While we still don’t know which party will win majority control of the House and Senate, we do know that it’ll be close either way. At this rate the Democrats have perhaps a 50-50 chance of winning the House majority. And the Democrats merely need to win two out of the four remaining Senate races in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Wisconsin in order to retain de facto majority control of the Senate.

The fact that the race results are so close means that the expert predictions were all off.

The Dobbs decision clearly motivated a large number of people to vote who wouldn’t normally vote. Pollsters have a notoriously difficult time trying to figure out how to accurately sample demographics of voters who don’t usually vote but have suddenly been motivated to vote.

Democrat’ House and Senate poll numbers rose across the board from May through September. Then, a few weeks ago the Republicans started commissioning polls that showed the GOP having supposedly locked up the midterms. Even though the media and polling analysts were split on whether to embrace or reject these commissioned polls, the mere existence of these "polls" seemed to goad the legitimate pollsters into shifting their methodologies, because the legitimate polls also started shifting toward the Republicans without any real world basis for having done so. This in turn goaded the entire media and expert class into predicting a blowout loss for the Democrats.

Legitimate pollsters will need to seriously reevaluate their methodologies if they want to remain relevant. Polling analysts will need to rethink their entire approach. And the mainstream media – which eagerly got on board with the baseless narrative these final weeks that this was going to be a red wave – obviously needs to take a long look at their role in this.

Contrarian, extraordinaire