If the Jensen Huang / Nvidia spy scandal had happened two weeks ago, I expect the midterm elections would’ve gone pretty much just as they actually went, but lots of pundits would’ve seized on this as the explanation for the election outcomes.

Why do I say this?

Because the result of the election was surprising. Not in its direction—everyone was expecting the Democrats to win a majority of the vote—but in the extent of the majority (in the event, they won 57% of the two-party vote for the House of Representatives) and the consequences for both houses of the legislature.

When there’s a surprise, people look for an explanation. That’s what stories are all about. As the most convenient recent politically-related news item, the Huang scandal would’ve fit the bill.

I’d still guess that, had this all happened fifteen or thirty years ago, the Huang-equivalents would’ve been Democrats. But, as it is, Huang is closely connected to an unpopular Republican president, so the story would’ve written itself. Even though I think that, had the Huang/Huang thing come up two weeks ago, the election outcome would’ve been essentially unaffected.

We recently saw You Can See Everything—yes, I highly recommend it, as with The Odyssey, it’s as good as everybody says, it lives up to the hype—and then there was the recent news about tech executive Jensen Huang. Put these two stories together and you get the above charming bit of incoherence. “Bring back the gallows,” indeed. Billy Evans seems to be discriminating in his thoughts on the recommended severity of punishment for white-collar crime.

In the movie, Billy Evans, the husband of disgraced medtech fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, says that he’s a fan of the late conservative firebrand Charlie Kirk, and, as you can see below, the couple are all-in on Donald Trump. Huang too is closely linked to the president, who in turn is a promoter of Wild West ventures such as crypto and betting markets.

While watching You Can See Everything and reading the news, I had this thought: If all this had happened fifteen to thirty years ago, I’m guessing that all these people would’ve been Democrats. Big tech money is right-coded today but was left-coded in the (Bill) Clinton and Obama eras.

The question is, why has this happened? The trend is particularly notable when juxtaposed with the general shift of college-educated voters away from the Republican party during the past two decades.

One difference, perhaps, is that information technology is more closely tied to the military than it was twenty years ago. Back then, the defense-contractors and tech were connected, but I think less intertwined. So it could make sense for Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc., to side against George W. Bush and the Iraq War, while current AI companies don’t want to go against a militarily-active government. Taking over Greenland is more exciting to today’s tech investors; twenty years ago they were more interested in opening up consumer markets around the world, and an unpopular foreign invasions were not a useful step in that direction.

Another take on it is that business investors are inclined to go with the winner. In 2008, this was Obama; in 2024, it was Trump. And I do think this is part of the story but not the whole thing. In 2008, Obama’s team had the high-tech luster and the Republicans were the grumpy outsiders. Since 2016, it’s been the opposite. Even setting aside Jensen Huang and Elizabeth Holmes, not to mention Elon Musk and that space mirrors guy, there’s a general sense that conservatives are now the tech cheerleaders and liberals are the new Debbie Downers.

There’s a story to explain any given individual case, or, more generally, you can say that U.S.-style conservatives support something closer to an unregulated free market, while U.S.-style liberals are more concerned about the balance of power between business and labor, so in that sense this all makes sense. One theory that’s been floating around is that tech executives have moved to the right in reaction to efforts by the left-wingers in their technical workforce to reduce executives’ freedom of action. Go back twenty or thirty years, and the Democratic party was led by figures such as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Barack Obama, all of whom were friendly not just to big business but to the tech industry in particular. This brings us closer to political scientist Thomas Ferguson’s view of national politics as reflecting divisions within business executives in competing industries. Also, tech lords were rich a generation ago—remember all those jokes about Bill Gates being rich—but not nearly as rich in aggregate as they are now, so that has to be part of the story too.

It’s also interesting to compare how different people react to right-coded business fraud vs. left-coded academic fraud.

As I said a few days ago, you don’t need me anymore to do your fancy post-election data analyses. So instead I can offer speculation (Could the 2026 election results lead to a decrease in political polarization?) and meta-commentary (NYT columnist offers epically stupid take on 2026 midterm elections).

But we can also learn from some really simple analyses.

Comparing 2026 to previous midterm swings

How big of a deal was the 2026 national election?

To look at consequences, you can count the number of seats won by the two parties. To look at the aggregate opinions of voters, it makes sense to look at the national popular vote for the House of Representatives, where the Democrats received 56.2% of the two-party vote, a swing of 7.5 percentage points from their House vote share in 2024.

Is 56.2% with a swing of 7.5pp a little or a lot? One way to judge this is to compare to the midterm stunners of recent decades:

2010 is the election that put the brakes on the Obama government: the Tea Party movement convinced the voters that government expansion was going too far. In that election, the Republicans won 53.5% of the two-party vote, a 9.0 percentage point swing from 2008.

