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By early morning Wednesday, there was a lot that millions of anxious Americans didn’t know.
Mainly, they didn’t know who the president-elect is. That, in itself, wasn’t unexpected, nor is it terrible.
But after consuming hours of news on Tuesday night, and observing the election results thus far, there are a few things that we can be certain of.
- That we should never again put as much stock in public opinion polls, and those who interpret them, as we’ve grown accustomed to doing. Polling seems to be irrevocably broken, or at least our understanding of how seriously to take it is.
The supposedly commanding lead that Joe Biden carried for weeks didn’t last very long into Tuesday evening. This was a lead, remember, that many predicted could result in a landslide Biden victory, help turn the Senate blue, and bring the Democrats amazing victories in red states like Ohio and Florida.
It didn’t take long for that dream to dissipate into a much more typical process of divvying up the states into red and blue, with a lot of unknowns added in. But none of it amounted to the clear repudiation of Trump that a lot of the polling caused us to think was coming. (As for the New York Times “needle” that projected results for Georgia, North Carolina and Florida? Just as in 2016, the way the graphic twitched and swerved throughout the evening once again was capable of provoking a heart attack or, depending on your politics, nausea.)
- The news media, in general, has not done a good job of covering the Latino vote. “One day after this election is over I am going to write a piece about how Latino is a contrived ethnic category that artificially lumps white Cubans with Black Puerto Ricans and Indigenous Guatemalans . . .” tweeted Nikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times.
A better, more nuanced understanding might have eased the surprise over how critical portions of Florida voted — particularly the strong support for President Trump in the area around Miami. One exception was an Atlantic article by Christian Paz, “What Liberals Don’t Understand About Pro-Trump Latinos,” that unpacked the president’s grasp of “their unique worldview, one rooted in deeply held beliefs about individualism, economic opportunity, and traditional social values.”
