I think this is exactly right.

On the left, landslide predictions were everywhere — it’ll be a blowout for Biden, so many said. He’ll take Florida, maybe Texas! Then the Senate goes blue, too. Court-packing, here we come. On the right, a mirror image of this anticipation, incessantly encouraged by a president who goes well beyond the usual campaign spiel about confidence in the American people’s wisdom to assertions that any unfavorable report is a deliberate lie and the only explanation for his loss is the coordination of massive fraud by his enemies. “The more bad things happen in the country, it just solidifies support for Trump,” a GOP county chair from North Carolina told Politico in June. “We’re thinking landslide.”

This pattern held in my personal acquaintance, too. Almost every Trump supporter I know thought their man would triumph by a comfortable margin, as did almost every Biden supporter. Map after map envisioned Electoral College totals north of 320, 330, 360! A friend of mine who works at a conservative consulting firm will likely win the office pool of election predictions because nearly all her Republican coworkers expected Trump to equal or improve upon his 2016 showing. The Democrats on my Twitter feed “just don’t even understand” how Trump got any votes. On a Republican Facebook friend’s profile, commenters are “stunned” Trump could lose (or convinced he’ll still pull off a victory somehow). And the QAnon folks … whew.

It’s as if American partisans have lost their political theory of mind. Their opponents’ interior life has become inaccessible, inexplicable. At the individual level, they might understand why their aunt voted Republican or their old roommate is a Democrat. But that exercise doesn’t seem to scale. Contemplating the nation, the politically mind-blind struggle to imagine how 70 million voters made a choice they find unfathomable.

https://theweek.com/articles/948405/americans-have-lost-political-theory-mind