How is anyone surprised?

The writing was on the wall for Trump’s landslide victory in the 2024 election well before Tuesday night, how is it then, so many people wound up surprised? How could so many people wind up shocked when the most likely outcome, and what had been the most likely outcome for the entire election cycle, came to pass on Tuesday?

How could so many people, honestly believe that Harris, or any democrat, had any prayer at victory in the 2024 election? The indicators were all against the democrats this cycle from the beginning. The Biden/Harris administration has been, by any objective measure an utter and complete failure almost from day one.

Historical Data Patterns

Joe Biden’s approval rating went under 50% on August 10th, 2021, and went officially underwater by September 3rd, and never recovered. For last next 3+ years Biden’s approval rating has been underwater, and hasn’t been above the low 40s, since October 1, 2021. Since then he has been stuck in the high 30s to low 40s range. The entire election year of 2024, Biden’s approval rating has only been above 40% about 30 or so days total.

Nearly 75% of the county believes the country is on the wrong track, and this has pretty much been the case this entire election year, in fact the lowest the “wrong track” numbers have been this entire election year has been 69.5%. The number of days the Right Track polling has been above 30% all year would not even require 2 hands to count. No incumbent party has ever won the White House with that low of a percentage of the electorate believing the country is on the right track, ever.

The economy has been an abject failure. 40 year high inflation, that this administration tried to ignore and arrogantly dismiss as “transitory” for more than a year, continues to wreck families finances and security. Unemployment numbers and Jobs are abysmal, and this Administration flat out lied all year, claiming nearly 1 Million jobs had been created which turned out to be completely made up and never existed. Days before the election the October Jobs report came out showing a paltry 12,000 jobs had been created that month, and if history of the Biden/Harris stewardship of our economy is any indication, those numbers will most likely be adjusted downward, like nearly every jobs report this year. Economic numbers like this never favor the incumbent party.

With those fundamentals alone, there was no reasonable way to expect that the party currently sitting in the White House would have any realistic chance of securing a White House victory. Anyone, and I do mean anyone doing honest analysis should and would have known, that the path to 270, did not exist for any democrat this cycle, and that fact was obvious from January of this year. No incumbent party has ever won the White House against fundamental data points like these. In fact with fundamentals as bad as these, it was all but a certainty that the Republican’s would not only take back the White House, but would do so in major way.

Looking at the Senate map, it too should have been obvious to anyone doing honest analysis, that the GOP would take back the Senate. You didn’t even need to look at those atrocious fundamentals listed above to see that the Democrats had next to no chance of holding their Senate majority. Democrats were defending more senate seats and many of them in places Trump had performed very well in the past, and a realistic analysis of the map showed there was not a single GOP Senate seat up that was in any realistic danger of flipping, as much as the Democrats talk about turning TX blue and dreaming of beating Cruz, this was never ever a realistic possibility. Manchin’s retirement in WV, assured that seat was going to flip. Tester in Montana was almost a near certainty of loss. So, without even taking the fundamentals listed in the paragraphs above into account, the GOP were all but guaranteed a 51 seat majority in the Senate. Add the fundamentals mentioned above, and the odds the GOP would gain even more seats was certainly at least a 50/50 shot if not more.

Looking at the House of Representatives, given that the odds were that the GOP would win the White House and win the popular vote, odds were always in favor that the GOP would not only hold the house but gain seats. I don’t know why the media punditry plays these stupid games every election cycle around who will win the house, particularly in a presidential election year. I’ll let you all in on a little, not so secret, secret that the media punditry either don’t know, and if they don’t they are just stupid, or intentionally keep from you in order to keep you in suspense, and tuning in. In a presidential election year, the party that wins the national popular vote for President, gains seats in the house around 90% of the time. I wrote an entire article about this simple observable fact which can be found here: ( https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19TR9ogpBw/ ). Now it is possible that this cycle could be one of those 10% exception years, but odds were always in favor of the GOP not only holding the house, but gaining seats this election.

So against this backdrop, where every major historical indicator is pointing to a Democrat loss, and anything but a “tight” race, how did so many people come to believe that this race was tight, let alone that the Democrats were going to win? How could any honest analyst, who had even the most basic understanding of national electoral politics believe in any way that the Democrats had anything other than a Hail Mary chance at any sort of electoral victory in 2024?

