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My Perspective on the Results
A perspective from Tom Jensen
Election Day marked 17 years for me at Public Policy Polling. And for most of those 17 years I wondered how I would handle it if there was ever a Presidential year that clearly wasn’t going to end well. We won in 2008, 2012, and 2020 and I thought we were going to win in 2016 so this was my first time really having that experience.
I made a choice to just be coldly analytical about it. I’ve had people coming to me all year wanting me to tell them something to make them feel better and I decided I just wasn’t going to do it. There were some people out there really spinning things to make them seem better than they were and I found that distasteful. If you were surprised by the outcome last night you should reconsider who you’re paying attention to.
I wanted to make people feel better, believe me, but I’m just not going to lie to do that. So I really stayed away from interviews, talks, public pronouncements, etc for the most part because I didn’t want to depress people.
Our polling was pretty darn accurate this year. Just about nothing that happened last night was a surprise to me. We did a poll in early October that found Harris only up 7 in New Jersey and from that point I kind of assumed Trump would win the popular vote. I believe we never had a poll with Harris up in North Carolina. Extensive legislative polling we did in Georgia, Nevada, and Wisconsin pretty consistently showed slippage at the top of the ticket. I wish the reality had been different but I’m proud of the work our team did.
Anyway here are some silver linings looking forward. And I really do mean these things:
1) I believe North Carolina will elect a Democratic Senator for the first time since 2008 in 2026.
2) Democrats may yet win the House this year but at any rate they’re going to win a ton of House seats and definitely get control in 2026 in backlash to what will prove to be a very unpopular second Trump administration.
3) We’ll also elect some great new Governors across the country- Michigan for one- and I think we’ll flip state legislative chambers as well. It’s going to be just as exciting as last night was depressing.
4) We are going to have an incredible crop of Presidential candidates to choose from in 2028. It’s really going to be an invigorating process and the hardest part about it for us as Democratic voters is going to be to just choose one.
5) And then whoever emerges from that will be battle hardened, they’re going to wipe the floor with JD Vance, and it’s going to be delightful.
It’s fine to take the time to mourn now. But everything in this country is cyclical. There are much better days ahead.
Thank you to everyone who worked on the election whether in a professional capacity or as a volunteer. I appreciate everything you do. I have no use for the blame game whatsoever. Sometimes people do incredible work and it doesn’t come to fruition because the country is somewhere else. There’s no magic campaign strategy that can make people feel different than they do. Better days ahead!
“Viewpoints” on Chapelboro is a recurring series of community-submitted opinion columns. All thoughts, ideas, opinions and expressions in this series are those of the author, and do not reflect the work or reporting of 97.9 The Hill and Chapelboro.com.
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