No one can say with certainty what will happen in tomorrow’s midterm elections. Polls suggest Republicans are likely to take control of the House and the Senate, and modern historical patterns clearly lean in the GOP’s favor, but if the polls are off a bit, and Democratic turnout exceeds expectations, the political world may soon be surprised.

Is it likely? No. Is it possible? Yes.

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But let’s say for the sake of conversation that the polls aren’t off, and a flood of Democratic voters doesn’t materialize. Let’s say the forecasts and assorted models are right and there’s a clean sweep for Republicans. What should Americans expect? What exactly are the stakes for the nation and its future?

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes recently had a terrific A block on this, summarizing one of the core questions facing voters.

“Ultimately, the thing we are all deciding as a democratic society is who will wield power and what they will do with that power? … With Republicans within striking distance retaking the House — probably favored to retake the House — you’ve got to ask yourself, what would that actually mean? Not just on the campaign trail, what would Republican governance, a Republican majority in the House actually look like? What would they do?”

These should not be rhetorical questions. Fortunately, we don’t need a crystal ball to know the answers.

I suspect many voters haven’t considered this in much detail, and even those who’ve imagined the prospect of a Democratic White House working alongside a Republican majority on Capitol Hill have probably made some modest assumptions about legislative gridlock, a handful of culture war disputes, and more frequent use of the presidential veto pen.

But this dramatically understates matters. The next two years will be vastly worse if voters rally behind GOP candidates tomorrow.

The New York Times’ Ezra Klein had a great column along these lines yesterday, explaining, “What Republicans are offering, if they win the 2022 elections, is not conservatism. It is crisis. More accurately, it is crises. A debt-ceiling crisis. An election crisis. And a body blow to the government’s efforts to prepare for a slew of other crises we know are coming.”

Some may see this as speculative, if not alarmist. We know those assumptions are wrong — because a great many GOP officials have been unsubtle about how they intend to use their power if the electorate hands it to them. As Ezra concluded, “[Republicans] have not hidden their intentions or their tactics. They have made clear what they intend to do if they win. Biden ran — and won — in 2020 promising a return to normalcy. Republicans are running in 2022 promising a return to calamity.”

Consider some of the specifics, likely to be seen at the federal level:

Debt ceiling: Republican leaders have freely admitted that they intend to hold the nation hostage next year, threatening to crash the economy on purpose unless their demands are met. We don’t yet have a sense of what would appear on their ransom note, but according to some GOP officials, cuts to Social Security and Medicare are likely to be part of the plan.

Sabotage: The last time there was a Republican majority on the Hill, there was a Republican president in the White House. This gave the GOP an incentive to keep the nation as stable as possible. With President Joe Biden in office, the opposite incentives kick in: Republicans will want to destabilize the United States with the expectation that such volatility will necessarily help the GOP and its likely presidential nominee in 2024.

There is some modern precedent for this: Republicans pursued a sabotage campaign after making gains in the 2010 midterms, and the result was a slower and unsteady recovery after the Great Recession.

Ugly, divisive legislation: A national abortion ban. A national version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” policy. A bill to make permanent the GOP’s ineffective tax breaks from 2017. Republicans will have proposals they’ll be eager to push; those proposals will be regressive and unpopular; and they’ll be intensively divisive. The odds of these bills becoming law while Biden is in the Oval Office, of course, are poor.

But if rewarded by the electorate, Republicans would waste time on them anyway, in part to scratch an ideological itch, in part to satisfy the demands of conservative media, in part to generate fundraising opportunities, and in part because they have no intention of doing real legislative work.

Donald Trump, the House Speaker in absentia: If you think the former president is calling the shots for much of his party now, just wait until after he’s launched his 2024 bid and his most sycophantic allies are in positions of congressional power, desperate to both follow his orders and position him for success.

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Pointless partisan spectacles: In addition to endless congressional hearings in pursuit of assorted conspiracy theories — no two words will be uttered more in the next Congress than “Hunter Biden“ — and many Republicans have made little effort to hide their plans to pursue impeachment crusades against a great many executive branch officials. (Similarly, it’s a distinct possibility that some GOP lawmakers would use newfound power to undo Trump’s earlier impeachments.)

Helping Russia, hurting Ukraine: More than a few Republicans, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, have left little doubt that U.S. support for our Ukrainian allies — a bipartisan commitment in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion — would be very much in doubt under a GOP majority.

Government shutdowns: A variety of Republicans, including members of the party leadership, have already announced plans to shut down the federal government in the next Congress unless their far-right demands are met.

So much for judicial confirmations: While much of the focus has been on the House, if there’s a GOP majority in the Senate, confirmations of the White House’s judicial nominees will be dramatically curtailed. In the event of a Supreme Court vacancy, in the next Congress, it would almost certainly go unfilled.

An executive branch crippled: It’s not just judicial nominees who would fail to get confirmation votes. It’s very easy to believe a Republican-led Senate would undermine the executive branch’s ability to function by balking at cabinet agency nominees.

A climate crisis ignored: The House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis would likely be shuttered under a GOP majority. The new majority would also try to undo the Inflation Reduction Act’s climate provisions and reverse the progress of the last two years.

The end of Jan. 6 scrutiny: The investigation into the Jan. 6 attack would be immediately shut down by a Republican majority, which has signaled an intention to instead investigate the investigation.

Hoping disaster doesn’t strike: If there’s a crisis along the lines of the start of the Covid pandemic, it would likely go without a federal response in the event of GOP control.

New opportunities for the fringe: The likes of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and her cohorts have been loud but powerless over the last couple of years. In a House chamber led by Republicans, they would be rewarded with actual authority and official responsibilities.

Threats to democracy abound: One more excerpt from Ezra Klein’s column: “The 2022 elections are very likely to sweep into power hundreds of Republicans committed to making sure that the 2024 presidential election goes their way, no matter how the vote tally turns out. … What if congressional Republicans refuse to certify the results in key states, as a majority of House Republicans did in 2020? What if — when Trump calls Republican secretaries of state or governors or board of elections supervisors in 2024, demanding they find the votes he wishes he had or disqualify the votes his opponent does have — they try harder to comply? The possibilities for crisis abound.”

There’s been some polling of late to suggest Americans expect new GOP majorities, should they exist, to focus on concerns such as gas prices and street crime. If those hopes lead to Republican majorities, a whole lot of people are going to be amazed at the gap between what the public wanted and what the public is poised to get.