In today’s polarized era, it’s easy to assume that nothing ever matters in American politics — that every four years, the same election happens over and over, with the same demographic groups lining up behind the same candidates in the same states.
In this view, any signs of change are to be met with skepticism. A diminished gap between the popular vote and the Electoral College? Ridiculous. Polls showing Donald J. Trump making big gains among young or nonwhite voters? Absurd.
I have a different perspective.
In every election I’ve covered, election night has brought enormous shifts that have often gone well beyond what was previously imagined.
Here’s one way to see it in the numbers: Over the last 16 years, every presidential election has featured at least one congressional district that swung at least 20 points from the last presidential race. At the state level, that would be enough to turn Rhode Island “red” or Montana “blue.”
Usually, there are warning signs. The polls in 2020, for instance, showed Mr. Trump doing much better among Hispanic voters than he had in 2016. Two years earlier, in the 2018 midterms, Miami-Dade County and South Texas were rare bright spots for Republicans. And yet despite these warnings, no one anticipated 30- to 50-point Trump gains across a Cuban enclave like Hialeah, Fla., or along the Rio Grande.
You can tell a story like this for every election since 2004. And every year, analysts have perfectly reasonable doubts about whether big shifts in the polls could possibly be real. These doubts get more credible every year, as increasing polarization makes it harder to imagine big changes, while the very real difficulties in polling make it easier to dismiss unexpected findings.
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