Then, you add in the fact the Democrat party, shoe horned in a candidate who had never faced the national electorate or received a single vote in any national election, not even a primary for her party, with only 100 days left in the election cycle, you would have to be absolutely bat shit crazy to believe that the Democrat party even had a Hail Mary left of reaching 270.

Yet, pundit after pundit, analyst after analyst, stood up every single day, and told anyone and everyone who could listen fairy tales about this is a tight election, a.divided electorate, its going to come down to the wire. Some even going so far as claim Harris had the momentum going into election day, and will win handily. When in fact, this was simply pixie dust and unicorn farts. Yet they did it, day in and day out for months.

How? how could anyone with a functioning frontal lobe, and access to all the historical trends and data around US presidential elections and politics, ever stand up and claim Biden or Harris ever had a prayer? Let alone, how could so many average Americans buy into the pixie dust and unicorn farts being blown up their asses? How could so many Americans have their legs collectively be pissed on, and believe its a warm summer rain?

The only ways you could remotely believe that the historical fundamentals were irrelevant, would be, either:

A) you were unaware of them, and this may be possible for many average Americans who don’t pay that close attention to politics, but zone in every 2-4 years for a brief few moments, cast their vote, and then go about their lives. The only information they are going to have to make their opinions and decisions based on are those that they are fed though their limited interactions with the media, and by and large the media did not report these fundamental relationships, choosing to ignore them. Though some did do so, usually it would be a casual mention here or there, and if you weren’t tuned in when that moment or two of information was offered, you would have had no idea about these data points and their correlation to historical outcomes. Believe me, if the news media gave just 1/1000th of the time stating during every discussion of the election that the odds an incumbent party with a right rack number of 30 or below had never won re-election, that they gave to making sure you knew Donald Trump has been indicted on 984,413 and 1/3 felony charges, every time they talked about the election this cycle, the average American would have known this and most would have realized they were being played, when they were told time and time again the election was close or Biden/Harris was winning.

or B)

You knew about these data points and understood there relationship with historical outcomes and believed some special never before seen influence would override these data points and the election would not follow norms because of the influence of this mystical and mysterious political “dark matter” if you will.

If you are a professional analysis, you have absolutely no reason other than pure laziness to fall into the A camp, and sadly I am sure there were a few that fell into the A camp among the professional set. The overwhelming majority however, likely fell into the B camp. They believed, that Trump himself was an exception that would prevent the historical norms from applying, believing Trump to be so divisive and toxic or whatever adjective you would like, that this more than countered the historical data points and their influence.

Options A and B fall into the realm of describing an honest player, if you are an honest player, and truly doing your best to provide what you believe to be accurate information then A and B are the only options. Unfortunately, we live in the real world, and sadly not everyone is an honest player in the game. There is a 3rd option, this being the dishonest player option, these folks knew about these data points, knew what they portend, and decided to just flat out lie about or ignore them in hopes that they could influence the election by feeding the public lies. Unfortunately, a large amount of the media punditry falls into this 3rd category. Flat out, they have absolutely no ethical pause to lie cheat or steal if it can in any way help prevent the election of someone they do not like or want to win.

Now my desire to believe in the better angles of man would love to say we got to so many people being shocked because so many people in the media and analysts fell into category B, that they knew the fundaments and what it portended, but decided Trump has such negatives that it would override them, and were engaging in honest agency. However, if I were to tell you that, I would be dishonest myself. I do not believe that, not for one, single, solitary second. If you were an honest agent, and did fall into the B camp, when you offered up your perspective and analysis you would absolutely point out the historical indicators and state that you believe in spite of them Trump will lose because his negatives will override those established patterns.

But that is not what happened in this cycle, not anywhere. I am sure there was likely an honest agent or two out there in all the media who fell into camp B and did indeed say, yes patterns and history say this, but I believe Trump’s unique negatives will outweigh these. They unfortunately were in the minority, most analysts and pundits just threw these historical fundamentals out the window and flat out pretended they did not exist. They never once took them into account when presenting information to the public.

So as idiotic pundit after idiotic pundit showed up claiming Biden/Harris was winning or it was tied or close, or whatever they never once challenged them on historical patterns or context, and just let them feed that garbage to their audience.

Polling

Now, lets look beyond fundamentals, and actually look at the polling over this race, and how it was reported. Looking purely at polling, and once again historical patterns, at no point, in any of the public polling was Biden/Harris ever in a position where an honest assessment placed them in the lead. The generally accepted consensus is that for a Democrat to win the White House, they would need to have at a minimum a 3-4 point lead in the national polling to have an honest shot at winning the electoral college.

