John Fetterman ended up winning by a somewhat significant margin.

[Joe Cool]

John Fetterman won by over 250k votes and nearly 5% against Oz. All of those BS Republican leaning polls that showed a late Oz surge were worthless.
BTW I repeatedly posted on DU that Fetterman was going to win based on the eye test in western Pennsylvania.

[livetohike]

1. If there was a late surge, Oz must have been behind by nearly

15% like Mastriano 😀. So relieved our PA elections turned out as we hoped. Now if we can get rid of the Trump signs that would be great. Especially that shrine out on 422.

[jimfields33]

12. There was no way that Pennsylvanians was gonna pick somebody who is from New Jersey.

[SallyHemmings]

15. Exactly!!!

[gab13by13]

2. Joe Cool I did the same thing,

I posted a bet here and spotted anyone 4 points who wanted to bet against Fetterman. $100.00 per point for charity. No one wanted to bet me and this was when the bogus polls had the race even. I imagine if Fetterman had not had his stroke he would have won by Shapiro numbers, Fetterman, IMO, was probably more popular than Shapiro.

The primary was s set up also to bring Fetterman down and nominate a more moderate candidate. It turns out that Pa. Democrats can elect a progressive Senator, imagine that.

[Joe Cool]

8. Shapiro is the ideal candidate.

Fetterman not so much but he is a folk figure in a way that Shapiro isn’t. If the GOP ran a sane candidate Shapiro probably wins by a similar margin as Fetterman. No stroke, Fetterman wins by about 10%. No crazy, Shapiro wins in the 5% range.

[Cosmocat]

13. That is my sense, too

Though Shapiro is pdg in his own right.

But, not only was Mastiano so nuts that a sizeable amount of Rs bailed on him, he never even tried a state wide campaign and didn't raise or spend any money.

Oz was a hapless dolt, but did campaign, and he and the R senate campaign threw a shit ton of $ into the race.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

3. "eye test"?

[BumRushDaShow]

5. A pile of OPs about lawn signs

[Joe Cool]

9. Yard signs

There were more Democratic yard signs in heavily Republican areas of western PA than I have ever seen in my life.

[gab13by13]

11. Same here,

I saw yard signs for Democrats where I never saw them before.

It turns out that yard signs were a better indicator than the fake polls. They were fake, proven to be.

I do believe in exit polling, they showed that Trump is way less popular than the fake polls were showing.

[NanceGreggs]

4. That might be because ...

... John Fetterman is a more-than-somewhat significant man.

[Roy Rolling]

6. One of a Kind

It’s hard for some to understand the effect of a unique soul like Fetterman. His uniqueness is hard to categorize because they have nothing to compare him with.

[Skittles]

18. I think he is so freaking cool

LOVE him

[Joe Cool]

10. Fetterman is a sort of folk figure in PA.

No stroke and Fetterman wins by at least 10%.

[hlthe2b]

7. A very happy outcome from this Senate race. Now let's do Warnock!

[BumRushDaShow]

14. The type of crap that 538 did with Fetterman/Oz

was in the same vein with what Gallup did with Obama/Romney.



The ACTUAL vote % difference was 51% Obama to 47% Romney.


The difference is that Gallup admitted its mistake, did an analysis/mea culpa about the problems of who they considered "likely voters", ended up with USA Today severing their partnership with them, and they ceased doing their "trial heat" Presidential Polls.

[Joe Cool]

21. An interesting thing about Romney

Out of the last four Presidential elections, he is the only Republican candidate to have over 47% (47.2 to be exact) of the popular vote. McCain and Trump (2X) never broke 47%.

[Farmer-Rick]

23. Wow, the media really does hate liberals

Capitalism and democracy are not easily compatible.

Buy up the media and you have control of most of the public opinions.

[BumRushDaShow]

27. If you look at the analysis

of 2012 and Gallup by several media outlets, they seem to focus on what might be part of the skew and that is the "likely voters", but with them usually continually associating the GOP voter as being "more enthusiastic" and thus they dismiss Democrats as being so, in one case mentioned, where apparently Democrats were answering poll questions about (paraphrase) "how much they paid attention to the election" and if they answered in the "wrong way" ("not really paying attention" ), they basically got demerits, and weren't really being considered as a "likely voter".

This assumption is idiotic because the average person is NOT a news/political junky and following polls and candidates fervently. You have millions who "do their duty" of voting as a habit. They don't get overly dramatic or theatric about it. They just do it. And many of those people ARE Democrats.

