10 years after trump came down the escalator, have the democrats finally figured him out, by outstupiding him?

it's not even clear that it worked.

give it another few days before you draw conclusions.

when they called texas, very early, the bigoted right-wing conservative christian candidate for the democratic party was ahead by 20 points, on the strength of urban voters and early ballots. it was immediately very clear that the entire thing was manufactured to inflate the strength of the democratic showing and that not only was it obvious that the vote would come way down but it was not obvious that the democrats were going to win at all.

right now, at 2:00 am est, there's still 10% of the vote left and the spread has decreased from 20% to 9%. it's halved. they haven't counted things like military ballots.

i understand that the projections are supposed to be made on the strength of the characteristics of the remaining vote to be counted, but it was abundantly obvious that almost all of the remaining vote was in republican areas. with 11% left to count and a much reduced spread, that is still the case.

i have also watched the spread slowly decrease in kansas, south carolina and iowa, where the same dynamic is at play: the early votes put the democrats way ahead and the republicans have been slowly catching up all night but haven't caught up yet. they seem to have stopped counting for the night. maine and michigan have bounced around a little more. maine still has a lot of counting to do as well. the republicans caught up in nebraska and appear to have caught up in alaska.

the democrats clearly had a good night. the news reports in the liberal media and the aggregate sites all over-projected the democratic results, but the democrats did still have a good night.

i believe the decisions in texas, kansas, south carolina, maine and iowa were premature. the final result will be outside of the margin of error reported in the final polls (the results will be closer than predicted) because the polls overweighted the democrats, but the democrats did have a very good night and they may barely win a few of these seats when the counting is done.

i don't think that the democrats have flipped kansas, texas or south carolina and that the final results will reverse the decisions made by the liberal media projections. they may have actually flipped maine and iowa, but there's still a lot of counting to do and, even if they did, the calls were still premature. the results are going to continue to tighten dramatically in all of these races. the media should have waited.

the candidates elected by the democrats are broadly terrible candidates - bigoted christians, uneducated loggers, transphobes and muslim extremists. this is nothing for anybody to be proud of. democrats should be embarrassed by the low quality of their candidates and americans should be embarrassed that the only strategy that democrats have found to compete against the republicans in most of the country is to outstupid them on the ground.