2006 was the year that George W. Bush’s post-9/11 high finally wore off. The Democrats’ share of the two-party vote in that election: 54.1%, a 5.5pp swing from the previous election.

1994 was the year that Newt Gingrich and the Republicans offered a clear alternative to the liberal policies of the Clinton administration, taking control of Congress with 53.5% of the two-party vote, a 6.1pp swing in their favor. 53.5% is lower than the other numbers I’ll be showing today, but it arguably understates the Republicans’ accomplishment in 1994, in that this was their first stint in the majority in forty years.

1982 isn’t remembered much now, because the Republicans roared back two years later, but, with the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and President Reagan having very low job approval, the Democrats did very well at the ballot box, winning 56.0% of the two-party House vote, a 4.1pp swing from the previous election.

1974 was the post-Watergate election, bringing many fresh faces into Congress. The Democrats capitalized on economic stagnation and discontent with the criminal doings of the Nixon administration to gather 56.9% of the two-party vote, a 4.2pp swing.

In summary, the Democrats’ performance in 2026—a 7.5 percentage point swing yielding 56.2% of the two-party vote—was indeed exceptional, at or above the level of previous repudiations of the incumbent party during the midterm elections.

This can be understood in various ways.

One way that 2026 was different is that this time the incumbent party was really the incumbent party. Unlike in those previous campaigns, this time the Republicans had unified control of the federal government—the legislative, executive, and judicial branches—and the incumbent party was itself highly unified (as can be seen, for example, in the Senate confirmation of some extreme cabinet officers). So, voters who wanted party balancing had a clear choice in a way that wasn’t so obvious in previous years where there was divided government.

The other way is to compare to historical baselines. The Democrats’ victories in 1974 and 1982 cemented their status as the default majority party, but that’s not as impressive as the Republicans’ feat in 1994, and then in 2010, of moving from the minority to gain firm control of Congress. The Democrats achieved this in 2026.

What comes next?

In most of the above cases, the midterm winner did not follow up with a decisive win at the next presidential election. 2006, followed by Obama’s victory two years later, was the only exception. Consider the other cases:
After 1974, the Republican party was left for dead: it had been the majority party for awhile and then was wiped out in the congressional elections. But, two years later, the not-particularly-popular Gerald Ford came within 2 percentage points of being elected president.
After the repudiation of Republicans in 1982, the economy came back to life—as the president quipped, now that things are going better, “they don’t call it Reaganomics anymore”—and the presidential election was a landslide.
And the Republicans’ congressional victories in 1994 and 2010 were followed by Clinton and Obama doing just fine in their subsequent reelection campaigns.

That said, the Republicans’ successes in 1994 and 2010 represent one possible template: the triumphant return of a party that had been given up for dead. In both cases, the victorious congressional party did not follow up with a presidential election win, but the party remained strong enough to determine much of the political agenda going forward.

The take-home message based on this history: the Democrats should value their congressional win for itself and not assume they’re on a glide path for 2028. Conversely, the Republicans should figure out how best to work with the Democratic majority without thinking of themselves as being about to lose all power.

Nationalization of politics

Along with partisan polarization has come a nationalization of the vote, which has led to two things. First, the vote swings in presidential elections have been much smaller. After their losses in 1982, the Republicans rebounded a bit in 1984, upping their House vote share to 47.4%, a gain of 3.4 percentage points. In that same year, Reagan was reelected with a two-party vote share of 59.2%!

That sort of thing doesn’t happen anymore, in two ways. First, with partisan polarization, you wouldn’t expect either party’s presidential candidate to come close to 60% of the vote. Second, congressional elections are nationalized, and you wouldn’t expect to see a stunning 12 percentage point gap between a party’s congressional and presidential vote share.

I have some hope, for the following reasons:

1. The incoming Democrats in Congress include some centrists and some on the left. Mix them in with the ones who are already there, and we can expect divisions on general ideological grounds and on specific issues such as Israel/Palestine, data centers, etc.

2. There have always been congressional Republicans who detest Trump, but they’ve shown close to zero defections from the president’s policies. But now that they’re the minority, the forces keeping them in line will be weaker. Also they are getting the point that general elections as well as primaries are threats to them.

My hope is that there will be some important issues that split within each party, leading to cross-party coalitions. I’m not saying this would be a cure for polarization—back in 1993, the vote on NAFTA split the two parties, and that did nothing to stop the Newt Gingrich-led polarization that took over soon after—but maybe it would be a step forward.

