What makes it all the stranger is that it looks like Republicans will notch a significant victory in the popular vote. As of this writing, they’ve received 51.0% of the vote to Democrats’ 47.1%.
As things stand, we are seeing roughly a 7-point swing from 2020, when Democrats won the popular vote by a 50.8% to 47.7% margin. Had you showed any major analyst these results, along with exit poll findings that Biden would be at 44% job approval, no one would have expected this outcome. Overall, it’s a strange election.
Sean provides some analysis as to what he believes happened. He rightfully rejects the abortion argument and defends the polling as most of them getting it right when it came to the generic popular vote polling. Just that the individual races did not conform to that popular vote result.
On abortion he points out that specific candidates who held pro-life views did well. In many cases, they did better in the same states. Trende uses DeWine as an example of someone who signed a fetal heartbeat law and ran well ahead of JD Vance who is not a hard core pro-lifer. He also pointed to judicial races where pro-life Justices were elected over more liberal justices in swing states like Pennsylvania. Those who say Dobbs lost the election for the GOP probably have not looked as closely at this as someone like an RCP senior election analyst.On the idea of pollsters flooding the zone, Sean suggests (correctly) that even Trafalgar was almost spot on in their generic vote poll, while missing the boat on several specific Senate candidates. Meanwhile some other pollsters were closer in Senate races, while missing the generic ballot. Sort of like the person who adds 2+2 and gets 5 - but then adds 2 more and gets 6. Can be wrong multiple times and still get the correct result. In this case, it would seem those who got it right in the generic ballot got it wrong in many races. Those who got it right in the races got it wrong in the generic ballot. Nobody got it all right or all wrong.v At the end of the day, the concept was that candidates matter and the GOP had good candidates who came close in tough situations and bad candidates who lost in districts and states that were winnable. He didn't specifically get into "Trump candidates" vs "non-Trump candidates" but that can be deduced by looking at many of the candidates who individually struggled.
