2020 Elections Enter New Stage
If your job involves the elections, you’re going to be humbled at some point, and probably more than once. Apparently four years is long enough to almost forget the fun and challenges of handicapping an election with Donald Trump on the ballot.
With votes still being counted and races still to be called, it’s too soon for any definitive analysis and potential changes that need to be made going forward. But we know enough to begin digesting what happened and start evaluating our projections, including a few things we got right.
We, along with most of the rest of the media, have been preparing people for an extended period of vote counting and litigation. That’s exactly what we’re walking through right now. For nearly two years, we’ve been projecting a modern record for voter turnout. And that’s going to happen.
It may only be fitting for a year such as 2020, we’re staring at a strange combination of election results and reaction. Republicans are taking victory laps while President Donald Trump is about to become the first incumbent president to lose re-election in 28 years, Democrats maintained their House majority and Democrats gained at least one seat in the Senate. Yet the initial narrative of the election is funereal or the Democratic Party.
That GOP euphoria is fueled by potentially keeping the Senate and dramatically overperforming expectations in the House. Those expectations were set by a majority of national, state, and district level polls (partisan and…