Unfortunately, you do only have some people who vote every 2 years or every 4 years, so for at least the federal elections years, they ARE voting. But for the off-year elections that are barely covered by the major polling outfits, people might not be voting, and THAT fact shows up in the "likely voter" questions because the person might not have voted in that election and get the demerit when it comes time for the polling in the following federal election because they hadn't recently voted, and thus are no longer considered a "likely voter".

The Atlantic published a review of Gallup's analysis back in 2013 -

Gallup Explains How It Messed Up 2012 Presidential Polling

Nearly seven months after President Obama won reelection by a margin of 4 percentage points, the Gallup Organization, the world's best-known polling firm, identified in a new report four main reasons why their 2012 surveys badly understated Obama's support.


By Steven Shepard, National Journal
June 4, 2013

(snip)

-- Likely-voter screen: Gallup's likely-voter screen, the battery of seven questions it uses to determine which respondents are most likely to cast ballots, "probably needs a total overhaul," Newport said Tuesday in a curtain-raising appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."

The Gallup postmortem calls their likely-voter model "broadly similar to those of other survey organizations," though they say that their questions "are more heavily weighted toward past voting behavior than other firm's questions."

The report found the question seemingly most responsible for tilting their poll too far toward Romney was asking respondents how much thought they were giving to the election. Obama led by 3 percentage points among all voters, but that swung 4 points toward Romney among voters identified by Gallup as likely to cast ballots.

"Obviously if we had used no questions, Obama would have led by 3 points," and Gallup would have been more accurate, Newport added. "We don't have a silver bullet" for explaining what part or parts of the likely-voter screen led to misrepresentation of the overall electorate, said Christopher Wlezien, a Temple University professor who consulted on the project.

(snip)

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/gallup-explains-how-it-messed-2012-presidential-polling/314613/

And I think the determination and weighting of "enthusiasm" is screwing up many of these polls (aside from them oversampling the GOP - with or without them assuming they are always "more enthusiastic" as a long-time, baked in bias).

The fact that weeks before this election, they all suddenly dismissed Roe v Wade as a "motivating factor" (which it really was for all parties and indies) and pivoted back to their talking points of "inflation", is exactly why this "enthusiasm" thing is broken.

[Joe Cool]

29. An unenthusiastic vote counts the same as an enthusiastic vote

I kept telling Trumpers that in 2020. Doesn´t matter if the failed casino owner had big rallies and Biden didn´t, rallies don´t vote.

[Farmer-Rick]

32. Oh yeah, very insightful

Good analysis. Yeah, they seem to always over sample the GOP.

I saw just the tip of this failure to identify likely voters in some brief comments by Nate Silver. But I never dug into it. Thanks for the info.

Seems they still haven't fixed their polling problems from 2012.

You should make this a separate post.

[modrepub]

28. They Love Capitalism

with billions of $ being spent on political adds it's no wonder races suddenly "tighten" closer to election. No horse race, no PACs willing to dump millions of dollars in advertising hoping to sway voters. Election season is the M$M's orgy of revenue. Make everyone think races are close and their advertising $ goes through the roof.

Add's are nice but with Dem registration generally higher than Rep, you'd think the Dem party would spend just as much if not more $ on GOTV efforts. In Reading, PA, roughly 30% of registered voters bothered showing up. I think there are similar numbers in most urban places in PA. Getting local ward leaders who can beat the bushes on election day would be just as if not more effective than running 16 ads an hour on expensive TV markets.

[Demsrule86]

33. The thing is 538 knew...I published their excuse OP the day before the election I think...so why

use polls you knew were likely wrong? Done with Nate.

[BumRushDaShow]

35. I found a great (twitter) thread from someone who worked in the MSM including at CNN at one time

She nails it!

Link to tweet

E.B. Boyd (Liza)
@ebboyd
·
Follow
Some thoughts on why the MSM & pundits missed the impact of abortion on the midterms. On why they so miscalculated the outcome of the elections.
And on what they can do better next time.
1/
2:31 PM · Nov 12, 2022

Unrolled thread - https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1591514022511509504.html

E.B. Boyd (Liza) Profile picture
E.B. Boyd (Liza)
Twitter logo
Nov 12 • 30 tweets • 5 min read


Some thoughts on why the MSM & pundits missed the impact of abortion on the midterms. On why they so miscalculated the outcome of the elections.
And on what they can do better next time.

1/

This summer's coverage of the potential impact of Dobbs on the elections faded in the fall, and was overtaken by a focus on inflation and "gas prices." (Aka: "kitchen table issues." ) There was talk of an impending "red wave."

