Assessing 538's performances in 2018

[wesmoorenerd]

Reading without adding something is totally fair! Just a heads up that you're interested every once in a while helps me stay motivated. But not I know, so no worries, I'll keep it up.

EDIT: As a matter of fact, since the model had turnout models for the House and Senate races, I was thinking of doing a comparison between the model’s projections and the actual results. Btw, great work!

Feel free to add your analysis to this thread! I haven't looked at turnout but I'd love to see what patterns you find. I'm especially curious if there's a correlation between where turnout was higher than expected and which party did better.

Top notch analysis! 4 realz. We need more effortposts like this.

I think Iowa is one of the more interesting cases of the year. The fact that Finkenauer underperformed so dramatically combined with Scholten's outstanding overperformance suggests some interesting patterns regarding candidate quality. I think this lies more with the GOP than the Dems on both counts. Finkenauer and Scholten were both good candidates, but Blum was notoriously underestimated in every race he ran in and King got the worst press of pretty much any candidate in the cycle.

Candidate quality matters fam

[wesmoorenerd]

Reading without adding something is totally fair! Just a heads up that you're interested every once in a while helps me stay motivated. But not I know, so no worries, I'll keep it up.

EDIT: As a matter of fact, since the model had turnout models for the House and Senate races, I was thinking of doing a comparison between the model’s projections and the actual results. Btw, great work!

Feel free to add your analysis to this thread! I haven't looked at turnout but I'd love to see what patterns you find. I'm especially curious if there's a correlation between where turnout was higher than expected and which party did better.

Top notch analysis! 4 realz. We need more effortposts like this.

I think Iowa is one of the more interesting cases of the year. The fact that Finkenauer underperformed so dramatically combined with Scholten's outstanding overperformance suggests some interesting patterns regarding candidate quality. I think this lies more with the GOP than the Dems on both counts. Finkenauer and Scholten were both good candidates, but Blum was notoriously underestimated in every race he ran in and King got the worst press of pretty much any candidate in the cycle.

Candidate quality matters fam

Yeah, candidate quality is a tempting explanation for several of these upsets (other examples that jump out are WI-1, NY-27 and CA-48). However, there are almost as many cases were the "stronger" candidate (or at least the one that was widely perceived as such) severely underperformed, or conversely a "weak" candidate beat the odds: see CA-21, TX-23, NJ-2 and WV-3. So it's hard to tell an overarching story.

Who exactly was the weak candidate in TX-23? GOJ was pretty strong, Hurd was just stronger.