Election Tea Leaves? Another Dem Outperforms Polls In Special Election

 

When it counts, when the votes are actually cast, the pollsters are ending up with egg on their faces. The latest example being "a massive performance" by a Democrat in a special election for a vacant Congressional seat in upstate New York (our emphasis):

Timothy Kennedy, a Democratic New York state senator, has won the special election for the Congressional seat vacated by the retired Democrat Brian Higgins.

Kennedy easily defeated his Republican opponent Gary Dickson for New York's 26th district seat, which includes Buffalo and Niagara Falls.

While Kennedy's victory was widely anticipated in the left-leaning district, the vote margin between both candidates was much larger than forecast.

Kennedy won by more than 36 percentage points—a massive performance by the Democratic Party. The Cook Political Report, an independent newsletter that analyzes elections and campaigns, had expected Kennedy to win the seat by 9 percentage points.

A former occupational therapist and father of three children, Kennedy has served in the state Senate since 2011. In 2018, when the Democratic Party won the majority in the Senate, he was appointed chair of the Transportation, Infrastructure, and Capital Investment Committee.

With 94 percent of votes counted early on Wednesday, Kennedy had 46,527 votes against Dickson's 21,685, according to data reported by The New York Times.  [snip]

The Democratic senator's triumph to take the temporarily vacant seat means that the Republican Party's narrow majority in the House of Representatives is now even thinner and reduced to a single vote. He will serve until the end of the year and will be then run in the general election...

We don't expect the pollsters to adjust their Republican- skewed algorithms or whatever it is that's making their predictions so wildly off- base.  Their narrative, much like that of the puerile political press is generally that Democrats are struggling and the Malignant Loser is ascendant.  Fortunately, voters are focusing on the stakes, not the polls, and getting out to vote for protecting democracy, reproductive freedom, and our rights, something the chattering class and its adjunct pollsters still don't see and probably never will.  A narrative, like a mind, is a terrible thing to lose.