Tapper’s colleague Chris Cillizza was one of the loudest landslide predictors, repeatedly positing that the media and pollsters had learned from their failure in 2016 and were no longer discounting Republican support.

“Simply because election models missed the Trump phenomenon the first time around doesn’t mean we should ignore them entirely,” he wrote in September. “The models are updated to reflect the realignment Trump set in motion in 2016. The likelihood, then, of missing some sort of hidden pro-Trump factors in the electorate is much less.”

As the race neared, Cillizza only grew more confident. “There is now a reasonable chance that we may be looking at a major landslide up and down the ballot in two weeks’ time,” he stated last month.

Cillizza was not the only one. “I think that it’s more likely that Joe Biden will win in a landslide, than that Trump will win at all,” esteemed New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof said, a sentiment shared by Times data guru Nate Cohn. “The Coming Biden Landslide,” read a September Bulwark headline.