Toni It’s still something of a mystery that the state polls were considerably off in some key Midwestern and Northeast states, correct?

Nate Yeah. There are theories — and we’ll publish some thoughts on them at some point — but it will be easier to nail down with this information.

Toni Regarding vote shifts since 2012, the erosion of Democratic support among working-class whites was happening well before Hillary Clinton. Looking back, Joni Ernst’s 2014 victory in Iowa was a flashing warning sign for Democrats. Harry Enten of FiveThirtyEight wrote an article whose headline was: “Something Funny Happened in Iowa, and It May Hurt Democrats in 2016.”

In your midterms analysis in 2014, you wrote:

The results in Iowa were the clearest illustration that the Republican landslide on Tuesday was not just because of low Democratic turnout in off-year elections. On Tuesday, Joni Ernst, now a Republican senator-elect, won a decisive nine-point victory. She swept much of traditionally Democratic eastern Iowa, where Democrats have long fared well with rural voters. These gains suggest that demographic trends have not doomed Republicans to minority-party status, as some political analysts predicted. The next Republican presidential candidate could outperform Mr. Romney among white voters by holding Republican gains in the South and winning back some of the white Obama voters of the rural North.

Nate I do think there’s a lot of interesting foreshadowing in the 2014 results. Bruce Poliquin’s win in northern Maine, big Republican House gains in upstate New York and Long Island, and the surprisingly easy G.O.P. wins in the Iowa Senate race and for Wisconsin and Michigan governor foreshadowed the broad contours of Republican gains.

And I’d also add that they foreshadowed the polling error as well. You could also add the Kentucky governor’s race in 2015 (Matt Bevin’s victory).

That said, 2014 was a midterm election when the president’s approval was in the low 40s. The Republican sweep was broad. Mark Warner, incredibly, nearly lost in Virginia. Mark Udall lost in Colorado. The Republicans picked up governor’s mansions in Illinois, Massachusetts and Maryland. The party’s strength was pretty comprehensive across all categories of white voters.

So, personally, I’m not really looking back on 2014 and thinking “we should have known” Clinton would lose in the way that she did. I think 2016 with Trump was much more of a decisive break from recent trends than it was a continuation of what we saw between 2008 and 2014.