Barring something really surprising, Donald Trump has won the election. I'm dismayed by the outcome and sorry for giving my friends false hope. There will be time to analyze political implications of a Trump victory later. Since I've been posting about polling and election predictions lately, I'll stick to that now.
I bet everything on Ann Selzer's Harris +3 result in Iowa being highly informative about national trends. This completely failed. It's understandable that she didn't predict the strong Hispanic swing towards Trump, since Iowa has a fairly small Hispanic population.
But I expected Selzer to at least be accurate about people in Iowa. With almost 95% reporting, Harris is down 14 in Iowa. That Selzer would miss by 17 in Iowa is the biggest surprise of the election to me, as she had done so well in previous elections. I was using her Iowa result to predict the rest of the country, and it was in the wrong direction about Iowa! Maybe she'll have some kind of explanation. I have no idea how this happened.
Perhaps the most important thing to understand that I don't understand how low-response-rate poll aggregation works. Somehow, it seems to work pretty well. Maybe the types of modeling errors I forecast this year will come to pass sometime in the future, but it's so far so good for the aggregators.
That people would vote for Donald Trump doesn't surprise me that much – I've seen it before. But that people would vote solidly against Trump's endorsees Herschel Walker in GA and Dr. Oz in PA in 2022, and then vote for Trump himself over Harris in 2024 is a bit unexpected. I suppose people are more into the boss than the minions? There also seems to be a fair amount of ticket-splitting where people voted for Trump and a Democratic Senate or Governor candidate. I thought they'd do it the other way around, but this is what we're seeing.
Somehow, we may take the House. How we might be doing that while losing everywhere else is among the many things I don't understand here – obviously there were some redistricting-related court cases that helped, but the bad news elsewhere seems overwhelming enough that winning a chamber is very surprising. That will be important for policy and worth watching.
Overall, though, I'm just astonished. Betting on Selzer is the sort of thing I usually do and it usually works – finding something deep in the weeds of politics that has an excellent track record and relying on it. But there's no guarantee that what worked before will work again, and here it spectacularly failed.
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