As a transplant living in California, I’m pretty familiar with the electoral system here. And the things I’ve been hearing Republicans say on the subject are outrageous, as I explained at New York.

Some Republicans were so busy on the evening of November 6 spinning a poor midterm showing into a vindication of their party and president that they apparently missed the fact that the election wasn’t quite over. And later on, they professed mystification at the final results. I say “professed” because it’s hard to believe Speaker Paul Ryan is as stupid as he sounds here:

“The California election system ‘just defies logic to me,’ Ryan said during a Washington Post event.

“‘We were only down 26 seats the night of the election and three weeks later, we lost basically every California race….’

“’In Wisconsin, we knew the next day. Scott Walker, my friend, I was sad to see him lose, but we accepted the results on Wednesday,’ Ryan said. In California, ‘their system is bizarre; I still don’t completely understand it. There are a lot of races there we should have won.’”

The slow count from California should not have come as a surprise: It happened in the June 5 primary as well, and in the 2016 primary and general election. And it was in part the product of a 2015 change in state election laws allowing ballots postmarked by Election Day and received within three days to count. Since the share of Californians voting by mail has been going up regularly in recent elections, we’re talking about a lot of votes. Since mail ballots have to go through signature verification (just like in-person ballots go through at polling places), it takes a while to count them. There’s nothing new or nefarious about either of these practices. Voting by mail (or as the practice’s proponents prefer to call it, “voting from home”) is now quasi-universal in three states: Colorado, Oregon, and Washington. And much longer than California, Washington has for years allowed ballots postmarked by Election Day to count, leading to slow counts in that state as well. A Washington election official had an interesting reaction when asked back in 2012 about the consequences of a slow count:

“‘News reporters are the only people who complain about the vote-counting delay,’ said [Katie] Blinn, adding that Washington’s system is relatively inexpensive, accurate and encourages turnout.”

Apparently Speakers of the House also complain now.

While a spokesman for Ryan hastened to say he didn’t intend to claim a election fraud, his complaints echoed those of a California member of the Republican National Committee, Shawn Steel, who suggested just that in an op-ed for the Washington Times.

Citing Republican congressional candidate Young Kim’s 14-point lead at one point on the evening of November 6, Steel asks:

“How does a 14-point Republican lead disappear? Merciless and unsparing, California Democrats have systematically undermined California’s already-weak voter protection laws to guarantee permanent one-party rule.”

To those unfamiliar with GOP rhetoric, I should explain that “voter protection laws” means laws making it as hard as possible to vote. Consider Steel’s interpretation of the rule allowing ballots postmarked by Election Day:

“In California, voting doesn’t stop on Election Day. Absentee ballots need only be postmarked by Election Day, with ballots counted that arrive up to three days late. If ballots are sent to the wrong county, the ballot is valid for an additional four days….That means you literally have seven days after an election where a county could still be receiving legitimate ballots.”

Again, that’s been the practice in Washington for years, without complaint (other than from reporters). And when you think about it, why should we respect ballots cast on Election Day more than those filled out on or before Election Day that are duly placed in the mail, at their own expense? Should such voters have to guess how long it will take the postal service to deliver their ballots? This complaint only makes sense to someone who wants to make voting inconvenient, and hence rarer. Steel goes on to suggest that voting by mail is itself nefarious:

“In just four years, the number of absentee ballots distributed in California has increased by 44 percent. ‘Nearly 13 million voters have received a ballot in the mail, compared to just 9 million in the last gubernatorial election in 2014,’ notes Paul Mitchell, vice president of Political Data Inc.”

First of all, these aren’t “absentee ballots.” As is the case in a growing number of states, voting by mail is considered normal, not something you have to construct an excuse to do. And of course the number is rising: In California you can register as a “voter by mail” and you will receive mail ballots automatically so long as you keep voting. Steel points to an experiment that allowed a handful of counties this year to mail ballots to all registered voters as though that somehow encourages fraud. Again, that is the universal practice in voting-by-mail states; what’s the beef? You can vote by mail, vote in person, or not vote at all. Nothing has changed.

Here’s another bogus complaint from Steel, about what he calls, without a shred of evidence, “motor voter fraud:”

“Every person in California that interacts with the Department of Motor Vehicles is automatically registered to vote. This has predictably led to tens of thousands cases of voter registration problems. The state’s Motor Voter program has come under fire for double registering as many as 77,000 people and registering as many as 1,500 ineligible voters. The state’s bipartisan oversight agency expressed concerns about ‘serious problems with ensuring that the New Motor Voter Program works as intended and promised.'”

