The Democratic Party is favored to win the House tonight. Prediction market Polymarket put the odds at 95 percent on Tuesday. Democrats looked at 95 and saw 5.

That's the party. That's the whole party.

The Washington Post reported Tuesday that polls favor Democrats to take the House and possibly the Senate, and that many die-hard Democrats are too consumed with their own anxiety to believe it. One Pennsylvania Democrat gave the Post a single word for how the good numbers make her feel: "Dread." Not hope. Not relief. Dread. She is watching the polls the way you watch a toddler carry a full glass of grape juice across a white carpet.

She has her reasons. The polls said Hillary Clinton would win in 2016. They said Kamala Harris would win in 2024. They said Beto O'Rourke had a real shot in Texas in 2018. At this point the polls are the ex who swears he's changed, and Democrats are standing at the door with the chain still on.

The Post compared these voters to traumatized sports fans who have watched their team blow it in the fourth quarter too many times. Fair. Except sports fans don't draft the quarterback. Democrats did. Then they acted shocked by the interceptions, every single season, like the playbook came from somebody else.

It gets better. A first-time voter in South Carolina told the Post that when someone said things couldn't get much worse, she ran to knock on a wooden pole to cancel the jinx. That is the Democratic turnout operation in 2026: door knocking, phone banking and lumber. Somebody tell the DNC to put the pole on payroll. It's the only thing in the coalition that hasn't flip-flopped.

A Texas Democrat told the paper she is "just so used to getting beaten." Ma'am, you live in Texas. That's not a feeling. That's a voter file.

Meanwhile, Kalshi and Polymarket have Democrats leading in races all over the map, and NBC News says networks could be in a position to call both chambers tonight. The party has never looked closer to winning. It has also never looked more like a patient waiting for the doctor to come back with the biopsy.

Here's the part nobody in the green room will say out loud. For ten years, Democrats told the rest of the country to trust the data, trust the experts and trust the science. Now the data says they're up big, and they're checking under the bed for a recount. Turns out "trust the experts" was always a suggestion for other people.

And the dread has a cost. A party convinced it's about to lose spends Election Day fundraising off panic, texting your aunt nine times before lunch that democracy ends at 8 p.m. unless she sends $15. She sent it. She always sends it. That aunt has single-handedly funded three Senate campaigns and a pole.

So that's where things stand as the polls close. Ninety-five percent likely to win, a hundred percent sure they won't, and one wooden pole in South Carolina carrying the heaviest load in American politics.

Democrats looked at 95 and saw 5. Tonight we find out which number was lying.

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The Demorat is a satire publication. This article is parody and commentary based on real news reports; jokes, exaggerations and fictional elements are not factual claims. Quotes attributed to real people are drawn from published reporting.

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