So You Think You Can Explain The Election

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

The election is over. The results are (mostly) in. Time to decide what it all means.​ That’s a particularly popular activity in a year when Democrats pulled off something of an upset — their successes going against historical expectations and the popular narrative that suggested Republicans were set to sweep the House and Senate in the midterms.

How do we explain these results? Maybe it’s fallout from the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade this summer. Maybe it’s extreme (or extremely silly) Republican candidates who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Maybe Democrats lost the House because they didn’t embrace Republican-led narratives about crime and punishment – or maybe they lost races because they did, and thus ceded ground. Maybe President Biden is just that beloved.

This article is not going to tell you which singular answer is correct. That’s because there is no singular answer. I’m not a politics reporter, but the search for election explanations has led me to think about which ones I — a science reporter with an anthropology degree who spends my work days observing the political natives — trust more than others, even as I give all of them a little side-eye.

Politics, I’ve noticed, loves a just-so story. A clear, coherent reason why the zebra got his stripes. But that’s a form of storytelling that isn’t as concerned with scientific accuracy as it is with passing down culturally specific ideas about how people should behave. So what’s a person to do when they care about both? Here are the tips I keep in mind:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-explanations-are-hard/

[lambchopp59]

1. As opposed to the autopsy the RW is performing

There is the old adage "It all comes out in the wash." I look at the election results as our party that is doing more correctly, in line with scientific data, general factual conventional truths that simply make sense.
As opposed to such hateful and complex confabulated opposition. Such obstruction, such divisive authoritarianism while hypocritically waving a banner of "freedom". Surely "we finished the wall, problem solved" but still lamenting "the border crisis" has such apparent hypocrisy to many.
Fox News has finally begun, not completely, but glimmer of reality is shaking them up by necessity. The house of cards they've built and tried to keep the wind from knocking down for so long is so unsustainably tall now. Honestly I hope the hatemongering Fox Noise's Watters dude he as much as said needs to be fired up even more: ppd'd: "there just isn't the hatred we need for Joe Biden"... Wow, yeah you stooge, keep that crap up, do that. It's already got so much of their audience in adrenaline fatigue it's spilling over into violence and completely nonsensical vitriol, or...
Just getting ridiculously tiresome to some.
Just like the childhood lessons on how a single lie can turn into a big stacked up mess of confabulations, they've not only lost track by now, but contradict themselves gloriously.
It's so much simpler to maintain factual truths.

[lees1975]

2. I think that if the Republicans who now control the house proceed with their agenda of

hatred and revenge, investigations, impeachments and extremism, they will set the Democrats up for decades of complete control of the government. I expect the 2024 election will be a Democratic landslide.

[markodochartaigh]

3. I think that more than anything else

the Republican gerrymandering of Ohio, Florida, and Texas, and the the Republican judges refusing to allow Democratic gerrymandering of New York explains why the Republicans control the house currently. In my opinion the allotment of senators by state lines rather than population is analogous to gerrymandering on a national level.