This is called “automatic voter registration” and 15 states (plus the District of Columbia) have similar systems. California’s just went into effect this last April, and those 1,500 ineligible voters (who were duly purged from the rolls) were out of the 1.4 million enrolled by September, when the errors were discovered and cured.

One more bogus complaint that you can hear other Republicans make involves something Steel confusedly calls “conditional voting”:

“California has effectively adopted same-day voter registration with the introduction of ‘conditional voting.’ This election cycle, voters who missed the 15-day voter registration deadline could request to cast a conditional ballot.”

Same-day voter registration is in effect in 17 states (plus D.C.). And “provisional ballots” have been in effect nationwide since the passage of the 2002 Help America Vote Act. It’s actually a means for ensuring against voter fraud, since provisional votes are not counted until their validity can be established. Yes, provisional ballots slow down vote counts, but the alternative — giving voters the benefit of the doubt and counting them all — isn’t likely going to be endorsed by Republicans….

This brouhaha might not matter if it did not feed the same myths of voter fraud that led Donald Trump to claim without a hint of evidence after the 2016 elections that “millions” of illegal votes had been cast for Hillary Clinton in California, robbing him of a popular-vote plurality nationally. Going into 2020, this sort of loose talk needs to be debunked wherever possible, unless we want to risk the possibility of a GOP election defeat that is not simply questioned but denied.

In looking at various analyses of where Republicans lost votes in the 2018 midterm elections, a pattern started to suggest itself, and I wrote about it at New York:

Most 2018 midterm postmortems have identified the same groups of voters as Republican weak spots. Chief among them are college-educated suburban voters, especially women, and millennials, who all stand out because they are swing voters likely to expand their share of the electorate, and because they really, really don’t seem to like the kind of GOP Donald Trump is building.

You know what else they tend to have in common? Progressive views on culture-war issues, which often offset comparatively more conservative views on economic policy, fiscal policy, and the size of the government. There are three notable state-level role models for Republican politics that caters to this combination of voter preferences, as RealClearPolitics’ Adele Malpass notes:

“The oxymoron of the 2018 elections is that three deep-blue states elected Democratic U.S. senators by wide margins while also electing Republican governors. In the so- called ‘People’s Republic of Vermont,’ voters overwhelmingly re-elected both progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders and Republican Gov. Phil Scott. It was the same story in reliably liberal Massachusetts where voters bestowed second terms on Elizabeth Warren and Charlie Baker. Ditto in Maryland for Ben Cardin and Larry Hogan. So how did Republican governors win in states where Hillary Clinton had some of her largest margins of victory in 2016?

“The campaign playbook was the same in all three states: stick to local issues while being socially liberal and fiscally conservative.”

But there’s a real problem with taking that approach at the national level. The sine qua non of “social liberalism” is being pro-choice on abortion policy. And in national GOP politics, that’s a position that has all but been read out of existence.

Yes, there remain two pro-choice Republicans in the Senate: Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. But Collins’s pro-choice street cred was severely damaged by her support for Brett Kavanaugh, and Murkowski’s relationship with her own party back home was strained by her “no” vote on that confirmation. And the anti-abortion movement believes the 2018 midterms significantly increased its power in the Senate and in the party, as the New York Times observed:

“Social conservatives said on Wednesday they were elated by the victories in the Senate and in the governors’ races, which they believe provide openings to push their agenda in the judiciary and the states even if a Democratic-led House ties up legislative priorities of President Trump and Washington Republicans.

“’We are so much stronger than we were before,’ said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion group that led an extensive turnout operation this year in states like North Dakota, Indiana and Missouri, where incumbent Democratic senators were defeated by anti-abortion Republicans. ‘We win when we go back to our roots,’ she added.”

With the Trump administration regarding its hard-core stance on abortion as central to its relationship with white evangelical “base” voters (a relationship policed by Vice-President Pence), the odds of the GOP giving a new breed of suburban political warriors space to maneuver on this issue are virtually nil. The next election, moreover, will be framed in no small part around the ability of Donald Trump to secure a second term in which to consummate a conservative judicial counterrevolution whose most immediate and important goal is the reversal of Roe v. Wade.

Polarization over abortion means that Democrats have all but lost their “pro-life” wing as well. But there are significantly more rank-and-file pro-choice Republicans than there are pro-life Democrats. And as Sarah Jones pointed out recently, Democrats don’t really need strongly anti-abortion voters to forge a majority. Republicans do need pro-choice voters, now and in the future, and at the worst possible time, their ability to accommodate that point of view is vanishing in the fires of the culture wars.

