YIKES

MAGA Pundits Humiliated as Bold Poll Predictions Implode

The writing was on the wall, but some didn’t want to read it.

A whole host of MAGA pundits have been embarrassed after their midterm election projections imploded and Democrats romped to victory in both chambers.

The Daily Beast’s D.C. brains Farrah Tomazin and Sarah Ewall-Wice described the election results as a “political earthquake,” with Democrats seizing control of the Senate and the House.

Polling had long shown trouble could be brewing for the Republican Party, but some conservative pundits and commentators made bold predictions of an upset.

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Farrah Tomazin

Larry Kudlow, who served as director of the National Economic Council during Donald Trump’s first term as president, even suggested “we should not even think about polling” as he declared on Tuesday that Abdul El-Sayed would not win, James Talarico wouldn’t have it easy in Texas, and Susan Collins would hang onto her longtime seat in Maine.

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All of these projections were, of course, wrong. But Kudlow was not alone in calling a red upset.

“I nailed all my election predictions in 2024,” asserted Clay Travis on X before any race had been called. He noted that his 2020 predictions were not as good, but he confidently predicted a sweep for Trump candidates.

“Byron Donalds wins Florida Gov comfortably. Senate: Ken Paxton wins Texas, Mike Rogers wins Michigan, Jon Husted wins Ohio, Ashley Hinson wins Iowa, Susan Collins wins Maine, the real Dan Sullivan wins Alaska, Kansas, South Carolina & Nebraska aren’t close, Republicans win senate races easily in those states,” the OutKick founder added.

“Polls are badly biased against Republicans for the 16th out of the past 17 election cycles.”

Byron Donalds did indeed win the gubernatorial race in Florida, as expected, and Alaska will take a while to work out. Nebraska, too, stayed red. However, Travis got all of his other predictions badly wrong.

Democrat James Talarico took the Senate seat over scandal-tarred Paxton; Abdul El-Sayed beat Rogers in Michigan; Husted, despite Trump’s incessant focus on his posterior, lost in Ohio; Democrat Josh Turek defeated Hinson in Iowa; and Collins ceded her seat to a Democrat in Maine.

Kansas, which hasn’t elected a Democratic senator in nearly a century, and South Carolina also went blue.

“PREDICTION,” crowed former Mitt Romney adviser Dan Senor on X, before dropping an absolute stinker by adding, “heads are going to explode when Michigan returns come in tonight and observers + partisans outside Michigan realize how off the @nytimes Siena poll was….”

The poll, the final one before voters went to the ballot box, said El-Sayed was up by 12 percentage points heading into the vote. Like messrs Kudlow and Travis, he suggested that this was much ado about nothing and that Trump’s man, Rogers, was waiting in the wings to claim victory.

“We did it!” the victor, El-Sayed, told a Detroit crowd hours later, before roasting Trump and Vice President JD Vance.

“I predicted the 2024 election with 100% accuracy,” said Trump 1.0 adviser George Papadopoulos, who was jailed in 2018 after an investigation into Russian election interference.

“Here is my prediction for how the Senate races will turn out tomorrow,” he added, sharing a map that showed a 53-47 GOP majority.

“You’re going to have to delete your account in disgrace after this dude,” one respondent noted. The Associated Press reports that Democrats have the Senate with a 54-44 majority.

But none of this would have happened if Trump was on the ballot, according to the midterm’s biggest loser, the president of the United States. “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” Trump wrote on Truth Social late on Tuesday after he presided over the disaster.

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Leigh KimminsReporter

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