People will bring their priors to the election analysis. Trump was vindicated. Trump has ruined us. It was the turnout. It was the media. The results looks suspicious in places. (Note: the results always look suspicious in places.) This is great news for 2024. This is terrible news for 2024. Michael Kennedy over at Chicago Boyz likes the Powerline analysis, and I agree it's not bad. But I'm not ready to accept that yet.
I am not good at this stuff to begin with, so this is easy for me to say, but I think it is good advice anyway: If your current conclusions are exactly like what you thought would happen going in, then you haven't learned anything. It's best to wait and see what emerges. I love numbers, but they are not yet ready to behave, so be careful around them.
My priors were that
ReplyDelete1) Most states had gotten their acts together, with some recalcitrant pockets of corruption (PA, for example). Even in WI, we had gotten rid of those drop boxes, though we still have lots of mail-in ballots.
2) Ballot harvesting was going to be pressed to the limits of legality and maybe beyond
3) There's lots of wishful thinking going on.
The data on hand was a bunch of polls of uncertain accuracy and life in Dane -Democrats-seem-kind-of-right-wing-and-don't-even-mention-Republicans County.
I didn't care to try to make projections.