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It's time to fully process the scale of Trump's electoral disaster. It is by far the worst political performance since 1932. In fact, Trump's 2026 disaster is significantly worse than 1932, when adjusted for the underlying fundamentals of the economy and the nation as a whole.
I voted for Trump, I persuaded other people to vote for him, and I like most of the MAGA/MAHA agenda, but the time has come to take a cold hard look at reality. Literally any other national Republican in Trump's place would have had a far better result.
I feel good about my predictions in this thread from before the election, even though I'm sad about the result. I predicted D+11 for the House national vote. The final result will be around D+14%, according to Chaz Nuttycombe, and also according to the prediction markets.
Side note, my predictions were partly informed by the best election modelers of the past two elections. (In my opinion, you should be able to make good predictions no matter which party does well. And all of these people did a great job in both 2024 and 2026.)
Fantastic liberals:
Chaz Nuttycombe of StateNavigate (who specializes in local elections, which are the most important elections, actually): https://x.com/ChazNuttycombe
David Shor of Blue Rose Research (a self-declared socialist): https://x.com/davidshor
Nate Cohn of the NYTimes: https://x.com/Nate_Cohn
Dark Malfoid MAGA:
Christian Heiens https://x.com/ChristianHeiens
Godly MAGA:
Jennica Pounds / DataRepublican: https://x.com/DataRepublican
Nate Silver is good, but I would rank all of these others above Silver.
My House popular vote prediction was closer to the final result than literally every prediction I saw by Republican-leaning people on social media. Even more accurate than Heiens and DataRepublican, who were better than all the other Republican-leaning predictions. And my predicted 99% odds of Democrats winning the House was the appropriate level of confidence to have.
I also predicted that 55 D Senate seats would be the most likely outcome... and if the Democrat wasn't barely winning in Mississippi, I would have gotten this one right.
I also specifically predicted that Darline Graham was a weak candidate who might lose (yet another thing Trump screwed up, she only became the nominee because of him), especially in the midst of the major regional swing towards Democrats. And lose she did, while the generic Republican candidate for Governor did 4% better and won.
I also predicted that Sullivan in Alaska, Collins in Maine, and Rogers in Michigan were strong Republican candidates. And they did in fact significantly outperform the national wave and the fundamentals in their states.
Trump-endorsed Paxton did worse than all the other Republicans in Texas. Trump's political instincts have been especially horrific for the past two years, it's as though he was deliberately trying to destroy the Republican party.
I'm actually kicking myself for not predicting D+13 in the House, which was what my gut said would happen, because my "historical anchoring bias" influenced me and said that surely it couldn't be that bad, since elections have been so polarized for so long, right? And yet it was even worse than D+13. (Well, "worse" from my POV. Obviously all of my pro-Democrat friends are over the moon, lol.)
Ok, now let's understand why we can be so certain that Trump created the worst political disaster since at least 1932.
Lots of people are saying this is the worst political performance since 1974. WRONG. This drastically undersells how catastrophic this was by Trump.
In my view, the appropriate way to measure political performance is to measure the swing from the previous election. So while, yes, Republicans lost the House popular vote in 1974 by 16.8%, which is 2.8% worse than Republicans will get this year... but Republicans had also lost the previous House popular vote in 1972 by 5.3%. So, the swing from 1972 to 1974 was 11.3%.
An 11.3% swing is bad, but the swing from 2024 (when Republicans won by 2.6%) to 2026 for Republicans is 16.6%.
[Edit: Lol, when I checked Kalshi the average predicted popular vote is up to 14.6%, for a swing of 17.2%, even worse. We won't know the true swing for literally weeks, thanks to California's incompetence.]
The difference between the swing to 1974, and the swing to 2026, is 5.3%, which would have been a wave election in its own right! 2026 is a whole wave worse than 1974!
And once we consider the historical context of these two elections, the Trump-disaster of 2026 becomes even more shocking.
In the 1974 election, the country was in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression. Also, the stock market had crashed by 48%.
Also, both the Republican President AND the original Vice-President had needed to resign prior to the election.
