They said the Democrats were a solid bet to hang on to the Senate. They said many of the races were tight as a tick. They said these were primarily local contests in which a President couldn’t have much impact.So what do journalists have to say for themselves now? Were they, once again, slavishly wedded to a conventional wisdom that turned out to be wrong? How did so many of them miss Tuesday’s Republican tide? ‘‘It caught everybody by surprise,’’ says Ron Brownstein, political correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. ‘‘Why limit it to the press? If you talked to Republican professionals on Thursday and Friday, they were not expecting a two-seat Senate gain.’’ There were exceptions, of course, but such conservatives as Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol, Wall Street Journal Editorial Page Editor Paul Gigot and columnist Peggy Noonan predicted a Democratic Senate, as did many liberals, including Washington Monthly Editor Paul Glastris, Fox’s Juan Williams and CNN’s Al Hunt, Margaret Carlson and Mark Shields. NBC correspondent Campbell Brown had also given the Democrats the nod.‘‘If you’re a conservative and give an optimistic scenario, you get such a drubbing,’’ says Jonah Goldberg, editor of National Review Online. ‘‘Everyone says you’re in the tank. There’s incredible social pressure to hedge your bets, to stay within the 40-yard lines in what you predict.’’ Goldberg says other panelists gave him ‘‘grief’’ after he predicted on CNN that Norm Coleman would beat Walter Mondale in the Minnesota Senate race.Kristol, who believes there was ‘‘a late break’’ toward the GOP, credits the president: ‘‘We missed the fact that it was a special year. No one seriously thinks this could have happened if you hadn’t had 9/11 and Bush’s reaction to 9 I underestimated how much Bush as commander-in-chief would be worth.’’ ‘‘It was the conventional wisdom momentarily blinding people to the data that was there in the last few days,’’ he says. ‘‘I certainly didn’t call this one. The night before, I really started wondering. But I definitely didn’t think it would go this badly for the Democrats.’’‘‘Democrats seem positioned to maintain — or enlarge — their one-seat Senate majority,’’ Brownstein wrote in the Los Angeles Times, while adding that a GOP takeover was not out of reach. ‘‘Republicans face stiff odds in their bid to reclaim a Senate majority,’’ The Washington Post said.‘‘The cycle for the next few days,’’ says Polman, ‘‘will be to beat up on ourselves for having said for days and days that this is a fifty-fifty nation: Boy, aren’t we foolish! But the underlying fundamentals haven’t changed all that much.’’Newsweek’s Howard Fineman said: ‘‘Based on Elizabeth Dole’s 2000 presidential campaign, I confidently predicted on the Today show that she was like a tire with a slow leak that would go flat on Election Day. Boy, was I wrong.’’ (LATWP)
