Unemployment is at 3.7 percent, a level so low we’ve reached it only once before in my entire lifetime. GDP is growing 3 percent per year. Wages are rising nicely. Inflation is tooling along at a very modest 2 percent. Manufacturers’ shipments are healthy. Consumer spending is strong and household debt is low. Aside from the dotcom boom, consumer confidence is at a 40-year high.

And yet, Republicans are going to lose three dozen seats in the House and cede control to the Democrats. Has any party ever done so badly in the middle of such strong economic performance?

I guess there was LBJ in 1966, after passing the Civil Rights Act and losing the South forever. But that’s about it.

In raw numbers this might not be the biggest wave election ever, but once you account for the economy it’s one of the great political blowouts of modern history. Donald Trump will never admit it, but don’t be fooled. He was crushed and repudiated tonight in a way that few presidents ever have been.

Back in happier times, President Trump bleats about all the jobs he's bringing to America while Foxconn chairman Terry Gou (left) and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son listen in.Brian Cassella/TNS via ZUMA

While everyone else is busy keeping you updated on the latest horserace news, my job today is to distract you with other stuff. This story out of Wisconsin isn’t really that big a deal, but it amuses me anyway:

Foxconn Technolog Group is considering bringing in personnel from China to help staff a large facility under construction in southern Wisconsin as it struggles to find engineers and other workers in one of the tightest labor markets in the U.S.

….Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou is looking to company engineers in China to transfer, according to people familiar with the matter. Some engineers have expressed reluctance to relocate to Wisconsin, which is less well-known to Chinese workers than U.S. tech hubs in California or New York. One engineer who declined to give his name said he wouldn’t want to move to a place he worried could be as cold as Harbin, a northern Chinese city known as “Ice City.”

….Mr. Gou is upset that few Chinese workers have volunteered to move to Wisconsin if called upon, people familiar with the matter said. It is unclear how many the firm is looking to transfer.

I’m sure Wisconsin will eventually get lots of jobs out of the Foxconn plant, but after all the “America is Back!” ballyhoo from Donald Trump and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, I can’t help but snicker that Foxconn now claims it can’t find enough American workers to build its plant. Their story, apparently, is that it would be cheaper to transfer them from Taiwan than to pay enough to attract them from, say, Detroit and Chicago and Kansas City and other cities where Americans aren’t used to cold weather.

Uh huh.

Lunchtime comes early today! Go vote!

I don't get it. Why does high society still hang out with this guy? There are plenty of non-vile billionaires around, after all.Dennis Van Tine/Geisler-Fotopres/DPA via ZUMA

It must be nice when state media is on your side at a rally on the final night before Election Day:

Introducing the president as he stumped for Republican candidates was Rush Limbaugh, the radio host who was born and raised in Cape Girardeau. Then after Mr. Trump took the microphone, he invited two Fox News personalities, Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro, to join him on stage.

….The pipeline also works the other way. The president recruited his current national security adviser, John R. Bolton, from Fox and he is considering naming another former Fox personality, Heather Nauert, as his new ambassador to the United Nations as early as this week….Hanging around backstage on Monday night was Bill Shine, a former Fox co-president now serving as deputy White House chief of staff in charge of communications. As the rally began, Mr. Shine and Mr. Hannity were spotted giving each other a high five not long after Mr. Hannity interviewed Mr. Trump. “I never miss your opening monologue,” the president told Mr. Hannity during the interview. “I would never do that.”

There has to be a point at which we all stop pretending that Fox News is a news network. I mean, sure, they’ve got a few real reporters who are trotted out during the late-morning and early-afternoon ratings lulls, but that’s about it. The rest of the time it’s nonstop agitprop for Donald Trump that’s so extravagant I think even Joseph Goebbels might have had second thoughts about whether it could actually work.

But the world moves on and so does the art and technology of propaganda. A century ago state media was at its best when it was broadcasting 5-hour speeches from Dear Leader, whoever that might be. Today’s marks get bored by that, so instead Fox supplies them with the current state-of-the-art in propaganda: plenty of pretty blond girls, intriguing conspiracy theories, and outrages of the day aimed at the racial and political opposition, all packaged into short, colorful, mesmerizing 4th-grade level snippets that still leave plenty of time to sell sleep number beds and gold coins.