At no point ever did Biden or Harris meet let alone beat this threshold in the Real Clear Polling averages in all of 2024. In fact the polling on January 1, 2024 RCP head to head polling average had Trump up 2.2% on Biden. Harris, once she replaced Biden, NEVER ever reached this threshold, the closest she ever got was a 2.2 lead for a few days in late September and another day or 2 in early October.

Now the media for the most part, was more openly honest at conveying that this 3-4 point threshold was the accepted norm needed for Biden/Harris to have a chance. They did mention this fact far more often than they did the historical data points we discussed before. However, they still treated and presented this race as if it were close, and allowed many pundits to make such claims without challenge. So much so, that election night they all treated this as though it was a razor thin race, and that it really could go either way. They took poll after poll showing a tight race, and generally portrayed it as a tight race, even though they knew very well that Biden/Harris up by anything less than 3, was almost certainly a loss for them, and that was without taking into account the misses of polling in both 2016 and especially 2020. To be fair they did not completely ignore them they would occasionally mention that polling had missed big in 16 and huge in 20 and once in a while play a “what if” and show what the results would be if the current polling was off as bad as it was in 16 or 20. However, they still were not fully honest with their audiences, continuing to generally portray this as a tight race.

Moving over the actual battle ground states, here too Biden/Harris never had shown themselves in the polling to EVER be in a position that they could win this entire year. For about 3.5 weeks, from August 27th to September 20th Harris did have the lead in the Top Battleground Average on RCP. Yet never held the lead in the individual state polling that would have allowed her an Electoral College victory, and that was if you took the polling at face value. Most state polling in both 2020 and 2016 had understated Trump as well.

While one could make an argument that a tight race might be possible at the national level, it would be a stretch. The polling misses in 2020 and 2016 should have given anyone pause to believe the 2024 polling showing an incredibly tight race.

Now, it is true that polls can be wrong, and yes, nothing matters except the vote counts at the end of the night. However, when the Biden/Harris campaign has never reached the minimal historical thresholds in polling, and is losing this historical fundamentals, to believe or act as thought its a statistical dead heat requires, to quote Hillary Clinton, “the willful suspension of disbelief”.

On this particular topic, I do give the media. little more credit. While they did a better job of presenting larger context on polling data, they still far too often acted and behaved as though the polls were indicating something that critical analysis should have told them was not likely true, especially when taking the historical data patterns into account.

The most egregious example of the media just flat out LYING around polling had to be the Des Moine Register/Mediacom Iowa poll released on November 2. This Poll could not pass the most fundamental smell tests of being remotely accurate, and should have literally been laughed at, but instead nearly every media outlet ran with this garbage poll as a lead story that day, and fully swallowed the left wing punditry propaganda claiming it showed that Harris was winning. This Poll, was abject garbage, and any credible news organization should have seen it for what it was, an attempt to steal a news cycle and influence the election. To add insult to injury on this, when the woman behind the poll was interviewed to discuss the details of the poll, she had to ask what the R and the D stood for in the cross tabs. This poll was absolutely garbage, it showed 47/44 Harris in IA with 9 points undecided… and entire news cycle was wasted with this propaganda claiming huge female voting shifts particularly by older women to Harris. This poll was just as much garbage as the October 13, 2016 Bloomberg poll that showed Hillary winning PA by 9. No the media didn’t “LIE” per say in reporting these polls existed, because obvious did, but they absolutely lied to their viewers and readers by presenting them as if they were credible. They were not. Anyone doing even the most basic analysis could tell you that the IA poll was propaganda, No poll showing up 3 days before presidential election is going to show 9 points undecided, and be remotely credible. At the time of this polls release IA polling except this one generally had Trump up 7-8 points on average, and for the record Trump won IA by more than 13 points.

Voter Registration

Republicans have been steadily increasing their voter registration numbers across the country, and in particular in the swing states. Probably one of the more extreme examples of this has to be Pennsylvania. Not that long ago Democrats had more than a 1 Million voter registration advantage in the Keystone State. This year, this registration advantage was down to less than 300,000. What had not all that long ago been a voter registration make up statewide of 39R, 46 D and 15I, was this election 40R, 44D 16I.. While it is true that Democrats continue to register new voters as well, Republicans are consistently registering more voters that democrats. The effort to register Republican voters has been focused, concerted and ongoing, and has bore a LOT of fruit.

