This is one of those races where people will look back and ask themselves why they ignored all the warning signs that the race would flip and that it wouldn’t be particularly close (incumbent's vote share in polling, state's tendency to reflect the national popular vote, demographics that were going to make the state the epicenter of a GOP wave under current party coalitions/in a midterm in which the trends observable in the last presidential election only tend to accelerate, generic Republican vs. generic Democrat contest, repeated signs and reports that pollsters were struggling to pick up the pace of the shift toward Republicans among non-white/non-Anglo working-class voters).
However, it made Ralston debase himself, so it was still worth it.
mm hmm