January 02, 2017 11:45 AM UTC

2016's Top Story: The Year Everyone Got Wrong (Including Us)

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• by: Colorado Pols

At the beginning of 2016 we believe that the eventual outcome of the 2016 elections, both here in Colorado and nationally, could not have been predicted. We feel pretty confident about that because almost no one correctly predicted the course of the primary and general elections in 2016–from the results of the presidential election, to Colorado’s U.S. Senate race, marquee congressional races, and multitude of state legislative contests.

Yes, readers, the political prognostication industry, which includes this humble little blog and stretches upward to include lots of people even you might consider important, failed in a spectacular fashion to predict the outcome of the 2016 elections. We failed in whole by missing Donald Trump’s disruptive appeal to broadly frustrated American voters, which had no equivalent outlet for the left after Democrats crushed the disruption of Bernie Sanders. We failed in part by missing the far higher baseline of support for Trump that manifested on Election Day, which swamped downballot races in many states and made other states (including Colorado) much closer than expected.

We are here to tell you today that we take the failure to predict the dynamics of the 2016 elections very seriously for our part, and we trust in the ability of all the smart people whose job it is to understand why things happen in politics to similarly engage in the kind of hard, unsparing introspection that is now required. In that spirit, let’s take a minute to be very frank about the things we got wrong in 2016–and if we miss anything, we trust our readers will remind us in comments. Be brutally honest. We can take it.

Hillary Clinton carried Colorado much more narrowly than we expected. Colorado was certainly not the only state that underperformed at the top of the Democratic ticket, but we did not anticipate the soft support for Hillary Clinton and stronger-than-expected support for Trump–and adjusting for that margin at the top of the ticket explains many (but not all) developments in downticket Colorado races. We can only say again that the presidential race was misfigured in almost every state–that’s why Clinton was campaigning in Arizona in the final week, a state in which she never had a chance, instead of camping out in the decisive Rust Belt states she ended up losing.

Darryl Glenn lost by much less than we expected. As we’ve noted in other posts, that Democrats held Colorado’s senior U.S. Senate seat for Michael Bennet in what turned out another strong Republican election was the biggest missed opportunity for Colorado Republicans last year. The fact that Glenn was able to attract big money towards the end of the race, shocking observers including our own lying eyes, and pulled within six points of Bennet in the final count, underscores what might have happened if a qualified candidate had won the June 28th Republican primary. In retrospect it’s clear that Sen. Bennet was in more trouble than anyone thought going into 2016, and survived due to a combination of good fortune and a disciplined campaign.

We got Mike Coffman’s race wrong again, and we’ve been getting CD-6 wrong for years. This is a really big one that we know readers have been waiting for. Ever since the last round of redistricting in 2011, in which GOP Rep. Mike Coffman’s district was redrawn from an ultra-safe Republican seat to an economically and culturally diverse battleground, we have been confidently predicting Coffman’s eventual destruction. We hedged a little in 2012 on account of a relatively unknown Democratic candidate, but when Joe Miklosi came far closer to beating Coffman than anticipated, we felt certain that Coffman’s number would be up next time. That’s not what happened. Coffman changed his political stripes with an audacity that mollified some on the left and enraged others, but voters didn’t care either way about the past–they liked what they were hearing then. Coffman’s victory in 2016 in a district Trump lost by a wide margin is proof that what he did worked. Coffman’s ability to remain a faithful Republican vote in Congress while triangulating off the Republican brand to keep his seat is something we can no longer dismiss as unsustainable.

Same with Scott Tipton. On paper the challenge faced by incumbent CD-3 Rep. Scott Tipton from former state Sen. Gail Schwartz of Aspen in 2016 was formidable, but Tipton shellacked Schwartz by 14 points. Here again, there was the Trump tide we didn’t anticipate, and in particular the softness of Pueblo County for Democrats this year as Trump outperformed in a formerly safe Democratic blue-collar locality that we failed to account for. But beyond that, we can no longer ignore the solidification of the Western Slope around Mesa County as an increasingly Republican bastion. The inside-baseball digs on Tipton that Democrats have snickered about for years were simply not enough, and with each passing year Tipton’s roots go deeper. Unless a credible Republican challenger emerges to primary Tipton or CD-3 changes in redistricting after 2020, Tipton is the most comfortable representative of CD-3 since Scott McInnis–who represented the district for over a decade.

We thought Laura Woods’ seat would decide control of the Colorado Senate, and it didn’t. Senate District 19, the closely-divided battleground swing suburban district covering most of Arvada and part of Westminster in Jefferson County, was the overwhelming focus of attention this year. A rematch against the appointed former Democrat who lost the seat in 2014 by the narrowest of margins, the strong game run by Democrats against Woods and a backfiring ad campaign from the GOP Senate “527” organization gave Rachel Zenzinger a solid margin of victory by the standards of this district. Meanwhile, however, Republican Rep. Kevin Priola was closing the gap in Senate District 25, and in this end it was his victory in Adams County that preserved control of the chamber for Republicans. Everyone knew that Senate Democrats had to “run the table” in their competitive races to win back the Senate, but we didn’t predict this to be the race it came down to.

There you have it, folks: five big errors that we made in 2016 and we hope to learn from going forward, and we don’t expect for wait long for readers to point out more. We could certainly write a post about the things we got right in 2016, but those aren’t the lessons we need to learn right now. Having been continuously writing about Colorado politics for over twelve years, we recognize that predictions made before an election reflect on the credibility of the source after the election. It’s never our intention to get it wrong. We’re not journalists, of course, we’re bloggers–and we’re allowed to have opinions. But we have to be careful about allowing our biases to skew what should be objective analysis.

Here’s to, with your help, getting it more right in 2017.