This fact wasn’t completely ignored in media analysis, but I don’t think its impact was fully conveyed. PA for example, under the old registration numbers of 39 R, 46D and 15I, to win statewide as a republican meant you needed to win all the Republicans and either win Indpendents more than 2/3 or win the independents by a good margin and peel off a lot of conservative Democrats. Something Trump was able to do in 16, but wasn’t able to quite do enough of in 2020. PA was nearly an automatic win for a Democrat statewide under the old registration model, as long as Democrats showed up to vote. While a 10% registration advantage is still significant, its a far cry from where it once was.

These registration shifts, further moved the scale toward Republicans, this cycle. By itself this doesn’t ensured a Trump win, but when combined with the the polling data and the historical patterns it was just another nail in the coffin, and the narrative that this election would be very close, let alone that Biden/Harris could win it becomes even more of a pipe dream.

Early Voting

Early Voting was yet another nail in the coffin for the Democrats. In the states that tracked early voting by party, Republicans were consistently overperforming in early/mail in voting across all the swing states. The margins that democrats generally came to the table with on election day were not going to be there for them this year. In some states the Republicans were flat out winning the early voting. This should have alarm bells for every analyst, on the planet. Even if you ignored every other item in this article, this one should have made you stop in your tracks if you were willing to openly state this is going to be a close election or that democrats were going to win it. Especially since so many of them absolutely missed this key data point in the 2016 election, particularly in FL. The MSM blew 2016 horrifically bad because they just didn’t bother to look at the early voting returns. To those that did it was obvious before the first votes were cast on election day 2016 that Trump almost certainly was going to win FL, but the majority of the media analysts and punditry had never bothered to look to see just how reduced the democrat early vote margin had shrunk in 2016, and entered election day honestly believing that while FL was a battleground, Hillary was going to likely win it safely.

The media did report on early voting, but depending on who you were watching, some of the reporting was incredibly dishonest. Some channels simply would state Democrats are up in early voting, which was true, but never bothered to report that their margins in the early voting and mail in returns was massively down from both 2020 and 2016. There was some reasonable questioning of whether the early republican vote was simply cannibalizing election day voting for them, so were those smaller margins really a concern for democrats, and I commend the news organizations that at least looked the margins… it turns out that the GOP did not cannibalize their election day voting at all with early voting, but it was a legitimate question to ask and reasonable logically to make.

Conclusions

Without even getting into who the candidates names were, the data points discussed here should have given any analyst worth their salt every reason to say outright, the Democrats chances of reaching 270 this cycle were next to none. While chances are never literally zero, this cycle for the democrats were as close as you were going to get.

It didn’t matter the candidates name, pedigree, bankroll (Harris had a $1 BILLION war chest, and it did her absolutely no good.) campaign strategy, messaging, none of that would have mattered. With that said could democrats have ran a better campaign? Certainly. Could they have had a better candidate? Certainly.. .but would it have changed the outcome in any meaningful way? Honestly, No. Might have changed a few things around the edges but in the macro, would the Democrats have wound up in any significantly different position today if they had done things differently? No, and honest analyst should have been telling the public this all along, and none of them, not a one of them did.

At the beginning of this year, I stated, the following. "Trump will win the White House, he will do so by most likely repeating the 2016 map and adding a state or two, possibly more, and don’t be surprised if he takes the popular vote as well. “ I didn’t state that because I’m a genius, or that I’ve got some magical mystical formula (Oh man did Lichtman make himself look the ass this cycle) I stated it because I understood the first thing discussed in this article. That one point alone, was all that was needed to understand that the outcome we just witnessed was the most likely outcome. Adding the other points in this article, as time passed through this year, there should not have been a single solitary honest analyst who ever presented the public with the notion that the Democrats had anything better than a Hail Mary to win the White House.

The honest High Point for the Democrats were those 3.5 weeks back in late august through September 20th, where it looked like there might be some hope for the possibility of moving to a slim electoral college win, that’s as close as this thing ever got, and honestly it was not that close.

To quote James Carville “It’s the economy stupid.” (Though the same James Carville made a complete ass out of himself this cycle, acting like the phrase that made him famous, no longer mattered)

Why is it, some schlub like me, can make such a statement in January of this year, yet for the paid punditry such a statement was never ever stated not once by any of them through out the election cycle?

There is absolutely no excuse that anyone should have been surprised by this, if they were following an honest news media. Unfortunately, we do not have this, particularly in broadcast news today.