I'm glad big elections only happen once every two years. They are quite stressful. The smart move is to be zen about it, but I'm a not a very zen man. Pretending to not care or forcing myself to not pay attention is actually more agonizing for me than constantly toggling back-and-forth between FiveThirtyEight and the NYT needle (not all that helpful this year, as they stopped it in place at 4am and never started it up again). Elections are also one of the few times I go on Twitter. But I find that it's showing me a lot of old tweets. Votes are being counted! Ten hours is an eternity ago! Get those antiques out of my feed!
Twitter seems different now for some reason. I can't put my finger on what could have changed though.
My instincts were definitely wrong about the election. This is a good thing, as I was really down on the Dems chances, but it turned out to be, at the very least, a not disastrous midterms. I'll upgrade this to a satisfying midterms if Dems retain the Senate and a good one if they also beat Kari Lake in the Arizona governor's race and unseat Lauren Boebert in Colorado. Everything is really close, so it could take days to declare winners in all these races, and the Senate could once again hinge on a Raphael Warnock runoff. I can't say it was a great midterms because the Dems have effectively already lost the House. They were done in mostly by newly gerrymandered Republican districts and their inability to effectively gerrymander their own districts (a judge threw out a map in New York that would've been more favorable to Dems), but also they lost some winnable races (a few in NY, as it were), which almost always happens to the in party during the midterms. Based on the fundamentals -- Biden's unpopularity, inflation, etc. -- it could have been much, much worse.
Democrats were helped tremendously by the fact that Republicans fielded a lot of terrible candidates. This is something I wasn't wrong about, and I said as much in a previous entry. Probably the best result of the night is that Trump's candidates mostly got smoked in all but the deepest of red areas, and the non-Trump-endorsed candidates did much better. This is best illustrated by Oz and Mastriano losing fairly handily in Pennsylvania, and Kemp and Raffensperger winning comfortably in Georgia. Also, Ron DeSantis (who I was dismayed to learn is younger than me), Trump's possible rival in the 2024 primary, had a huge night in the Florida governor race. I'm no fan of DeSantis, and I think it's tragic how Florida has somehow gone from the quintessential swing state to solidly red in the span of six years, but if he actually decides to take on Trump and beats him (both realistic possibilities), then I will be much less of a non-fan than I am now. In fact, if you told me right now that I could guarantee Ron DeSantis would win the presidency in 2024, I would be tempted to take it; I probably would not, but I would be tempted.
Pretty good election for the polls too despite what you might hear. They weren't super accurate, but they were much more accurate than the prevailing narrative. The result we are seeing now was considered unlikely by poll-based models, but it wasn't some crazy outlier event. The polling error was just in the Dems favor this time. I'm kinda kicking myself for being so bullish on the red wave, but I was intentionally not really following the polls and just going with my gut, and my gut was probably acting as a defense mechanism for a worst case scenario. It's kinda like when I was saying the Mariners weren't going to make the playoffs even though I knew on some level that they probably would (and they did). The point is, your gut is shit... literally, if you think about it.
Anyway, I gotta wrap it up because I'm super tired. (S is gone right now, and Lil' S2 is kinda sick so he wakes up in the middle of the night and starts doing this weird congested whimper, and then I have to get up and give him a shot of children's Dimetapp to get him to go back to sleep, so I haven't been sleeping well.) I'll just conclude by giving my main takeaway from the night: Voters want access to abortion and normal elections. Also, I think anti-Trumpism is still a powerful motivating factor. So, thanks for that, Don, I guess.
Until next time...
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