To put it another way, I think of there being two components to partisan polarization. One component is a natural consequence of connections between issues: there’s a logic to the left and right representing different coalitions and being represented by two political parties. The other component is not so good, it’s the lockstep conformity that leads to candidates taking extreme positions to appeal to primary election voters, presidents crafting policies to satisfy moderates just enough to get the threshold of required votes, and party-line votes to confirm unqualified cabinet officials. Maybe some open disputes on high-profile issues will make pure partisan voting less of an expected thing, so that legislators can vote against their party leadership without it being such a big deal, which in turn could motivate moderation among their leaders. Which does not mean that non-centrist policies on the left or right could not be passed, just that they’d require coalition building of some sort..

Political polarization has been steadily increasing for the past thirty-five years, so it seems like it would be a mistake to bet against more of the same. But trends can occasionally reverse; nothing lasts forever. Back when my colleagues and I were starting to do research in political science, the incumbency advantage had been steadily increasing for forty years . . . but then the trend reversed.

Also, partisan polarization is a funny thing: some people are strongly motivated to vote for Republicans because they hate the Democrats and what they stand for; others are strongly motivated to vote for Democrats because they hate the Republicans etc. There aren’t too many voters who actually like either party, at least not on a national level. To borrow a physical analogy, you could say that political polarization is maintained by tension, not compression.

P.S. Somewhat relatedly, NYT columnist offers epically stupid take on 2026 midterm elections.

P.P.S. I think I blew it by not using a clickbait title such as “Polarization is so over.”

Back in the day, I would do a post-election post, summarizing information from the election outcomes and exit polls. For example, after the 2008 election:

As with previous Republican candidates, McCain did better among the rich than the poor:

The gap between young and old has increased—a lot:

But there was no massive turnout among young voters. According to the exit polls, 18% of the voters this time were under 30, as compared to 17% of voters in 2004. (By comparison, 22% of voting-age Americans are under 30.)

The red/blue map was not redrawn; it was more of a national partisan swing. See this state-by-state scatterplot of Obama vote in 2008 vs. Kerry vote in 2004:

The standard deviation of the state swings (excluding D.C. and the unusual case of Hawaii) was 3.3%. That is, after accounting for the national swing in Obama’s favor, most of the states were within 3% of where they were, compared to their relative positions in 2004.

By comparison, here’s the 2000/2004 graph:

The standard deviation of these state swings was 2.4%. This was even less variation–2004 was basically a replay of 2000—still, the relative state swings of 3.3% in 2008 were not large by historical standards.

Again, Obama didn’t redraw the map; he shifted the map over in his favor. (Or, to put it more precisely, the economy shifted the map over in the Democrats’ favor and Obama took advantage of this.)

Here’s the map showing where Obama and McCain did better or worse than expected based on 2004:

Finally, how did the pre-election polls do? Here’s the scatterplot:

I see some systematic patterns: Obama underperformed where the polls had him way down, and he outperformed where the polls had him up.

But I don’t need to do this sort of thing anymore.

Why not? Because the news media do it well all by themselves now. The New York Times page is good, also freelance sites by analysts such as former Fivethirtyeight.com honchos Nate Silver and Elliott Morris. There’s been an impressive improvement in political analysis in the past 25 years.

Back in the day, the election-night and post-election summaries in the news media were frustratingly crude. As the votes came in, the TV networks would just report raw totals based on X% of the vote in state Y, without even trying to do any analytics, even anything as simple as tallying the swing from those precincts compared to the previous election. And then the next day you just get a list of the winners along with some exit poll results.

What’s changed?

First, exit polling has become more difficult—all those mail-in votes—so there’s more of a focus on the actual election results. Second, outsiders such as Nate have upped the game, leading other news organizations to follow. Third, data processing is better so that now sites can immediately make this sort of display:

Things didn’t use to be this way. Back in 2000, I was in a meeting with the news media exit poll consortium and I was trying to persuade them to look at swings and to do MRP to help with their noisy data . . . and they didn’t listen to me. They were a happy monopoly and didn’t need no fancy analytics. But look at the news media now. I have the impression that campaigns are much more sophisticated in their analyses too.

I’d like to say that the media and political campaigns have caught up with academic political science. But it would be more accurate to say that they’ve surpassed us. I still think academic political science has useful things to contribute: new methods such as MRPW, innovative data collection and presentation from CES and others, and also we have the space to try to systematically understand trends such as trickle-down polarization. As well as all sorts of work out there that I haven’t even heard of. But these analyses I used to do, looking at swings, going back and forth between the local story and the big picture? The news media can do it better. I guess that’s how Bill James must feel when he sees modern sports analytics: he has his insights, but the stuff he did that was difficult and innovative back in the 1980s is now out there, and at a much more sophisticated level.

P.S. I’m hoping in a few months to get a detailed report from Yair and his team, reporting not just what happened in the vote but what was going on underneath. Kind of like their reports from 2018, 2020, 2022 and 2024. Each of these came out in the May following the election, so stay tuned.