I will now accept my accolades megathread

[politicallefty]

I felt very confident about Minnesota (see my post in the megathread). I did say a couple months ago that it's the Democratic mirror of Georgia or Texas. It's probably the mirror for South Carolina. The MSP metro area is a big enough area of the state and trending enough to counteract the rural trends in the state.

I can't claim I did a good job predicting this election. I did great in 2012 and terribly in 2016. Overall, my prediction was closer to 2012 great than 2016 terrible. I was predicting/hoping for a 407-131 map. The late trend had me sour on Iowa for Biden. Otherwise, it looks like I got 4 states wrong (FL, OH, TX, and NC). NC will be very close, so not a huge miss. Florida is Florida. I never trusted it and never counted on it (nor should any Democrat ever). I should've trusted my gut there. I clearly overestimated the suburban shift in Texas and never foresaw what happened in the RGV. That was very disappointing and Democrats need to figure that out ASAP. Ohio was probably a stretch, but I didn't expect Trump to do as well he did across the Rust Belt (although it's another state where the big college-educated suburban shift failed to materialize as expected). I'm absolutely stunned that Trump won Mahoning County. Apart from a slight suburban swing to Biden in Ohio, most of the state swung even more to Trump, especially the Southeastern part of the state.

While I didn't get the margins right, I was always optimistic about Arizona and I had late optimism about Georgia. I'm a little disappointed that Arizona's got this close (especially the Senate race, where I expected a huge victory for Mark Kelly). And, while I did put Georgia in Biden's column, it's quite something to actually see it happen. The Democratic Party definitely owes a deep debt of gratitude to Stacey Abrams. Hopefully, the gains that have been made can be even more fully realized in the January runoffs that will determine control of the Senate.