One of the great post-election rituals in recent years has been an assessment of the polls we all obsessed over before the first ballot was cast. I wrote about that at New York.

In retrospect, the national polls didn’t do badly at all that year, as Nate Silver explained:

“Trump outperformed his national polls by only 1 to 2 percentage points in losing the popular vote to Clinton, making them slightly closer to the mark than they were in 2012. Meanwhile, he beat his polls by only 2 to 3 percentage points in the average swing state.3 Certainly, there were individual pollsters that had some explaining to do, especially in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where Trump beat his polls by a larger amount. But the result was not some sort of massive outlier; on the contrary, the polls were pretty much as accurate as they’d been, on average, since 1968.”

Still, many Republicans have continued to believe that pollsters are generally part of a media establishment conspiring to undermine their confidence via the “fake news” of cooked data, as their leader has suggested:

The two fake news polls released yesterday, ABC & NBC, while containing some very positive info, were totally wrong in General E. Watch!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 24, 2017

“Nonpartisan House polls have historically missed the mark by an average of 5.9 points. This year it was just 4.9 points. Again, that means the average district poll was a full point closer to the result than usual….

“Statewide polling also had a strong year, although it should be noted that Senate and governors’ polling did pick fewer winners than usual. The average poll in the Senate was off by only 4.2 points. The average Senate poll historically has been off by 5.2 points, which means this year’s polls were a point better than average. Likewise, the average governor’s poll had an error rate of 4.4 points. That’s 0.7 point more accurate than the average governor’s poll since 1998.”

The reason for the “pick fewer winners” problem wasn’t so much polling error as the exceptional number of very close races. The gold-standard Cook Political Report rated nine Senate races and 12 gubernatorial races as toss-ups. There were a few races — which happened to be very high-profile contests — where the polls seemed to be off more than a hair, such as the Florida governor’s race, where the RealClearPolitics polling average on election eve showed Andrew Gillum up by nearly four points; it showed a slight lead for Bill Nelson in the same state; both lost by an eyelash. And the polls missed Mike Braun’s solid Senate win in Indiana. But the RCP averages correctly predicted the outcome of many cliff-hangers like the Georgia’s governor’s race and Senate contests in Missouri, Montana, and Texas.

Where there were mistakes, they didn’t follow any partisan pattern, as Nate Cohn observed in his review of midterm polling:

“On average, the polls were biased toward Democrats (meaning the Democrats did worse in the elections than polls indicated they would) by 0.4 points, making this year’s polls the least biased since 2006 and nothing like the polls in 2016, which were three points more Democratic than the results.”

And if you get into particular types of races, as Harry Enten did, the partisan “errors” were mixed:

“The average governor and Senate polls were about a point more favorable to the Democrats than the result. The average generic congressional ballot and House district polls were less than a point more favorable to Republicans than the actual result.”

Since sky-high turnout (the highest as a percentage of eligible voters in a midterm in over a century) may have been the biggest surprise of the elections, and the one pollsters would have had the hardest time predicting, the overall accuracy and balance were especially impressive. Certain types of voters, however, still seem to marginally elude pollsters, notes Cohn:

“The higher-than-expected turnout might have inadvertently contributed to a 2016-like pattern, since lower-turnout voters in the big urban states tend to be nonwhite and Democratic, while lower-turnout voters in rural, less educated states tend to be white working-class voters.

“In the Times Upshot/Siena polls, undecided voters tended to follow a similar pattern: In the Sun Belt, the undecided voters tended to be nonwhite Democrats; in the North, they were more likely to be white voters without a degree.”

So unsurprisingly, polls again tended to underestimate Republican votes in states with big white working-class populations and to underestimate Democratic voters in states with large nonwhite populations. And very late trends in undecided voters — which polls always miss to some extent — may have mattered here and there as well.

From a consumer’s point of view (and no one consumes polls quite like a daily political writer like yours truly), the big new development in 2018 was the large battery of House polls conducted by the New York Times in conjunction with Siena College. The combine not only supplied rare data on competitive House races (where a lot of the polling is private), but hit the mark quite often, as Enten notes:

“[The] increase in accuracy [in House races] was driven in large part by the Siena College/New York Times polls, whose surveys made up the bulk of district level polling and had an average absolute error of just about 3 points. That’s nearly 3 points better than average, which is off the charts good.”

If, like me, you believe the answer to questionable data is more, not less, data, the proliferation of polls is a good thing, even if quality continues to vary. And while Republicans may continue to follow Trump’s cynical habit of attacking any information that doesn’t confirm their own biases, you’d hope that at least privately they’d concede that more competition produces a better and more reliable result.