2/

A friend asked me the other day why the predictions were so off-base. Here's what I told him:

3/

Who am I, btw? I came up in the MSM, working for CNN & the daily newspaper in Toledo, OH. Then I took a hard left and went to work in S.Valley tech co's, before returning to journalism to cover tech for Fast Company. (And later freelancing for a bunch of others.)

4/

So I've been inside. I've seen how the sausage is made. But I've also been outside. I have enough distance to look at it critically and understand how its culture and practices (which usually serve it well) can also significantly trip it up.

5/

A couple key principles impacted the MSM's failure this cycle:
A) There is a fundamental belief inside the MSM that the economy trumps everything. That people vote based on their wallets. It's not irrational to think this. It's the way it's been in many elections.

6/

B) Meanwhile, abortion has always been viewed as a "niche" issue. (ie: Yes, it's important to some people, but not so important that it could displace the economy as the most important issue for a meaningful chunk of people, esp in a time of shocking inflation.)

7/

So when the economy hit the fan this year, editors and reporters turned their attention there. (It probably wasn't even a conscious decision that inflation (aka "gas prices" ) would be the pre-eminent issue. It would have just been "known" to be true.)

8/

This is very natural. Few of us systematically question things we "know to be true."

9/

Added this, many newsroom decision-makers -- senior editors and senior producers -- are in their 40s and 50s. Their mindset frames are even more set. They operate on cognitive/decision-making shortcuts baked in over decades.

10/

(It's not just journalists who do this, of course. You see this in every industry. It's sometimes hard to convince senior leaders to change their ways of thinking when those ways have served them well over decades.)

11/

Lastly, journos are shockingly hive-minded for an industry whose core is about questioning. Individual journos and editors find it difficult to challenge a narrative that is prevailing on their beat.

12/

I know it sounds ridiculous, but we're all social creatures. Journos don't want to embarrass themselves in front of their peers by getting something shockingly wrong. It's OK to all be wrong together. But not to have "totally missed the story" that "everyone else" got.

13/

That works as a disincentive to start reporting something meaningfully different than what the hive is saying. (Even when your reporting is telling you so.) We saw it in the lead up to the Iraq War. In the coverage of Trump's 2016 campaign. I saw it on the tech beat.

14/

All of which is to say, this fall, even if a particular reporter or editor had an instinct that abortion was going to play a bigger role in the midterms, it would have been very hard to persuade one's organization to invest more reporting on that, vs. on the economy

15/

So how can the MSM do better next time?

16/

A) They need to develop internal methodologies & strategies for questioning the things they believe to be true. They need to have milestones at which they ask themselves: Is this frame under which we're operating still true? Do we need to adjust the frame?

17/

Doing so is hard & time-consuming in an industry that moves fast & where everyone is strapped, of course. But if one's mission is to report accurately, then it has to be part of the process

18/

B) Folks in the MSM need to begin to understand that abortion is no longer a niche issue.

19/

Sure, it might have been previously, when it was "settled law." When no one was worried that it was going to be taken away.

20/

But a tectonic shift happened this summer for 50% of the electorate.

21/

The minute the Dobbs decision was announced, many women felt themselves go cold. They understood in way that hadn't been clear 24 hours earlier that they were now, existentially, under threat.

22/

For them, the decision wasn't about a narrow medical procedure.
A decision had been made that the state could control your life.

23/

Women understood that if the state was willing to pull this right back, they would be willing to pull back other rights. (Which has since borne out.) They understood this wasn't about a procedure. It was the first salvo in a fight to roll back rights and control their lives.

24/

This is what the MSM and the pundits missed. They continued to view abortion as niche. Perhaps as a question of morality that people discussed in the privacy of their living rooms, with no greater significance for their larger lives.

25/

But everything changed for women this summer. Everything. Why would you possibly care about gas prices when you understood a fight had begun to take away your your right to live your life as you see fit? To make you "less than" the other 50% of the population can?

26/

The results of the midterms reflected this fundamental shift:
- All 4 abortion ballot measures came out overwhelmingly pro-choice.
- Abortion mattered _as much_ to voters as inflation

27/


Feelings about those measures almost certainly impacted how the electorate voted on other parts of the ticket.
And with that, your red wave disappears.

28/

If the MSM is going to do better covering future elections, it needs to adopt a humility around how much their past experience can inform their future coverage. They must be more willing to question what they "know to be true."

