HMM: Ignore The Polls. Republicans Have A Major Voter Turnout Problem.

Maybe last night’s election was a fluke. After all, voter turnout was seemingly low and will likely be higher during this fall’s presidential contest.

While such reasoning is certainly viable, it doesn’t take into account the growing list of recent elections in which Democrats have widely outperformed expectations at the ballot box.

Take the 2022 midterms, for example. As The Blaze’s Daniel Horowitz observed in November, the majority of polls predicting the outcome of the country’s biggest gubernatorial and Senate races overestimated Republicans’ chances of victory.

In Nevada’s Senate race, for instance, the RealClearPolitics polling average showed Republican Adam Laxalt beating Democrat Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto by 3.4 points. Cortez Masto ended up winning the election by 0.9 points. Similar trends were also seen in Michigan’s gubernatorial race, in which Democrat Gov. Gretchen Whitmer defeated Republican Tudor Dixon by 10.6 points despite the RCP average projecting the former to win by only 1 point.

These alarming trends continued into 2023. A FiveThirtyEight analysis published in September found that Democrats not only won the majority of special elections between January and September 2023, but that they over-performed their projected margins. Even in the smattering of races Republicans won, Democrats managed to surpass expectations.

Give voters a reason to turn out and they will. It’s been a long time since most Republicans could generate that kind of enthusiasm — because that’s what broken promises and “Democrat lite” policies do.