There Was Never a Blue Wave Coming
The recriminations and finger-pointing are premature
So much for a “blue wave.” While Joe Biden is still favored to become the next president of the United States, the remarkable pre-election polling errors reached a magnitude not seen since the Chicago Tribune’s infamous “Dewey Beats Truman” headline and left Democrats feeling uneasy on Wednesday.
As the country waits for ballots to be counted in the Rust Belt states of Michigan and Pennsylvania, Democrats reckoned with the fact that they lost House seats and appear to have fallen short of a Senate majority. After all that buildup, Tuesday was not a stinging rebuke of Donald Trump.
Democrats will now become the first political party to commence a circular firing squad after winning a popular vote majority.
But such finger-pointing is still premature, because we just don’t yet have a clear enough picture of what happened. Yes, Democrats scaled back their door-to-door efforts in the midst of the pandemic and relied on phone calls and text messages to get out the vote, while Republicans operated a more traditional outreach machine. Yet the election saw historic turnout, and there doesn’t seem to be evidence that Democrats just didn’t show up at the polls.
