It appears we have reached the end of the primary battles. Massachusetts was the last one, and - from my vantage point - there weren't any big surprises. Ed Markey is going to keep his seat, despite his advanced age (not pounding McDonald's every day probably helps, health-wise). Other older democrats also fended off younger challengers.

There's something else, though, I'd like to put forth as a hypothesis. It has to do with domain knowledge and expertise...

When the current maladministration rolled in, they took to government like a wrecking ball. As in 2016, a lot of public servants decided to retire early rather than deal with this insanity. With DOGE being invited in to use their complete lack of understanding as to how anything works to destroy government institutions, the brain-drain has been devastating.

This has created a situation where government oversight is nearly non-existent. Nothing could go wrong with that, right?

Added to this mess is the over-exuberance of ICE rounding up and deporting individuals on the flimsiest of terms. Most of them have been hard-working Hispanics doing the jobs that native-born Americans no longer want to do. The problem, of course, is that they knew how to do the jobs correctly.

The lack of safety and oversight, combined with the removal of those who knew how the work is supposed to get done, has created a perfect storm of quality elimination, the result being a staggering number of food recalls over the last few months. When food is prepared unsafely by people with no knowledge of how to do it correctly, and there's no one to ensure it's inspected and done correctly, we get the mess we're in today.

My personal experience captures this perfectly. I had half of my basement floor tiled a couple years ago. A single Hispanic man came in his own truck, and did a fantastic job by himself in 1 1/2 days. I recently had the other half tiled. It was done by two middle-aged white men (one of whom said he hadn't done any tiling in almost 10 years) who arrived in company trucks and ended up doing a pretty sloppy job (and took 1 1/2 days). I had to touch up paint on the walls where the put their mortar-covered hands to brace themselves, and there was (and still is) a lot of grout left on the tiles.

I think it illustrates in a microcosm the bigger problem facing the country - deporting expertise and destroying the controls that ensure the job is done properly. It will take years to recover from this; I just hope the electorate has the patience to let Democrats restore our once-great country back to some semblance of its previous self.