Almost Every Day Since Election Day Has Brought Democrats a New Reason to Celebrate

[workinclasszero]

By JOSH VOORHEES NOV 13, 2018

For a few hours on election night, it appeared as though the midterms had turned disastrous for Democrats: The early returns suggested the party’s long-assumed House takeover might not happen after all, and that their performance in Senate races could turn out to be so bad that it would put the upper chamber out of reach not just for the next two years, but for the next four.

The Democrats’ midterm performance, though, has looked better with each passing day—and with a few more, may look even better still. As of last Wednesday morning, Democrats had picked up 26 seats in the House; as of this Tuesday, they’d extended their gains to 32 seats. Another 10 GOP battleground races remain too close to call, including four in which the Democrat is in the lead and a fifth, in Maine, where the state’s new ranked-voting system is expected to turn the district from red to blue.

With Kyrsten Sinema’s win in Arizona on Monday, Senate Democrats have now limited their net loss in the upper chamber to a maximum of just two seats. They could yet whittle that down to a single lost seat or even break even in the unlikely scenario that the Florida recount goes Sen. Bill Nelson’s way and/or Democrat Mike Espy manages to pull off a stunner in the Mississippi runoff later this month. But even a two-seat loss is incredible when you consider just how horrible the Senate calendar was for Democrats, who had to defend a total of 10 seats in states Trump won, four of which he did so by landslides of 18 percentage points or more.

Add that to their gains at the state level, where they flipped seven governor’s seats to winnow Republicans’ advantage in the gubernatorial department to only 27–23—the smallest margin since after the 2010 midterms—and there’s no disputing Democrats had a great night.

One major reason the early narrative missed the mark, though, was because real-time coverage of Election Day returns largely failed to account for Democrats’ advantage out West, as Vox’s Matthew Yglesias notes. Forecast models like FiveThirtyEight’s overreacted to some early House returns, and then the chattering class freaked out as a few key battleground Senate races—Tennessee and Indiana among them—turned red faster than most had expected.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/11/democrats-house-senate-better.html

[mercuryblues]

1. On election night

I did not turn on the news channels until after 7PM. Only to hear Carville say the blue wave isn't happening. WTF? People were still voting and there he was predicting doom and gloom. That set the course for the next few hours, despite what was happening. As the totals came in, republicans were going down across the country and still it was said, no blue wave. The media held onto that until, well they couldn't deny it anymore. It was days before they even broached the subject of easy seats for republicans to win were flipped or still too close to call.

[workinclasszero]

2. Yup all the talking heads were doom and gloom on the dems

NO BLUE WAVE was the message.

You just cannot trust the media anymore. They are corporate/GOP homers!

They are bought and paid for. How James Carville fell into their GOP narrative, I do not know but he was very disappointing to say the least.