So is this it? Can we finally stop pretending that FNC is a normal news channel, even if Shep Smith and Bret Baier continue to provide a bit of midday window dressing? Rupert Murdoch has finally achieved in America what he already proved could be done in Australia, and he’s become a billionaire in the process. Hooray for him. But now it’s time to finally treat him like the B-league Geobbels that he is, and eject him from polite society. Enough, already.

Amazon HQ in London, one of many headquarters buildings Amazon already has.Amazon

Here’s the latest on Amazon’s Great Headquarters Search:

After conducting a yearlong search for a second home, Amazon has switched gears and is now finalizing plans to have a total of 50,000 employees in two locations, according to people familiar with the decision-making process.

The company is nearing a deal to move to the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens, according to two of the people briefed on the discussions. Amazon is also close to a deal to move to the Crystal City area of Arlington, Va., a Washington suburb, one of the people said. Amazon already has more employees in those two areas than anywhere else outside of Seattle, its home base, and the Bay Area.

I wonder how many people understand that Amazon is just playing everyone here? They aren’t going to have two headquarters. They aren’t going to have three headquarters. And there are plenty of places where they can hire enough tech workers to fill out a 50,000-person office without having to split in two.

What they’re most likely to do, eventually, is simply have different parts of the business run from different places. Maybe retail will be run from Seattle, AWS will be run from Arlington, and Whole Foods will be run from Long Island City. Or something. There’s nothing unusual about this, and it doesn’t mean that Amazon has “three headquarters,” even if they make sure that all three campuses have a nice big corner office reserved for Jeff Bezos at all times.

So let’s cut the crap. Amazon is expanding, full stop. Eventually they’ll probably reorganize and start shuffling people around. That’s about it except for the vast amount of PR they’ve gotten from all this.

Over at National Review, Henry Olsen has an odd essay. It’s all about moderate Republicans, otherwise known as RINOs, or Republicans In Name Only:

Movement types have long been enraged by RINOs’ cool attitude toward tax cutting and social conservatism and their willingness to cooperate with, and occasionally vote for, Democrats. Hunting RINO officeholders during primary season has been the Club for Growth’s primary mission for years, and together with activist muscle, the group has successfully pushed the party to the right.

It turns out, however, that poaching RINO legislators is not enough to drive RINOs to extinction….Millions of voters [in suburbia] were in fact RINOs too, and picking off their representatives did not do a thing to change their minds about the issues. They like “go slow” Republicanism and do not believe that things in America are bad enough on any level to warrant radical, significant change.

….Tuesday, however, is going to be the RINOs’ revenge.

It goes on in this vein for a while, and the odd thing is not that Olsen is wrong. He’s entirely right. The odd thing is that he seems somehow surprised by this.

But there’s nothing to be surprised at here. When parties win and lose majorities, the battleground is almost always the center. When Democrats won in 2006 and 2008, they picked up a lot of centrist blue dogs, much to the annoyance of more progressive Dems. In 2010 it went the other way: Republicans walloped Democrats by killing off the blue dogs and electing a whole bunch of moderate Republicans. This year the tide turns again. The RINOs are getting picked off and will be replaced by moderate Democrats. They won’t call themselves blue dogs, but they won’t be much different.

There’s another part of this that’s surprising but shouldn’t be: namely that party activists are endlessly surprised about this. Whenever a party loses its centrists, it mathematically becomes more extreme and activists become convinced that this is the future. Democrats are finally getting more progressive! Republicans are finally getting more conservative! Now all we have to do is keep it that way as we rebuild a majority.

But rebuilding a majority means winning back those centrists. The party might, in fact, move a bit to the left or right during an entire cycle of this, but not nearly as much as activists wish. This is why people like John Boehner and Paul Ryan could never govern the House: the hard core of Freedom Caucus folks on the right might have grown, but so did the Tuesday Group in the middle. Even if the party had drifted right overall, it hadn’t actually drifted that far. There was still a huge abyss between left and right.

