For those who were watching Tuesday night started out looking like the way the 2016 election ended. It was a nail-biter for sure, but around 10 PM ET Democratic candidates broke through and soon enough, first Fox News then MSNBC and NBC News projected the Democrats would take the House.
CNN’s Jake Tapper early on said, “this was not a blue wave.”
The White House, naturally, also insisted there was no “blue wave.”
That’s false.
Princeton scientist Dr. Sam Wang, who founded and heads the Princeton Election Consortium, says that based on the number of Democratic votes, this was definitely a blue wave, or, as he puts it, a “popular wave.”
Dr. Wang notes that the last five elections that were called “waves,” ranged from margins of +5.7% to +10.6%.
And he says, based on The New York Times’ vote tallies of +9.2%, this is a wave.
The number of seats Democrats will gain over Republicans in the House right now is not known, but +9.2% is a huge margin.
(As of this writing the Times model shows Democrats +8.1%, still huge.)
Yes, this was a blue wave – and Democrats would have won even more seats had Republicans not gerrymandered the maps so much.
Don’t let Republicans – or anyone else – tell you differently.
Others are starting to catch on:
Image by Steve Lacy via Flickr and a CC license