A number of you likely read my Tuesday On TAP, in which I predicted a sweeping Biden victory. I’m confident I got the "victory" part right, but not, unfortunately, the "sweeping."

Mea culpa. Boy, was I culpa. I was going on the basis of the polls I judged to be the best, a judgment informed (or misinformed) by people I’d trusted on such matters. There were a couple of flashing lights—like The Des Moines Register’s poll—that should have slowed me down, but didn’t.

The misinformation probably came down to the question of who was judged to be a "likely voter." In hindsight, a sizable number of unlikelies turned out to be likely after all. The Trumpies did a very good job of mobilizing Red America, as the Bidens did the Blue. Clearly, there was a collective underestimation of the Trumpies’ achievement, and I was part of that collective.

We also don’t know yet the consequences of the fact that the Trump people actually walked their precincts for months, while the Biden side relied on phone and digital contacts, though they did begin walking in the final weeks. All praise to UNITE HERE, the union of (largely unemployed) hotel workers, who spent months walking in Nevada, Arizona, and Philadelphia and thereby made a huge contribution to Biden’s impending victory.

My Tuesday mistake reminds me of a story about FDR. As his 1936 re-election campaign loomed, he held a Cabinet meeting to discuss the coming campaign and brought up the inconvenient fact that when he’d run in 1932, he’d delivered a big speech in Pittsburgh in which he’d pledged he’d absolutely balance the budget. Happily, necessarily, he hadn’t done that once elected. Indeed, he’d allocated billions to put millions of unemployed Americans on the federal payroll building schools, roads, bridges, airports, dams, aircraft carriers, the works. The budget was thus way out of balance, and it was a blessing that it was. Still, there was the matter of that Pittsburgh speech. What, he asked his Cabinet, should he do about it?

The room fell silent. Then, Commerce Secretary Dan Roper suggested a response: "Deny you were ever in Pittsburgh."

My Tuesday On TAP? What Tuesday On TAP?