29/

We all went into journalism bc we want to help people understand the world they live in. The drastic diff bw what the MSM was reporting & how the election turned out shows there are some serious gaps in how journalism is doing that. It's time to take stock & adjust

30/


• •

[JI7]

16. The media want Oz, Trump, Walker and other fools in office so they can report the bs

that comes from them instead of reporting on real policy issues which they find boring and don't want to study .

[gab13by13]

17. They want them in office

because the MSM is owned and managed by right wing domestic oligarchs who want deregulation and tax breaks for the rich.

Keith Olbermann was one of the most popular cable news anchors when he was fired for straying from the teleprompter.

[Ford_Prefect]

19. A number of polls were pushed out late in the campaign which claimed a red wave was inevitable.

This was a ploy by the GOP to skew perception and depress Democratic voting. The polls were bent to present the impression that there was a stronger preference for OZ, Mastriano, and other GOP candidates than facts on the ground would support. The intention was to give Democrats and others, who were yet to vote, the idea that the majority of voters wanted the GOP candidates, thus reducing the value voting for the Democratic candidates since it would seem they could not win on the numbers.

The source of this information was Michael Steele, former Chairman of the Republican party.

[Farmer-Rick]

24. Now everyone knows how it feels to vote in a blue state

Everytime I vote, I know the stupidest GOPers are going to cancel out my vote. And I know the gerrymandering is stacked against me. I know the fool who barely makes ends meet with his Social Security and Medicare is going to vote for a guy who wants to take that away from him. I know the fool living in a rusty trailer will vote for a filthy rich idiot and thinks the idiot is in touch with poor folk like him.

The media around here are always talking smack about liberals and Dems. It is very disheartening. But every election I go vote for all Dems and No GOPers. But sometimes the GOPers shoot themselves in the foot and then a Dem wins. I keep hoping this is the case every election cycle.

[NBachers]

20. I live in California. Seems like it was a year ago I first heard about Fetterman.

Last edited Sat Nov 19, 2022, 10:39 AM - Edit history (1)

and started donating to him. He was my adopted candidate for this election cycle.

I had to come back and change the auto spelling from Federman to Fetterman. My experiences with self-writing text doesn’t give me much faith in self-driving cars.

[The Jungle 1]

26. Pa thanks you.

I think the most interesting thing about Fetterman is how smart he is.
He has a degree from Harvard. This is going to be a fun story.

[Joe Cool]

30. He has three degrees

Undergrad from Albright, an MBA from UConn, and a Masters from Harvard.

[The Jungle 1]

37. I know and he is very down to earth.

Fetterman is one of the few that I will say... He is in my corner.

[Butterflylady]

22. Even more impressive is he beat

Connor Lamb in the primary without any help from the head democrats in the state and he got no endorsements from any of the state house and senate democrats.

[Joe Cool]

31. Conor Lamb is going to be the Senator from PA after Bob Casey.

Mark it down.

[Demsrule86]

34. I don't know...he is just like all the other Senate candidates that lost. I think we need to run a

new candidate. He wasn't even close in the primary.

[The Jungle 1]

25. Fetterman won.

Equally important Shapiro won.
The icing on this cake. WE WON CONTROL OF THE PA HOUSE. First time in 12 years. I'm Blue, So Blue. Willy DeVille

So how is that gerrymandering thing going for ya repukes. Apparently when we have fair districts the repukes lose. Imagine that. Now the repukes want to change the voting age. Stupid young people actually voted. Can't have that. 72% of women aged 18-29 voted for Democrat candidates according to exit polls. Hummmmm wonder why they did that. Do you think they are mad at the repukes?

When the court decided to go fascist I told my republican friends one short story which shut them up. Yo, watch the midterms!

I need to stop grinning. I'm better than that.

[BumRushDaShow]

36. "Now the repukes want to change the voting age."

I actually saw this brought up here in PA the past week and was seemingly kept hush hush by the media (at least here in Philly), that the GOP loons in Harrisburg had actually moved forward a ballot initiative for the voting age (along with one banning abortions) for a state Constitutional Amendment.

The fact that when it WAS brought up, the reports only mentioned it as an aside, and completely neglected to include THIS obvious fact -

26th Amendment

Amendment XXVI

Section 1.

The right of citizens of the United States, who are 18 years of age or older, to vote, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of age.

Section 2.

The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxxvi

And thus it shows how far they have fallen into the pits of tunnelvison. It's as my mother used to say, "lazy journalism".

[The Jungle 1]

38. There is no chance of this happening, however...

We can beat this and beat this. In two years we should still be talking about how repukes want to change the voting age.
It is not you and I who will believe it. It is the great MIDDLE who will believe it! They only have to hear it.