The prospects for 2022 are surprisingly bright. In addition to the 2020 outcomes, the decision by nearly all Democratic officeholders across the nation to embrace authoritarianism and paranoia as the bases for their pandemic-response policy has their own constituencies looking for common-sense alternatives. Here in California, nearly 40 million Americans have spent the past year in semi-isolation, bounded by a latticework of increasingly preposterous rules that seem to have no meaningful connection to public health. Democratic elites don’t follow them, of course — nothing has propelled Governor Gavin Newsom’s recall effort as much as his rule-breaking dinner at French Laundry — but we have to.

Everyone knows families struggling because they can’t send their children to school. Likewise, everyone knows small businesses and entrepreneurs who lost everything because they were forbidden from opening their doors. In my own family, we were denied the opportunity to properly mourn my late grandfather, because we were forbidden to gather in an outdoor cemetery for more than 15 minutes.

The coronavirus pandemic is a real emergency, of course. But most Californians no longer believe that the Democratic officeholders, from top to bottom, have real answers to it — and certainly not answers that do not destroy their lives and livelihoods. Add on to this the metastasizing progressive mania for overthrowing California and American history, and you have all the conditions for an electoral revolt.