I wasn’t living in NZ when Jim Bolger uttered that now famous phrase, but it’s one for the ages, as polls told him that he would win the 1993 General election comfortably – though obviously losing seats after the 1990 landslide victory – only to see a massive swing to Labour that came within a millimetre of winning it for them

It left National and Bolger hanging on by their fingernails and it took some very clever backroom politics to see another National government formed.

In the US the GOP will certainly be having those thoughts today after a mediocre red trickle leaked across the country rather than the red tsunami they were expecting.

In only one place did that tsunami roar on to land and that was in Florida early in the evening, where Governor DeSantis not only had a massive win over an admittedly hopeless Democrat candidate in the execerable turncoat Charlie Crist, but saw him win the previous Democrat stronghold of Maimi-Dade county, where Biden had won in 2020 and Hillary had crushed Trump in 2016. But the GOP succeeded all across the state, flipping numerous seats from D to R.

And then it collapsed.

It can hardly be called a disaster when you take over the House, and still have a chance to win the Senate, something that won’t be decided now until the runoff election occurs in Georgia, where election laws demand a Senate winner get more than 50% of the vote; both Warnock(D) and Walker (R) failed to do that.

But given the economic and political environment the GOP should have done much better – and they expected too. The GOP wave elections of 1994 and 2010 did not have so many positives for the GOP to seize on as this election.

A President that’s very low in the polls, with no enthusiasm for him, with myriad, serious economic problems hitting ordinary people in the form of inflation, especially on food and gas, an uncertain international situation, massive fights occurring in schools at the grassroots level, and ever increasing levels of violent crime, especially in the Blue cities, plus the hangover issues of how the C-19 pandemic was handled by Democrat governors

If you can’t win with all this in your sails when can you? Of course to ask that question is to ignore previous elections where the GOP won while facing headwinds.

It should have been a blowout, and certainly both Democrats and Republicans were prepping for such. Instead it was a mixed bag, with Democrats flipping seats in the already One Party state of California to match the GOP Florida flips. A very notable loss was in New York where none other than the head of the DCCC, (Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) lost his House seat. It’s been decades since that happened.

But aside from some highlights why wasn’t this a Red Tsunami? I’ll throw out a number of issues, starting with numero uno:

  • Trump:
    The combination of his inability to stay quiet in the background plus the Democrats desperate efforts to put him front and centre, worked to a certain degree. Notably it didn’t work in Florida because DeSantis is the Big Dog there. But it did work in a lot of other places, especially where Trump-endorsed candidates had won the GOP primaries against people who may have been better suited for their states. Trump loves celebrities. He’s also poison to a large chunk of the American electorate and you only get to face an even more loathed candidate like Hillary once in a lifetime.
  • C-19 Lockdowns:
    In many cases – but especially in Minnesota and Michigan – the GOP candidates could not really go after their opponent’s heavy handedness over lockdowns because they were either backed by Trump, who acquiesced in such things by letting Fauci and Birx have their head, or because they’d been pretty squishy on the subjects themselves. Sure, you can fight an election by effectively agreeing with your opponent to take an issue off the table, but it can also rob you of a powerful weapon. Given the damage to education and business resulting from C-19 measures, both Waltz (Minnesota) and Whitmar (Michigan) should have lost.
  • Candidate quality matters
    Some candidates, particularly some backed by Trump, were just not very good. The prime example would be Dr Oz in Pennsylvania, where he lost to Fetterman – a guy who is not only obviously brain-damaged from his stroke (as millions discovered when they watched the debate between the two) but is also a total fake on the “working class” angle, given his wealthy parents supported him into his forties, since when he’s been a permanent politician. But Oz was seen as another fake: a slick, clever man who did not fit with Pennsylvania’s self-image. Tellingly he ran behind Trump’s 2020 numbers in several Republican-leaning counties. Of course if you are going to bang this drum you have to acknowledge that Fetterman, while being the worst, was not the only low-quality Democrat candidate who won.
  • Mail-in voting
    This has grown tremendously over the last decade, pushed by a Democrat Party who have realised the old truth of Left-wing parties everywhere: that their voters have a tough time getting to the polls on election day. In olden times the Democrats invested a lot of money in election-day GOTV efforts. No more: the focus is now on mail-in voting weeks before election day. Aside from the possibilities for fraud that are created if the process is not tightly controlled, mail-in voting also enables a lot of voter decisions to made before the election campaigns really get underway. In the case of Fetterman, tens of thousands of votes had already been cast before he finally had his debate with Oz. How many of those voters may have regretted voting for him once they saw his terrible mental condition?

    The same thing applies for abortion, which did not show up in polls after the white heat of mid-Summer, following the Dodd decision. But back in September it was still an issue and millions of men and woman may have voted early on that basis. By the time the grim economic news caught up with them to become their top priorities it was too late.

    Such voting has always been a part of elections, it certainly is here in NZ where it is regarded as an exception. In many US States it’s becoming the rule and the Democrats love it. If the GOP don’t return it to being the exception it was, and should be, then they’re either going to have start playing the mail-in game harder or look forward to more last-second losses at midnight on election day. One of the reasons for DeSantis’s huge win was that Florida has taken vote fraud seriously because of what happened in 2018 when Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade counties tried to steal the elections the week after Election Day. The same is true of Ohio – they don’t let the big cities mail out ballots willy nilly.

There are also some outstanding questions about this election that will only be answered slowly as people dig into the data, and the pollsters will be frantic to do so in finding out why they got it so wrong.

Certainly the rule of thumb that had stood for several election cycles – that the polls always undercount the GOP vote – proved not to be true in most places. Those polls that showed the Democrats as being competitive in the last week were largely dismissed (certainly by me) as being desperate influencer polls, but they turned out to not be as far from the truth of the election as expected. It’s going to be interesting to see which polls now go up (and down) the accuracy rankings.

The ever-growing problem of landlines being substituted for cell phones continues to grow as Gen Z mature to voting age. I’ve not seen any pollster who has solved that problem, and while exit polls are untrustworthy the following should get the GOP’s attention;

CNN Exit poll showed:

GOP +13 for age 65 and older
GOP +11 for age 45-64
Dem +2 for age 30-44
Dem +28 for age 18 to 29 (Generation Z, my kids)

Sure, it’s an exit poll – and it’s from CNN – so adjust for lots of bullshit.

So where does this leave the Democrats and the GOP? Both have problems in the near future.

The Democrat’s immediate problems being what to do with Biden (who will be taking these results as approval) and the economic problems of inflation, energy costs, and interest rates that are not getting better. Even with a GOP House and Senate, voters still hold the President responsible. As far as violent crime goes that’s a problem at State and City level, it is also growing worse, and although the likes of Governor Horchul and company escaped this time it won’t go away – and they have no answers to it that won’t piss off their progressive base.

For the GOP, although they have other longer term problems too (see Gen Z above), plus this:

Thirty seven point difference? The Democrat Party has become the Husband of Last Resort for Unmarriageable Women, and I don’t know what appeals the GOP could possibly make to them that would not burn off the voters they have now. Probably better to focus on peeling away from the Democrats unmarried men as well married men and woman – a process the Democrats are doing by themselves.

But for the GOP there’s just one question for the immediate future : what to do about Trump in 2024?