That headline is quite obviously a pun on the phrase "flipping the bird," I will fully admit. But more on bird-flipping in a moment, though. Instead, let's begin with what inspired the pun in the first place: last night's off-off-year election results. The results for the 2019 election cycle are now (mostly) in, and what they show is that the big blue wave which arose in 2018 shows no signs of ebbing. Democrats not only won the governor's race in a state that Donald Trump won by 30 points back in 2016, but they also achieved the "trifecta" in Virginia, flipping both houses of the legislature in a single election (they already held the governor's office, completing the trifecta of one-party control). But the biggest news is how they achieved such gains, and the answer is -- as it also was one year ago -- that they flipped the suburbs that Republicans used to routinely count on as strongholds.

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Does President Trump's phone even have a spell-checker? One has to wonder, when he tweets so many idiotic misspellings on such a regular basis. This week's gem came directly after the House voted on impeachment inquiry procedures, which Trump wasn't exactly happy about:

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We're in the midst of a brand-new breaking scandal -- one that's so new it hasn't even been assigned a "-gate" label yet. Ukraine-gate? Kiev-gate? MassiveTrumpCollusion-gate? As was entirely appropriate, Hillary Clinton had the pithiest tweet of the week: "The president asked a foreign power to help him win an election. Again."

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We have to begin today with an apology. Five years ago, without knowing any better, we erroneously reported in this space that there would not be another Friday the 13th which coincided with a full moon until 2049. So it was much to our surprise that we heard that this week we all were going to see another one, only five short years after we feverishly coined the word "selenofriggatriskaidekaphobia" to describe those with the very specific neurotic fear (-phobia) of both full moons (seleno-) and Fridays (-frigga-) the 13th (-triskaideka-).

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There are two special House elections in North Carolina today. Both of them should be foregone conclusions that nobody but political wonks pay attention to, because both of them are such solid-red districts. But while that is true in one of the special House elections tonight, it definitely isn't true in the other. In North Carolina's third district, the Republican candidate is going to chalk up an easy win, and nobody's going to pay any attention. But in the ninth district, Democrats have a real shot at flipping a district that Donald Trump won by 12 points in 2016. Whether they manage to eke out a victory or not, though, the very closeness of the race is making other Republicans increasingly nervous.

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You know things are getting bad in Trumpland when Our Dear Leader is openly attacking Fox News for not being servile enough.

In a series of angry tweets, Trump this week called Fox News "HOPELESS & CLUELESS" and ended his rant with:

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While almost all the election attention from the media so far has been on the presidential race (and, more specifically, the Democratic nomination race), there are other races out there which might be more important in the grand scheme of things, because the fight for the Senate is really the determining factor for what will get done in the two years after the presidency is decided. This holds true no matter who wins the White House, in fact, because if Trump gets a second term, facing a Democratic Senate and House would severely constrain his ability to enact his agenda. If Trump loses to a Democrat, it won't matter how many sweeping campaign promises get him or her elected, because control of the Senate will determine whether any of it will get a chance.

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The big story from the 2020 presidential election was the previously solid-blue states that flipped for Trump. Democrats still fixate on the roughly 70,000 votes it would have taken for them to hold onto three states in what had previously been considered solid Democratic states (part of the famous "Big Blue Wall," in other words): Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Was this a new demographic change, as blue-collar workers completed a journey they had begun in 1980 (they were originally called "Reagan Democrats," if you'll remember)? Did this shift in the red/blue map presage a much tougher road to victory for any future Democrat?

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Well, the second round of the Democratic debates is over, which means we are now smack in the middle of the debate about the debates. This is a window where we don't yet have an accurate picture of whether this week's debates will change anything in the polling (likely outcome: not very much), so instead of hard data all we have to argue about is sheer speculation and opinion. And, from what's being said, some are wringing their hands with worry.

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