Last week, in a bizarrely revealing display, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi posted the raw numbers of votes polled by congressional candidates across the country.
Pelosi did this to shore up a base discouraged by the fact, as NBC phrased it, “The party fumbled key Senate races, lost ground in the House, and failed to capture state legislatures in a redistricting year despite having the political winds at its back, more money in its bank account and a hyper-activated grassroots movement that had spent four years preparing for this moment.”
According to Pelosi’s numbers, Democratic congressional candidates received, in total, 3-plus million more votes than Republican candidates, an utterly irrelevant statistic.