AND the Vietnam war was still ongoing, with huge numbers of American deaths racked up, the most deaths of any war we've had since World War II.
And we should also understand the baseline from 1972- the stock market had soared 64% leading into the election, and the economy was booming. So, it would have been quite likely for Republicans to do worse in 1974 than in the rosy situation in 1972 even with an average economy and no scandals.
And yet, despite all those factors, the swing from 1972 to 1974 was only 11.3%. Even with a massive economic whipsaw, and the resignation of the executive branch, the swing was just 11.3%.
(People might wonder how Republicans could not win the House vote in 1972 when Nixon won in a landslide- the Democratic party was incredibly strong back then, and ticket-splitting was common, and America was at its least polarized during the 1970s.
It used to be a lot more common to have large swings, in general, back then. So, Trump's 16.6% swing left is especially shocking, simply by managing to achieve this level of destruction in an electorate in which large swings should be especially difficult.)
And now consider 2024>2026: In 2024, the economy and the stock market were basically fine. Republicans were not dealing with an ideal economic situation in 2024, nor a disastrous one in 2026, like they were in 1974. The stock market has gone up during Trump's second term, and we have supposedly never entered into a recession. And inflation rates have not been drastically different between the two recent Presidencies.
So, even without massive economic headwinds, Trump managed to decimate the Republican party purely by his unpopular policies and his unpopular personal conduct. This catastrophe is 90% Trump's doing. Of this, there can be no doubt. There are no other major factors that can be blamed. (And yet Trump is trying to blame everyone but himself, when there is no major plausible factor other than Trump.)
To find a 2-year swing as bad as 2024>2026, we have to go all the way back to 1930>1932, when there was a 2 year electoral swing of 21%. It took literally a Great Depression to generate an election swing worse than what Trump caused all by himself. And the swing to 2026 is closer to the swing to 1932 than it is to the swing to 1974.
And in defense of the Republican president in 1932 (Hoover), he had inherited the Great Depression, and had saved millions of lives as a philanthropist earlier in his life. Trump didn't inherit anything horrible, he managed to decimate the Republican party entirely on his own.
One the flip side, Hoover did acts like Smoot Hawley which caused the collapse in international trade which caused the depression to get far worse. On the flip flip side, there is still debate over how much individual acts like Smoot Hawley did and Hoover in general followed what was best practices at the time.
Nitpick aside, it’s pretty bad. While not much will change personally, I’m sad Abbott will no longer be governor. He really stood up for Texans.
Yeah, there's no way that Hoover's approach to the Great Depression was great. But that makes the case for Trump's 2026 political disaster even more obvious- if Hoover had to inherit a stock market crash and depression, then bungle it and achieve 25% unemployment at the time of the election, and that's what it took to drag Republicans down worse than Trump did, then...
Regarding Abbot, my sense is that it's extremely difficult for politicians to escape the influence of how people perceive the President, unless they're from a small state and have a strong bond with the locals. For most people, politics is just the President, and almost everything else is secondary.
So, Republican Susan Collins could win Maine in 2020, Republican Phil Scott in Vermont still won this year, Democrat Jon Bel Edwards could win the Louisiana governorship in 2015, etc. Those are small states and those politicians did the work to form a bond with a lot of locals.
But according to AI, during the past 20 years there is only one case of a top 10 population state having a top race (governor or senator) with a politician that could outperform the partisan lean of their state by 10 points or more (Tom Wolf D in Pennsylvania in 2014* barely achieved it).
And I'm definitely not a Texas expert, but someone like Abbot in Texas is screwed, partly because it's a huge state and not a lot of people can feel a bond with their governor there. Abbot barely performed any differently than other statewide offices, right?
The only exception I can think of is when Arnold Schwarzenegger won in California. But he was a mega-celebrity capable of transcending national politics, and he was a moderate who was a decent fit for California.
Another reason not to trust AI. Wolfe won in 2014, not 2010, and Shapiro won by a pretty wide margin in 2022.
Actually, the mistake was mine =(. I went back and checked. I had misread it or had a short-term memory failure, sorry.
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