What (the heck) did happen....

It's not over yet but, boy, it could have been a lot worse

In no particular order, some reactions to last night and some thoughts about what it means:

1.Those “structural” models I referred to in my last post, the ones that political scientists have used to predict election outcomes, had a bad night. The “fundamentals” pointed to a bad-to-disastrous night for Democrats, which did not come to pass. In that post, I suggested reasons why they might be wrong, including the possibility that, because of the Dobbs decision, angry/motivated Democratic voters would counteract the usual lull in enthusiasm among voters of the party-in-power. We still need to see fuller data from exit polling, but if reports of unusually high youth turnout last night are confirmed, that hypothesis may be born out.

We’re also in a political era in which hyper-partisanship means fewer people are switching parties/votes/loyalties from election to election, which would greatly blunt the so-called midterm effects. Both higher turnouts - a general trend in recent years - and more consistent voting suggest it might be time for an updating of some of those models’ assumptions. Then again, every time we think we have a handle on a new so-called trend in American politics, we end up being wrong.

2.What was a bad night for the structural models was a better night for the polls-based models, and most of the non-partisan pollsters. The Economist’s G. Elliott Morris, a polls-based forecaster and a very good one, thought Democrats were even money to hold the Senate and guessed their House losses would be at the lower end of the range. 538 more or less thought the same. Indeed, insofar as polling was off this cycle, it tended to exaggerate Republican strength. That’s relevant to point one above, since all of the talk about polling in recent years has been about why it has undercounted Republican strength, and all sorts of hypotheses have been generated to explain that phenomenon, including the “shy” Trump voter who didn’t want to talk to pollsters, or the mis-weighting of less educated voters in pollsters’ models.

So, now we’re likely to get lots of speculation about why polls - which did a pretty good job overall - missed Democrats’ surprising strength. You, faithful reader, already know one potential answer, since we’ve already discussed it. As elections approach, pollsters give more weight to likely voters. And they tend to assume younger voters are less likely to vote, for perfectly good historical reasons. But that assumption may have caused them to miss a surge in turnout for a very Democratic-leaning bloc of voters. And to defend Nate Silver in all this (I promise I’m not paid to do this), Silver said weeks ago that just because polling missed in one partisan direction in 2016 and 2020 didn’t mean, if there were misses in 2022, that they would be in the same direction.

As an aside, everybody who does election polling for a living is trying to figure out something that’s really hard to do - that is, model who is going to show up to vote, and for whom. The census bureau says the United States had a “citizen population” of over 230 million people in 2020, and over 168 million registered voters. Every state has its own rules about who can register and when and who can vote and when, and there are hundreds of races across the country. Pollsters, on the basis of samples of typically 500 to 1000 people, are trying to guess what the tens of millions of voters who do cast ballots - out of this potential pool of a quarter of a billion people - are going to do in all these races. If they’re off by a couple of percentage points, that’s pretty good!

3.Florida is gone for the Democratic Party. I know people are going to complain about candidate quality, but with the shift of Miami-Dade County - the state’s big metro area - from bright blue just a few years ago to red now, Florida is just too high a mountain to climb for Democrats. The huge margins that both DeSantis and Rubio ran up there yesterday made it seem like Democrats nationally might be in for a long night (as an aside, Florida does an admirably good job of counting its votes quickly). But Republican success in the Sunshine State augured no such national wipeout. Distinctive political dynamics are under way in Florida, including the apparently increasing rightward shift of Hispanic voters there.

4. On that point, what’s good for Florida Republicans is not necessarily good for Republicans nationally. Specifically, about Hispanic voters, it might be past time to stop thinking of them as anything like a uniform voting bloc. There has been endless chatter over the past few years about that group becoming less Democratic. But that might be the wrong conversation to be having, because what’s happening in Florida and parts of Texas among that group is not necessarily happening in other parts of the country, in places like Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada, for example. Careful scholars have already been making these arguments. They need to be a more prominent part of mainstream political discourse.

5.It was an undeniably bad night, overall, for Donald Trump. Chris Hayes repeated endlessly on MSNBC last night that, had Republicans run “normal” candidates in places like Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, they probably would have won the Senate outright. Listening last night, I found myself agreeing with Hayes. This morning, I think he was overstating his case. But what is undeniable is that Trump did not help the GOP last night. Trump-backed Senate candidates in Georgia, New Hampshire and Ohio ran significantly behind non-Trumpian, incumbent GOP governors in those states, each of whom easily won reelection. Indeed, nowhere that I can think of did a high profile Trumplican exceed expectations, and many ran behind. That fact, combined with DeSantis’ wipeout reelection victory increases greatly the likelihood of a major showdown for the 2024 nomination. It’s also already intensifying criticisms of Trump from some conservative commentators that yesterday’s election “disaster” - that’s how some of these commentators have described it - was his fault.

It’s important to remember that Trump is not a loyal Republican, since he’s not loyal to anything but himself. So, he may well not care at all about whether his endorsements weakened GOP prospects, and he’ll never change his behavior, of course. Trump’s loyalties¹ could become a very interesting issue as 2024 approaches, if Ron DeSanctimonious² appears to be replacing Trump as the GOP's last best hope to save America from Woke Communism.

6.The fight for control of the House has turned out to be shockingly close. As of this morning, the odds are that Republicans will have a majority, but a very narrow one. This is a bad outcome, of course, for two critical reasons. First, because any GOP majority means we’ll get almost no meaningful legislation passed in the next two years. And second, because the party’s restive crazies are going to take a serious run at forcing the United States to default on its financial obligations, breaking a 250-year commitment that our debt is backed by the full faith and credit of the United States Treasury. This could be a disaster on many levels and while it’s not a foregone conclusion, it’s a real possibility. The fact that Republicans pushed through gerrymanders even in places, like Ohio, where courts told them what they were doing violated the law, while Democrats in New York, for example, redrew its maps because Courts told them to, may well have turned out to be the difference in determining control of the House. The thought makes me want to scream.

But I digress.

7.While Republican control of the House is a deeply unfortunate outcome, last night was a surprisingly good night for Democrats across the country. The fact is that the the party began the cycle facing enormous disadvantages and dramatically outperformed expectations. There will be endless discussion about why that happened, and most pundits will explain how it clearly confirmed that which they always believed Democrats needed to do about messaging, strategy and so forth. And the truth will be that there’s no one-size-fits-all model for success. It will be necessary to continue to run moderates in some places, and really important to run more inspiring populist types in other places. We’ll need to keep running and electing a rainbow coalition, because the Democratic Party *is* a sprawling coalition, and what makes sense in Kansas and exurban Virginia doesn’t necessarily in New York or California or metro Atlanta.

8.At the national level, all that matters in the immediate term is control of the United States Senate. If they do nothing else in the next two years, a Democratic-controlled Senate needs to push through as many federal judges as humanly possible. If Democrats manage to hold Nevada and Arizona - the former is close to a toss-up right now, the latter looks a little better - then the Georgia runoff next month will not be for all the marbles. But if Catherine Cortez-Masto loses her seat, everybody needs to figure out how they can help Raphael Warnock beat Herschel Walker on December 6.

I’ll have more substantive, less horse-racey thoughts to share soon.

1. I’ m not referring to the espionage question here.

2. Trump’s new nickname for the Florida governor.