This dynamic matters a lot less when a party doesn’t control the presidency, so it probably won’t be especially visible in the Democratic Caucus if they win a majority tomorrow. But it will spring out of nowhere to surprise everyone yet again in 2020 if they manage to kick Donald Trump out of the White House.

I call this the Revenge of the Median Voter Theorem, which I continue to believe always gets its revenge no matter what fancy theories modern political scientists keep coming up with to claim that it’s dead. Tomorrow it will have its day again.

At one point during my wanderings around New York City a few weeks ago, I ended up on the east side of Central Park near a plot of grass that’s apparently a dog run. As you can see, lighted collars are now stylish accessories for nighttime canine frolics, and when I saw these dogs the first thing I thought of was Star Wars. I was really hoping they’d both run around and play with each other, allowing me to get some kind of picture that looked like a light saber duel, but no such luck. They just meandered around a bit while their owners argued politics.

A few years ago the city of Seattle passed a law that gradually raised the minimum wage to $15+ per hour starting in 2015. A group of researchers at the University of Washington immediately got to work to track the effect of the law. Their most recent study was released in October and was met with a little too much nyah-nyah-nyahing for my taste. The plan all along was to follow the data over time and write progress reports every few months, so the fact that one report comes to different conclusions from a previous one doesn’t really mean much. It doesn’t mean they “changed their minds” or anything like that. It just means they added another couple of data points and reassessed their results.

So. Anyway. Here are the results for hourly wages through the end of 2016:

The methodology used is to compare wages in Seattle with wages in a “pseudo-Seattle” that’s constructed of other cities that, when mushed together, very much resemble ordinary Seattle. More here if you’re interested. In this case, wages increased far more in Seattle than in the synthetic version of Seattle, which is no surprise. But did this affect the number of hours worked?

There’s a small disemployment effect of about an hour a week for low-wage workers. Now let’s combine the higher wages with the lower hours worked:

Low-income workers in Seattle, on average, earned about $17 more per week than they would have if the minimum wage law hadn’t changed. The researchers also come to a few other conclusions:

• All the gains accrued to experienced workers. Inexperienced workers earned the same weekly wages as before.
• Some of the gains came from working extra hours outside Seattle.
• Job turnover decreased.
• New entries into the workforce also decreased.

That’s it so far: mostly good news, with a bit of concern about the effect on new workers entering the job market. Personally, though, I’d caution not to take any of this very seriously until we see a change in the economy. If a big change in the minimum wage were going to have an effect, I’d expect to see it first when the economy turns down, as it eventually will. There’s a good chance that we won’t get a final read on the Seattle experiment until 2020 or later.

This isn’t really more predictions, just the same one as yesterday but presented with a little more context. I finally got tired of reading endless headlines about how the Democratic lead in the generic ballot is “shrinking” or “widening” or “eroding” or whatever, so I went off to 538.com to get the answer. Here it is:

There you have it. Ignore the individual polls, which can easily change by several points for no particular reason. You may truthfully say that “the Democratic lead has grown substantially since summer” or “the Democratic lead has shrunk slightly since September.”  Whichever one supports your narrative is OK. But those two choices are about all you have.

I have no intention of making any predictions about Election Day.  The New York Times, for example, suggests that Democrat Katie Porter will edge out incumbent Republican Mimi Walters here in my home district, the California 45th deep in Orange County. That would be so great! But having lived for 60 years—represented by Republicans in every single one of those years—it’s just hard to believe it might finally happen. We’ll see.

Anyway, with no polling days left before Election Day, here are two projections for the House. The first is from Sam Wang:

He puts the generic congressional ballot at +8 percent for the Democrats, which would be enough to barely win control of the House with a pickup of around 30 seats. And here’s Nate Silver:

This appears to be a bit more optimistic, with a projection of a 38-seat Democratic gain and an 85 percent chance of winning control of the House. Keep your fingers crossed and keep ringing those doorbells!

POSTSCRIPT: As for the Senate, don’t ask. No one has much confidence the Democrats can run the table and take back control. Unless something big happens, it looks like Mitch McConnell has two more years left as majority leader.