What Would We Do Without Experts?

Political consultant and data scientist David Shor is the founder of a Democratic data firm (Blue Rose Research). Shor often is considered to be among the sharpest analysts around.

Recently Mr. Shor spoke with Eric Levitz at New York Magazine, where Shor voices his takeaways from this year’s mid-term elections:

The No. 1 most salient fact about this election is that Republican turnout was very strong relative to Democratic turnout.

Back of the envelope, it looks like the electorate was about 2 percent more Republican than it was in 2020.

Republicans literally outnumbered Democrats, according to the AP’s VoteCast. And yet Democrats still won.

Why Did Democrats Win?

For a few reasons. continues Mr. Shor:

• First, Democrats won independent voters, which may be the first time that a party that controlled the presidency has won independents in a midterm since 2002.
• Second, they got a lot of self-identified Republicans to vote for them. And third, they did those things especially well in close races.

The party’s overall share of the national vote is actually going to look fairly bad. It looks like we got roughly 48 percent of the vote. But that’s because Democratic incumbents in safe seats did much worse than those in close races.

The Breakthrough President?

Donald Trump was a breakthrough figure. He changed the party in some healthy ways, but, unfortunately for his base, the former president got lost in obsessions and bitterness, in petty feuds, Peggy Noonan writes in the WSJ.

Trump’s “All About Me-ness” came at the expense of policy and party.

The GOP’s mid-term unsuccess story has a silver lining – a gift, if you will, to Republicans. Ms. Noonan reminds readers: “Every victory carries within it the seeds of defeat, every defeat the seeds of victory.”

If Republicans had just won, they never would have learned a thing.

Andrew McCarthy agrees in NRO, “last night’s crushing disappointment probably had to happen before we could get out of it.”