turnout for the midterms is normally low but it was down 20%. it was about 63%. it was due to massive republican abstention. that's what the difference was in texas and kansas and other places - republicans just didn't vote. that's not what the models said, and it's not what the polling said, and it's not what the arts majors or the journalists said.
the polling oversampled democrats and then didn't correct it, but fed it into bad models to get the wrong prediction of a shift to the democrats. the media and the arts majors suggested a mass uprising against the president that the data didn't support and that didn't happen. the polling did project higher democratic enthusiasm - high democratic turnout - but it didn't pick up low republican turnout. those aren't the same thing, but the mistake in oversampling democrats balanced out with the polling miss in not measuring low republican enthusiasm, and they accidentally got the right result.
it's frustrating to correctly analyze and correctly adjust the modelling errors, only for the models to accidentally get the right outcome because there actually was a polling mistake, in not picking up low enthusiasm in republican voters.
you could argue that's the difference between the "likely voter" and "registered voter" categories, but that didn't get it right either. this correctly picked up and in fact largely overshot democratic turnout (because it doubled up on it. the lv adjustment was accurate and correct. but they put the lv adjustment on top of the oversampling. if they had adjusted for oversampling before applying the lv, they would have had closer results), but they still missed the low turnout amongst republicans. high enthusiasm amongst democrats is not the same thing as low enthusiasm amongst republicans. they picked up the former but not the latter. excited democrats on their own can't swing kansas or texas. you also need cynical republicans on top of excited democrats, and the polling just didn't catch that.
in fact, this is extremely unusual and not obviously predictable. democratic enthusiasm waxes and wanes. republican enthusiasm has been unbreakable since roe v wade. and maybe that's actually it.
if the polling had picked up low enthusiasm in republicans in addition to high enthusiasm in democrats (who are not left-wing. stop saying that.), the results would have still had the oversampling of democrats, but the data would have presented a better explanation for it. the overshoot would have been less and the modelling would have been better, although it would still be making the foundational ideological mistakes i've been pointing out for years. further, if i had caught it, i would have argued that the results were a little less unlikely, given that republicans are telling us they aren't going to show up.
i hold to my analysis that the likelihood of the outcome was so unlikely as to be negligible. a correct prediction of the outcome given the data was that it was essentially impossible for the democrats to flip more than two seats. the modelling projections were based on terrible mathematical assumptions and brutally bad data, and should have been nowhere close to correct. but, the extremely unlikely outcome actually happened, because the whole system missed an actual polling error, which actually decided the outcome.
people get hit by lightning from time to time. it does happen.
but it would have been more expected if the polling had picked up the extremely unusual and not very predictable republican cynicism on top of the more predictable democratic enthusiasm, and it didn't. there was no indication that republican turnout was going to crater like that, and it was neither fed into the modelling nor into my criticism of it.
everybody actually missed the factor that decided the election and that actually allowed for the outcome, which was not general election polling, but low turnout amongst republicans, in key states. there was actually a clear polling miss, which is unusual - the polling doesn't generally have errors like this. the modelling was consequently wrong in projecting a swing to the democrats, which didn't happen. and the arts majors and journalists were wrong in projecting a political uprising, which also didn't happen. what actually happened was a cynical withdrawal amongst republicans, not an enthusiastic swing. nobody picked that up. nobody predicted it. nobody was actually right in their projection.
i also missed that because the polling missed it and my projection was off because there was a polling error that threw it off. everybody else accidentally got the result right because the polling error cancelled out the modelling or political science mistakes they made.
chance works that way.
the lesson for me is something i already knew: don't think you can outsmart the universe. there's always some factor you might miss. but republican abstention is really pretty obscure and not something that's very predictable. if this becomes a trend, that is truly a shift, but not the one being reported.
have republicans lost their argument, by getting it done on abortion? has reaganism finally ultimately run it's course?
everything makes sense in hindsight, but i didn't see that coming and i don't think anybody else did either.