Quote (thundercock @ 15 Nov 2020 04:24)
It might not even be that. I think we calibrated to "Democrat landslide" too much and that ruined our expectations. The Democrats who lost in the House were in Republican leaning districts. If anything, this is just a reversion to the mean I think.
They didnt just underperform in the House, where there were a lot of low hanging fruit for the GOP to pick up. They also underperformend in virtually every competitive Senate race, they underperformed in virtually all state legislatures.
And yes, they underperformed in the presidential race. Just to put this presidential race into perspective:
According to liberals, Trump is the most corrupt and incompetent incumbent ever, whose cruelty, ineptitude and sociopathy was on display every single day. They ran against him during the worst public health crisis in a century; during the worst economic recession in 90 years. According to them, his carelessness and ignorance are responsible for more dead Americans than the Civil War, the first World War, Vietnam, Iraq and 9/11 together. He ran for reelection amid the backdrop of Democrats outspending him by at least two to one; amid the backdrop of a concerted, 24/7/365/4 propaganda effort by the media, Big Tech and virtually every cultural and intellectual institution in the country to sway the election and sink him. Since the immediate aftermath of his inauguration four years ago, his approval ratings never exceeded 46% again; he never got closer to Biden in the polling averages than 5 percentage points.
The deck was historically stacked against Trump to begin with. And on top of that, he constantly shot himself in the foot to add insult to injury. And yet the Democrats still got awfully close to losing to this guy
yet again, they only eked out the wins in the decivisve states by some 47k votes, or margins of 0.6% and less.