This Nov. 4 New Yorker story re the upcoming election "bloodbath" of Democrats is FUN to read today.

[pnwmom]

They got so much wrong -- or at least, the reporter did.

The GOP "insiders" and pollsters talking to the reporters might have been engaged in gaslighting -- which is something to remember next time we're hearing demoralizing predictions of a rout.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-political-scene/why-republican-insiders-think-the-gop-is-poised-for-a-blowout

Why Republican Insiders Think the G.O.P. Is Poised for a Blowout

The consensus among pollsters and consultants is this Tuesday’s election will be a “bloodbath” for the Democratic Party.

"On Wednesday afternoon, I spoke with a leading Republican political consultant about the Senate campaign in Georgia. That race is strategically significant for both parties, but it has a special symbolic importance for Democrats. The incumbent, Raphael Warnock, who for many years has occupied Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church, in Atlanta, is seen as a potential national leader of the Democratic Party—and he may still lose to a scandal-ridden ex-football star, the Republican Herschel Walker. The Republican consultant told me that Warnock’s prospects were even bleaker than many recent public polls suggest. “There isn’t a single private poll in America that has Herschel Walker anything but ahead,” the Republican consultant told me. “Not one.”

"The consensus among a number of G.O.P. pollsters and operatives I spoke to this week is that in the Senate races that are thought to be competitive, Republican candidates are heading for a clean sweep: Mehmet Oz will beat John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, and not just by a point or two; Adam Laxalt looks pretty certain to defeat the incumbent Democratic senator Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada; even less regarded candidates such as Blake Masters in Arizona will be carried into office by a predicted wave. “He won’t deserve it, but I think at this point he falls into a Senate seat,” one Republican strategist told me. To these Republican insiders, certain high-profile races in which G.O.P. candidates were already favored now look like potential blowouts—Kari Lake’s campaign for governor in Arizona, J. D. Vance’s for Senate in Ohio. And some races that seemed out of reach, such as the Senate campaign, in New Hampshire, of the election denier Don Bolduc, now look like possible wins. The word that kept coming up in these conversations was “bloodbath.”


"My interest in talking with Republican consultants and pollsters, those with their hands in many races around the country, was not only to collect predictions but to hear the G.O.P.’s story of the election. (I let them speak anonymously, and spoke with some of their Democratic peers, too, in order to provide a check on their accounts.) I wanted to know what they thought earlier polls had missed, and how a race that had seemed like a tossup for much of the year could turn into a Republican rout."

[pwb]

1. This dude shouldn't write ever again.

Did he like Santos too?

[Cha]

5. Benjamin Wallace-Wells is his name

[DENVERPOPS]

11. He obviously drank the Kool-aide

and sold out. His credentials as a journalist, or even as a legitimate writer should be obliterated.
If New Yorker, New York Times, even WaPo on occasion keeps allowing these crackpots to be published on their magazines and papers they are destined to lose countless subscribers and will be reduced to street corner free tabloids, and super market check out racks.....

Hey Republican owned mass media in the United States, (80+% owned by rich Republicans) you better hope to be followed by the 70 million Trump Humping Republicans because you have lost the even larger %age of other voters......

[Alexander Of Assyria]

2. Every alternate reality needs alternate pollsters. We know who they are, the public doesn't.

All anonymous? Why? Anonymous eggs on their faces!

Follow up interviews, just for the fun!?

[rpannier]

3. I read the article and it was another lazy, drivel, poor neglected Republikkan whine piece

"My interest in talking with Republican consultants and pollsters, those with their hands in many races around the country, was not only to collect predictions but to hear the G.O.P.’s story of the election."

Every election we get these pieces where some insipid... intrepid reporter goes to ask the poor, ignored Republicans what they think of the election. There are usually 4 to 5 of these lame articles by someone who claims they are stepping out of the "bubble" and doing what no one else is doing

[pnwmom]

4. This election had more of them than usual. And 538 was calling the election

for the GOP, for both the House and the Senate, because of pollsters and consultants like this.

[Farmer-Rick]

8. I agree. It was as if they were all blind

About 3 or 4 of those polls had such huge margins of error that I was amazed 538 was using them. In the past he refused to even include really bad polls except as footnotes. I don't know why he used the obviously bad polls in his calculations but it didn't help his accuracy any.

And those really bad polls were splashed all over the corporate media and of course right wing media was blasting them through out the world.

It was as if they did not see how badly the polls were designed. The polls conclusions were forced and not supported by the data they collected. That's why their margins of error were so huge.

And I am an armature. The glaring problems with the polls should have been caught by the so called experts....but they weren't. It's as if they had all agreed to pretend the polls were good because we are too stupid to know the difference.

[pnwmom]

14. I hope 538 rethinks this before the next election comes along. nt

[SWBTATTReg]

6. Seems like some 'pollsters' aren't truly polling but expressing their own desires in poll results.

In short, they brainwashed themselves to believe what they wanted to believe would happen. Especially when the old saying that an odd election cycle is usually a blowout against the party that won the presidential election prior before.

Thus republicans fell for their own pumped up 'good' news that republicans would sweep the board clean during these last midterm elections.

Didn't happen and why? I suspect that the one common denominator was djt, the toxic as poison gas candidate who won't shut the hell up. Other reasons relate to the other republican candidates being not wholly good candidates (and democrats had good decent candidates in the meantime).

I suspect a lot of anger is still out there among democrats who were bound and determined to cause the republicans to incur some losses at the ballot box too, basically were getting sick and tired of the constant put downs of democrats by republicans (I too, get sick and tired of this).

[erronis]

13. Yup - pollsters injecting their personal leanings. Just wait for the AI bots to take over.

Now, who programs those bots???

[Indykatie]

7. This Article is "Why Republican Insiders/Pollsters Think the G.O.P. Is Poised for a Blowout"

So of course they expected a red wave so massive that even crappy candidates like Masters and Walker would be carried to victory. In their defense all the GOP pollsters told them this would happen.

[phoenix75]

9. As Yogi Berra said: "It ain't over till it's over"

[Lonestarblue]

10. I think I read somewhere that some Republican pollsters were deliberately slanting their polls

to discourage Democrats and keep them from voting. The bag of Republic misinformation and dirty tricks has no bottom.

[SouthernDem4ever]

12. As a Georgian, I am still embarrassed at all those who voted for walker

Sad! - as Dump used to say.

[Demovictory9]

15. The red tsunami!!

[packman]

16. Article is 2 months old - interesting in retrospect, I guess

[pnwmom]

17. The date is in the headline. So, yes, it was from 2 months ago. nt

[packman]

18. That's the problem when you post before drinking that 1st cup of coffee

Sorry -

[pnwmom]

19. LOL, have a nice day! nt

[prodigitalson]

20. Who is this man so wise in the ways of politics?