Wednesday, January 06, 2021

Why I Didn't Even Try to Predict the Georgia Runoff Outcomes

The last two months have been so crazy, from all sides, that I didn't see any way to get a handle on Georgia.

As I write this, AP has called one of the two races for the Democrat (not by much) and hasn't called the other yet (but the Democrat seems to have a slight edge).

If I had predicted an outcome, I probably would have expected huge wins for both Democrats. I'm very surprised it's as close as it seems to be.

The main possible factor I've been hearing from mainstream media has been "will Trump's rejection of the presidential election outcome depress the GOP vote because his strongest supporters don't trust the process and will boycott?"

Well, maybe, but I don't think that's what's really going on here. Trump cultists were going to get out and vote the way he told them to vote whether they trusted the process or not, because cultists do what the cult leader tells them to do even if it is cognitively dissonant.

I'd have expected the bigger factor to be the cultists' public behavior. They've spent the last two months raving and rampaging like a bunch of LaRouchies on PCP. If there was anyone at all left on the fence, the weirdness presumably drove those people off on the Democratic side of said fence.

But I could be wrong. Like I said, it's just been too crazy to be very amenable to careful predicting.

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