As late votes began drifting in and post-midterm spin reached its apex, I took a long look and pushed back a bit at New York on a couple of common interpretations we were hearing:

You’d think that on November 8, 2016, the political world would have learned that early election night impressions can be misleading. But rushes to judgement were common on and immediately after Election Day 2018. Some of them were simply prefab Republican spin reinforced by a selective view of the early returns….

Another factor: There were a lot of uncalled races on election night. That occurred partly because many contests were close, but also because of two crosscutting phenomena that combined to slow the count in many places: Democratic-supported proliferation of last-minute voting opportunities, and Republican-supported restrictions that added to the number of unresolved “provisional” ballots. In the former category, California stood out as a megastate that recently decided to allow mail ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted later, which meant that over a third of the votes were uncounted on election night.

Nevertheless, the day after the midterms, spin efforts by Republicans intensified, led by the spinner-in-chief:

“President Trump on Wednesday said that Republicans ‘defied history’ in the 2018 midterm elections by maintaining control of the Senate and winning a ‘slew’ of governor’s races — despite losing their majority in the House of Representatives.

“’It was a big day yesterday,’ a somber-sounding Trump said in the East Room of the White House. ‘The Republican Party defied history to expand our Senate majority while significantly beating expectations in the House.’

“’It was very close to a complete victory,’ he declared.”

It helped GOP spinners that their candidates led in the election night returns in a host of unresolved contests, including the Arizona and Florida Senate races and a bunch of House races in New York, New Jersey, Georgia, and, most of all, California.

But nearly two weeks after the fact, we can now make a more balanced assessment of the midterms. The fact that late-counted ballots tended to trend Democratic almost everywhere (even if it wasn’t enough to change the outcome in several key races) made the final map bluer than it looked on election night.

In the Senate, Republicans picked up two net seats by winning Democratic-held seats in Florida, Indiana, Missouri, and North Dakota, while losing seats they held in Arizona and Nevada. The fate of a final Republican-held seat will be determined in a November 27 runoff in Mississippi where appointed Republican senator Cindy Hyde-Smith will face Democrat Mike Espy. But Democrats won 22 of the 34 Senate races decided so far. And while California complicates the Senate popular-vote picture (because its top-two primary system produced a two-Democrat general election for the Senate), by any measure more people voted for Democrats than Republicansin Senate races. FiveThirtyEight calculates that 27 of 33 Democratic candidates (excluding Mississippi and two-Democrats California) over-performed the partisan lean of their states. So it’s a bit strange to treat the Senate shift as a GOP “mandate” on par with what happened in the House.

Speaking of the House, post–Election Day results for the lower chamber have been solidly blue, as Roll Call notes:

“Nine of the last 10 House races that have been called by The Associated Press have flipped to the Democrats after Gil Cisneros defeated Republican Young Kim in California’s 39th District, currently held by retiring GOP Rep. Ed Royce.”

Cisneros’s win completed a Democratic sweep of five California House toss-up races (plus another open Republican seat they were favored to win), including four in the ancient Republican stronghold of Orange County. There’s even a chance that late mail and provisional ballots could tip yet another GOP seat, David Valadao’s in the Central Valley, into the Donkey column.

Democrats have gained at least 37 net House seats, 14 more than they needed to gain control of the chamber; of the four races still unresolved, they lead in one district (New York’s 22nd) and trail in three (Georgia’s Seventh, New York’s 27th, and Utah’s Fourth). A 38-seat shift would represent the fourth largest in midterms in the last half-century (Democrats won 48 seats in 1974, while Republicans won 52 seats in 1994 and 63 in 2010), and seven more than Democrats won the last time they flipped control of the House, in 2006. When it’s all said and done Democrats will probably have won the national House popular vote by a bit more than 7 points; Republicans won it by just under one percent in 2016, and by a little under 6 percent in 2014.

Democrats also climbed out of a very deep hole they had dug for themselves in state elections. They picked up seven net governorships out of 36 on the ballot, giving them 23, even though they lost close, winnable races in Florida, Georgia, Iowa, and Ohio. They also won control of seven state legislative chambers, and made some progress toward busting up Republican “trifecta” control of state governments (they’ll have another chance in 2020):

“Entering the 2018 midterm election, Republicans had a +14 state trifecta lead: of 34 states with trifectas, 26 were Republican and eight were Democratic. But after the votes were counted, Democrats increased their trifecta total with a net gain of six, and Republicans declined to 23 trifectas (a net loss of three). States with divided government (i.e., no trifecta for either major party) declined to 13.”

