I spoke with Elaina Plott of The Atlantic about the Texas Senate race and political miscalculations on both sides:
But in critiques of O’Rourke’s strategy, the deficiencies of his challenger—and the GOP as a whole—become just as clear. Texas may play host to mostly conservative voters, yes. But massive early-voting numbers and record turnout among minority demographics reveal that the state is shifting not so much in how its citizens decide to vote, but in who decides to show up. “A lot of the patterns last night were predictable,” the Republican strategist Liam Donovan told me. “It was the volume that caught everyone by surprise.” For Cruz, the blind spot was telling: His campaign based its electoral models on 6 million voters, far shy of the 8 million who ultimately turned up to vote. It’s the kind of miscalculation that, if replicated, could spell doom in the future for Republican candidates in Texas and beyond.
Read the entire piece here.