[laverya]

Yes, Trump underperformed relative to 2016 - and yet the Republicans made gains in the House, and maintained control of the Senate. The fact that the presidential race is close enough to still be under contention days after election night should be evidence enough that there wasn't a significant blue wave!

[nobody9999]

>The fact that the presidential race is close enough to still be under contention days after election

There were a number of factors that pretty much guaranteed the delays we've seen, all of which had lots of press coverage long before election day[0]:

"There’s a good chance we won’t know who won the presidential election on election night. More people than ever are voting by mail this year due to the pandemic, and mail ballots take longer to count than ballots cast at polling places. But because each state has its own rules for how votes are counted and reported, some will report results sooner than others. Those disparate rules may also make initial returns misleading: The margins in some states may shift toward Democrats as mail ballots (which are overwhelmingly cast by Democrats) are counted, while states that release mail ballots first may experience a shift toward Republicans as Election Day votes are tallied."

[0] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/election-results-timing...

[laverya]

Yes, Trump performance decreasing as mail-in votes were counted was predicted. But people also predicted a lot more of a margin for Biden than actually appeared, and if we had had those margins the races currently under contention would not be. Sure, PA might still be waiting on another 100k mail-in votes - but if Biden was 300k in the lead, no one would really care.

49.7% to 49.2% is a HELL of a lot closer than the D+6 projections I saw.

[ModernMech]

The Democrats maintained control of the House. There were 435 seats up for election, and a majority went to the Democrats. In 2018 they had their biggest House win ever, so it's not that surprising that a couple seats when back toward the Republicans.

Senate control is still an open issue. There will be a runoff in GA in January to determine control.

The only reason this was under contention days after the election is that PA wasn't able to start counting their mail in ballots until election day. This was a choice made by the PA legislature. I don't know why. If PA was allowed to precanvas, PA would have announced like FL on election night and this would have been over Tuesday.

[laverya]

> so it's not that surprising that a couple seats when back toward the Republicans.

My understanding is that Republicans were projected to lose even more seats this election - in the 10-20 range - and instead gained seats. So yeah, surprising.

I'm not entirely sure how Georgia's senate runoffs work.

> The only reason this was under contention days after the election is that PA wasn't able to start counting their mail in ballots until election day. This was a choice made by the PA legislature. I don't know why. If PA was allowed to precanvas, PA would have announced like FL on election night and this would have been over Tuesday.

Well, maybe. PA still looks to be within 50k votes, and while it's possible that precanvassing would have allowed the election to be called on Tuesday night, the policy of accepting votes postmarked up to election night even if they arrived late would still leave things potentially up for grabs. And there's a LOT of close states this year. (And to answer "why", I believe it's to prevent vote counts from leaking before people actually go and vote)

The more general point that "If there was a blue wave, we wouldn't be worrying about states with margins of under 50k votes or talking about how control of the senate will be determined later" still stands.

[dragonwriter]

> and maintained control of the Senate.

That's kind-of true. They've definitely maintained it through the end of the Trump Administration, since when the Senate convenes it will be 48-48 with two vacancies to be settled by runoffs two days later, and Pence will still be VP. But as of January 21, the outcome of the two Georgia runoffs will decide the balance of the Senate.

> The fact that the presidential race is close enough to still be under contention days after election night

It's not particularly close, it just has an unusually hard to project due to the pattern of vote counts resulting from one candidate urging voters not to vote by mail-in ballots, large mail-in vote totals, and the timing of mail-in ballot counts vs. counts of in-person ballots in various states. Both by popular and electoral votes, it's going to be less close than the average election of the 2000s.

“Easy to project the winner” and “close” are generally correlated, but fundamentally different, qualities, and this is a case where the usual relationship between them did not hold.

[laverya]

Perhaps we're using "blue wave" differently. To me, a "blue wave" would be Biden scraping a win on election night and then solidifying it into a 338+ blowout, not "Trump wins on election night and then loses as mail-in votes are counted". Having a 50-50 Senate at best isn't exactly a "blue wave" either. (Which is what happens if the Republicans win NC and AK, but lose both the Georgia Senate seat runoffs)