Everything you were told about the midterms has turned out to be wrong
Over the final few weeks of the 2022 midterm election cycle, pretty much the entire mainstream media and pundit class obsessively kept insisting that the Democrats would get wiped out in the midterms. Now it turns out every single bit of that was wrong.
We still don’t know which party will win majority control of the House and Senate. But we do know that it’ll be close either way. At this rate the Democrats have perhaps a 50-50 chance of winning the House majority. And the Democrats merely need to win two out of the four remaining Senate races in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Wisconsin in order to retain de facto majority control of the Senate.
We’ll see how it plays out from here, as we wait for more races to be called, last minute mail-in votes to be counted, and even a potential runoff not month in Georgia. But the fact that this is a nail-biter means that the expert predictions were all off by a million miles. So what happened?
Let’s be fair here. A lot of these experts have a history of making correctly or nearly correct predictions in previous elections, and they didn’t suddenly become morons. They didn’t wake up one day last month and no longer remember how to do their jobs. But the ground did shift beneath the experts’ feet, and to varying degrees they were unable to see it or unwilling to acknowledge it.
For instance, the Roe decision clearly motivated a large number of people to vote who wouldn’t normally vote. Pollsters have a notoriously difficult time trying to figure out how to accurately sample demographics of voters who don’t usually vote but have suddenly been motivated to vote. There’s no 2018 or 2020 voting data to work with when it comes to trying to identify and survey these segments of potential voters, and so they typically end up severely under-represented in the polls.
Of course even in light of this phenomenon, the Democrats’ House and Senate poll numbers did rise across the board from May through September. But then a few weeks ago the Republicans started commissioning laughable polls that showed them having supposedly already locked up the midterms. And even though the media and polling analysts were split on whether to embrace or reject these commissioned polls, the mere existence of these “fake polls” seemed to goad the legitimate pollsters into shifting their methodologies, because the legitimate polls also started shifting toward the Republicans without any real world basis for having done so. And that in turn goaded the entire media and expert class into predicting a blowout loss for the Democrats.
These midterm results will force a reckoning across the board. Commissioned polls will obviously have to be discarded completely. The legitimate polls will need to seriously reevaluate their methodologies if they want to remain relevant. Polling analysts will need to rethink their entire approach. And the mainstream media – which eagerly got on board with the baseless narrative these final weeks that this was going to be a red wave – obviously needs to take a long shower and reevaluate its life choices.
