选民果断投票，以遏制总统的权力。期望值低自有其好处。在周二中期选举开始前，对共和党的预测如此悲观，以至于民调观察人士开始开起一种心照不宣的玩笑：选举结果要么意味着特朗普时代的终结，要么意味着民调行业的终结。
The electorate voted decisively to curb the president’s power There’s a certain freedom in low expectations. Going in to Tuesday’s midterm elections, forecasts were so grim for the Republicans that poll watchers started trading a kind of knowing joke: that the results would either mean the end of the Trump era, or the end of the polling profession.
在这类预测之下，共和党人哪怕取得任何胜利，都似乎堪称小小的奇迹。人们的预期是民主党将大获全胜；而共和党人指望最终计票结果能稍微更复杂一些，因此几乎肯定可以自由地宣称，他们的表现比任何人预想的都要好。
Amid those sorts of predictions, any Republican victories would have seemed like a minor miracle. The expectation was that Democrats would have a blowout; Republicans, counting on the final tally to be a bit more mixed, would therefore almost certainly have the freedom to claim that they’d done better than anyone had thought they would.