It's true that low-quality Republican-aligned pollsters flooded the zone here and in many other competitive races - I personally was conflicted on this because I knew those polls were nonsense yet their topline numbers looked very similar to the numbers we and other Democratic pollsters were pulling out in our own surveys (except in Nevada). Simultaneously, many media and university polls did wind up doing a good job but folks were skeptical with good reason because these were the exact outlets that badly missed in recent years.
Making sense of all of this required everybody - myself included - to make a lot of blanket assumptions which is something that personal preferences and partisan leanings easily cloud decision-making about. Very easy to Monday morning quarterback and the "correct" assumptions always become obvious/clear in hindsight but at the time there were good arguments in a lot of directions - all you have to do is look at many users' old pre-election posts to see them. Arguments about future predictions can still be good and well-reasoned even if they don't wind up being "accurate" per se - and I generally think its tacky to speak down on people for thinking something would happen differently than it did after the fact even though they may have had good reason to beforehand.
If, however, their reasoning was impractical/evidence-free/unserious then they should be mercilessly mocked.
I was (as I’m sure you all know by now) a lot more surprised by the NV loss. Any input on what went wrong for Laxalt/any campaign missteps on the Republican side?
Sisolak lost and Republicans won the popular vote for U.S. House 51-47.5, so the votes were clearly there for him (although there was no margin for error). While Laxalt was tainted by Trump, the party's poor national brand, and (perhaps) some of his previous runs for public office, he was effective as an attack dog and had no glaring issues as a candidate like Oz/Walker/Masters. Then again, neither did Budd, and he underperformed rather noticeably as well.
It really wasn’t a race that should have been lost by Republicans. I wish (and in fact already wished back in September) that Laxalt had created/would create some distance between himself and the national party on select issues, but other than that, it seemed like it was mostly external factors (and a far superior D turnout operation) which caused his defeat.
We did a bit of work in Nevada this year - not enough to see a trendline emerge and not close enough to the election to avoid late movers tripping us up, but we never saw the Laxalt advantage that public polls showed but did show the picture most polls painted and that wound up being correct of Masto running slightly ahead of Sisolak (our "final" poll - almost a month out - had Masto up 1 and Sisolak down 4). The difference was almost entirely Hispanic voters, and some non-college white women. Laxalt seemed to have a particularly strong anti-abortion brand (a plurality of voters said they believed him to be "strongly opposed" to abortion being legal) and based on those two subgroups being the ones he underperformed with I'm guessing that's what made the difference.
One of my personal hunches that I have no hard data to back up with is that Sisolak always seemed like an "accidental" governor - he put up an unimpressive showing in a primary in 2018 that didn't attract any genuinely impressive candidates like most Dem primaries in 2018 did and then pretty clearly rode the wave to a similarly underwhelming general election victory against Laxalt himself who clearly has issues statewide here. He didn't seem to have a base and never really cultivated one beyond the state's core Democratic constituencies. That he came as close as he did to being re-elected in a tougher year against a tougher opponent can probably be chalked up to incumbency.