Far under the radar screen, Democrats flipped four state attorney general offices, and two secretaries of State.

All in all, it’s impossible to call this midterm anything other than a solid Democratic win, once you contextualize what happened in the Senate and don’t get too hung up on expectations or should-woulda-coulda contests. Facing a highly polarized electorate and structural GOP advantages in both the House (gerrymandering and more efficient GOP voter distribution) and the Senate (the aforementioned crazy landscape), Democrats did well across the board, and without the usual midterm qualifier of low turnout (2018 produced the highest midterm turnout since 1914). There is a decidedly less one-sided atmosphere in Washington and in many states, and Democrats are well positioned for an even more fateful election two years from now.

As a resident of the Golden State of California, I have been impressed by the gradually building landslide this state’s Democrats have built as the vote slowly came in on and after November 6 thanks to Democratic-passed laws aimed at making it easier to vote and making sure every vote is counted.  I wrote an assessment at New York:

California, already a blue bastion in which Democrats held the legislature, every statewide elected position, both U.S. Senate seats, and a solid majority of U.S. House seats, managed to become even more Democratic on November 6.

Democrats regained the state legislative supermajorities they won in 2016 (they had lost that margin in the state senate thanks to a recall, and temporarily lost it in the state assembly due to resignations over sexual-misconduct charges), giving new Democratic governor Gavin Newsom veto-proof support for this agenda. Republicans again failed to win any statewide offices; the closest they came was former Republican insurance commissioner Steve Poizner’s just-short effort to reclaim his old job as an independent. And most importantly, they have lost four U.S. House seats out of the 14 they currently control, with two more losses more likely than not as late returns (mostly mail ballots postmarked on or near Election Day) continue to trend Democratic, as the Los Angeles Times notes:

“California Republicans lost a fourth seat in the House on Tuesday as Democrat Josh Harder gained enough votes to oust GOP Rep. Jeff Denham in the San Joaquin Valley….

“In Orange County’s latest ballot count Tuesday, Republican Rep. Mimi Walters fell 261 votes behind her Democratic challenger, Katie Porter. Walters finished election night more than 6,200 votes ahead, but her lead steadily dwindled until it vanished on Tuesday.

“Young Kim, the Republican running to succeed GOP Rep. Ed Royce of Fullerton, saw her lead over Democrat Gil Cisneros shrink to 711 votes in the updated Orange and Los Angeles county tallies.”

By my rough calculation, losing six seats would leave Republicans with the fewest California House members since 1944, when the state only had 23 districts. The GOP did better in House races even in such notable Democratic landslide years as 1964, 1974, 2006, and 2008.

These very blue results for Republicans extended beyond their dismal performance in electoral contests. The GOP invested heavily in a ballot initiative to repeal a big 2017 fuel-tax increase that was being used to deal with a massive backlog of road and bridge repairs; Republicans very much hoped it would drive voters to the polls in their Southern California and Central Valley strongholds, saving endangered officeholders. It didn’t seem to work, and the initiative itself was trounced.

The depths to which California Republicans have descended have already spurred calls for the party to distance itself from Donald Trump, who is pretty clearly a millstone around the elephant’s neck in this particular part of the country. A widely quoted op-ed by Republican former legislator Kristin Olsen didn’t mince words:

“The California Republican Party isn’t salvageable at this time. The Grand Old Party is dead – partly because it has failed to separate itself from today’s toxic, national brand of Republican politics….

“While the rest of the nation saw a mix of Republican and Democrat victories, we in California experienced a blue tsunami. It looks as if Democrats will win nearly every target seat, including some in districts that have been historically considered ‘safe’ for Republicans.

“It is time for a New Way. And if the Republican Party can’t evolve, it may be time for a third party, one that will appeal to disenfranchised voters in the Republican and Democratic parties who long for better representation and a better California for all.”

If this sounds alarmist, it’s not that different from the position taken earlier this year by the last Republican governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, in helping to launch a moderate GOP organization called (probably not coincidentally) “New Way:”

“Mr. Schwarzenegger said the Republican Party had to be ‘environmentally progressive, socially liberal and fiscally conservative’ in order to be competitive.

“’The politics of division and anger and resentment can drive a strong base to the polls, yes,’ he said. ‘But it is tearing our country apart at the seams. And nothing is getting done.'”

Having alienated the state’s large and growing minority populations via years of anti-immigrant demagoguery and law-and-order appeals, and now beginning to lose its ancient suburban base via fidelity to Trump, California Republicans have richly earned their bad situation. It’s hard to imagine them going back and starting over, but that may be what the situation demands.