Of this election season, we may say what Samuel Johnson said of Milton’s “Paradise Lost”: No one ever wished it longer. Still, if your idea of heaven is endless learning (is there a better idea?), political 2022 has been heavenly because we learned much about ourselves, even if we would rather not have learned a lot of it.

Fifty-eight percent of Americans own stocks individually, or through mutual funds, 401(k)s, IRAs, etc. As this is written, the Dow Jones industrial average is about 4,800 points below its all-time high of 36,952.65 on Jan. 5 this year.

Twenty-six days before Election Day, the last pre-election inflation numbers showed that government-made inflation, which the Biden administration 18 months ago called “transitory,” is like all “temporary” government programs: long-lived. By midyear, a typical household was spending $460 a month more than 12 months earlier for the same set of purchases. It was always fanciful for Democrats to think that, although tens of millions of Americans supported overturning Roe v. Wade, abortion rights could be a more politically potent issue than inflation, which infuriates everyone. The Supreme Court restored states’ authority to set abortion policy, making governors central to the debate. Republican pro-life gubernatorial candidates were winning in Georgia, Ohio and Iowa, and perhaps Arizona.

If on Tuesday Hispanic voters continued their drift away from Democrats, the reasons might include these: Self-identified “strong progressives” are only about 10 percent of voters, but they have a disproportionate effect in setting perceptions of the Democratic Party.

Sixty-six percent of them say this is not the world’s greatest country, and 94 percent say racism is built into the nation’s policies and institutions. Hispanics disagree with those propositions by 70 percent and 58 percent, respectively.

Also, many Hispanics fled socialism, or have family memories of it, and are repelled by progressives who admire it from a safe distance.

Furthermore, because many Hispanics are upwardly mobile, they believe in upward American mobility, and hence are not attracted by the Biden administration’s enthusiasm for racial spoils systems, a.k.a., “equity.” These are, as Christopher DeMuth of the Hudson Institute correctly said at Hillsdale College recently, “programs favoring a long and elastic list of politically selected groups, including its catchall category of those ‘adversely affected by inequality.’ “ Many Hispanics have experience of life under governments that pick winners and guarantee losers.

Until 1970, when Hispanics were less than 5 percent of the population, they were not a category counted by the census. Now, they are 19 percent of us, and they wonder why patronizing progressives thought it necessary to concoct for them the neologism “Latinx.”

I watched Tuesday night for evidence of polarization continuing in the form of partisan uniformities and clusterings. In 2020, Maine was the only state to elect a senator from a party different than the party of the state’s presidential choice. In 1976, 26 percent of voters lived in counties that gave at least 60 percent of their vote to one presidential candidate. By 2016, 60 percent did. Polarization has intensified since 2014, when a Pew Research Center report found “92 percent of Republicans are to the right of the median Democrat, and 94 percent of Democrats are to the left of the median Republican.” This year, one party controls the legislature and governor’s office in 37 states, up from 19 three decades ago.

If on Tuesday Herschel Walker captured Georgia’s Senate seat or forced a December runoff (if neither he nor the incumbent, Raphael G. Warnock, attain 50 percent), we will know 2022 is Year 6 PAHT (Post-”Access Hollywood” Tape). That tape did not derail its vulgarian star, and a Walker victory will indicate that blinkered partisanship now obliterates all other concerns, including character. If this contest and Georgia’s gubernatorial rematch between Gov. Brian Kemp (R) and Stacey Abrams generated record-high voter turnout, progressives’ (including Abrams’s) denunciations of Georgia Republicans’ “voter suppression” measures will … continue.

During Barack Obama’s presidency, 2009-2016, Democrats lost 1,042 federal and state offices. One consequence of this culling of the party’s rising talent was Joe Biden’s late-in-life ascent. He became eligible for Social Security before millions of eligible 2024 voters were born. If on Tuesday Democrats lost the House, he would be the fifth consecutive president to lose his party’s House majority in a midterm election. If, in addition, Senate control changed for the seventh time in 30 years, Biden’s presidency will be comatose. He will become what, during the 2020 primaries, he presented himself as, and what he should have been content to be seen as: “a bridge, not as anything else.”