Midterm elections post-mortems, particularly if coming from partisan navel-gazing grandstanding kibitzers, are predictably confusing. 

In fact, for every distorted post-mortem that someone makes, someone else has an equally distorted and opposite post-mortem.

But don’t despair. Keep in mind all post-mortems have but one true intent — to ready you for the next political death matches. 

Most times too it’s all guesswork. But you’ll soon see that some points being made somehow sound right or wrong, depending on whose foot soldier you’ll be going into the next battle. 

You’d been fashionably prepped for the war zone too. In fact, paid political hacks and hustlers made sure they manipulated and screwed your malleable political emotions even before the midterms.

So, if things go on as mostly predicted, you probably won’t be existentially bored. Soon you’ll be trading snide barbs and hurling insults at friends and foes in the next two months or so. 

It was otherwise when the midterms were still being bruited about. 

Framed initially as a humdrum referendum to gauge how popular or unpopular the present regime is, this year’s midterms turned unique on a fillip — the Veep’s impeachment.

As we know by now, the bitter fallout between the once formidable Marcos-Duterte coalition and the ensuing death matches and winner-take-all tussles, including kicking out the Veep, changed everything.

Consequently, the midterms soon starkly revolved around how an impeached Vice President Sara Duterte could boost her sagging political fortunes with the electoral trick of stuffing a Senate impeachment court with more sympathetic jurors.

Predictably, fringe jerk-offs of the pro-Duterte fandom variety prematurely proclaimed a twisted-reality victory mere days after election day. 

It turned out that neither camp had managed to dislodge the other. Both camps ended up in a stalemate, which can now only be decisively broken once the Senate impeachment court convenes in July.

Interestingly, the midterms by and large unexpectedly threw up a joker right into the poker matches between the two powerful protagonists.

Voters, particularly the youth, suddenly gave aces to the otherwise discounted Liberal Party and the “pink movement” at large. 

Back in the fray, the Liberals and the “pinks” now sport the motto “Hope over despair.”

Such a re-awakened formidable political force too caught survey outfits with their pants down. 

So much so that sheepish survey firms promised to revise everything they’ve been doing, especially on how they’ll treat the clout of young voters. 

As for our main protagonists, the President calmly accepted his seeming setback and aired a willingness to work with such a diverse bunch of newly elected senators.

But while the chief looked chastened by the results, he was far from being a lame duck as his noisy critics crowed. Nobody knows what he is still capable of.

Intriguingly, the Veep, despite living to fight another day, wasn’t crowing either. After peering, Medusa-like, into the mirror of her immediate future she didn’t like what she saw.

“The outcome was not what we had hoped for,” an apprehensive Veep quickly declared, probably realizing how costly a politically charged Senate impeachment trial, closely watched and monitored by the public, can be.

Here, the historical costly reference is that of ousted President Joseph Estrada, where even his large political base and sympathetic senator-jurors ended up helpless against an enraged middle class that took to the streets. 

Treading carefully and correctly gauging the fraught political risks stemming from the public’s reaction, therefore, is the overriding theme once the Veep’s impeachment trial comes around.

In fact, re-elected Senator Bong Go, nominally a loyal Duterte acolyte, abundantly made clear the risks when he insisted that for the forthcoming trial “importante sa ‘kin ang ebidensya (the evidence will be important to me).”