's to lose, and they barely won it (See also: the 2022 midterms.). Trump is polarizing but at least some variety of popular. The rest of the GOP are almost as polarizing and lack the charisma.
More fundamentally, the GOP as a party (Trump sort of has a direction, but it's a largely incoherent and surface level imitation of Pat Buchanan, and the GOP has neither the numbers or the consensus to push anything through Congress.) hasn't answered its post '06/'08 dilemma. Educated Republicans (aka. the Mitt Romneys of the world) aren't a big enough coalition to win Presidential elections (and probably not the House since Democrats have caught up to REDMAP), their priorities aren't shared by anyone else (Hint: 2012 was as white, male, and boomer as the college educated will ever be again.), and 40 years of largely uninterrupted culture war losses mean that they hold no sway with the high school educated base. The hardest of copers can note that Reagan got smashed in the '82 midterms, but there isn't an incoming equivalent of the 1-2 tail wind of crashing interest rates and oil prices that juiced the economy in the mid 1980s. Even getting rid of tariffs returns us to the baseline of late-stage Biden.
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I think your analysis is spot on
As someone who isn't a fan of Republicans, you love to see it!
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