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[Tyrone Slothrop]

For everyone here, but especially TM since we were arguing about Dems turning out the base vs. persuading marginal voters:

https://www.salon.com/2019/08/17/thi...2020-forecast/

Maybe she's wrong, but she reinforces my priors so clearly she must be right. Here's a bit of it:

When made your initial prediction of a 42-seat wave, other analysts weren’t even sure there would be any blue wave at all, and everybody had toss-ups where you are saying these will flip or are likely to flip. You were proven right, but the common-sense explanation that Democrats won over moderate Republicans by campaigning on health care was very much at odds with your explanation. You had this very prescient insight, and then everyone else catches up, but they sort of drop your insight. So how did you know, and how is that explanation mistaken?

I'm really glad to hear you frame it that way. I haven't heard it framed that way, even in my own brain, but you're exactly right. I am way ahead of everybody, they finally catch up as we move into the final two months before Election Day — certainly that last month — and then the election happens and it happens exactly that way, and then they abandoned my explanation. Now I’m out there trying to fight to get the explanation accepted.

The explanation, of course, is that it was this giant turnout of core constituencies, that either are Democrats or favor Democrats — they’re independents who favor Democrats — and they have a huge turnout explosion. So it's not the same pool of voters changing their minds and voting Democrat after voting Republican because of the issue of health care. It's a whole different pool of voters.

They might have many reasons that they cite, and probably this is not the reason they would cite. But what made them enraged and show up is Trump Inc., the negative partisanship. I don't know why Nancy Pelosi, the DCCC or many of these moderate members are convinced that moderate Republicans crossed over and voted for them. I have the data for some of these districts and the data tells a very different, very clear story: If Republicans voted in huge numbers, they voted for Republicans.