But the readiness of someone to tell a pollster which one issue was most important in picking a candidate surely goes astray. The real reason for the swing among swing voters is the Gestalt sense that we are heading downhill in a hurry. And the brakes aren’t working.

The left is now debating whether the right answer is to accelerate the descent in order to hasten the “total transformation” to come, or to try to steer the cart to a gentler slope. The wokest part of the Democratic Party has been driven since January 2021 by the fear that it needed to execute its agenda as fast as possible before the opportunity passed. Biden’s popularity was bound to be short-lived, as perhaps his time in office too; and the midterms always loomed as the date after which plans for radical “transformation” would probably perish. Joe’s get-as-much-done-as-you-can-before-the-rubes-catch-on presidency remains in place. Why stop now? In fact, if the end is nigh, let’s move even faster.

The more temperate souls among the Democrats are thinking longer-term. They would like to retain as much power as long as possible, which requires winning elections without having to rely overmuch on trunks of 2 a.m. ballots discovered in Davy Jones’s locker. A counsel of temperateness, however, faces a tough contest against the apostles of retribution. The hard left wants to punish America in the name of anti-racism, social justice, green energy and all-round equity. The moderate left endorses those goals while seeking a path that makes their pursuit a little less scary to the people who, sooner or later, will be ravaged by them. Much of the American business community has sidled into agreement with this tamer, greenish, semi-apocalyptic, repentant-white-people-still-welcome agenda.