Another bundle of primary elections happened last night, and this morning all the political news was focused on what turned out to be the closest race of the evening: an upset victory in the governor's race among Democrats in Wisconsin. Which is understandable enough, I suppose, since it truly was a close contest (decided by less than a half a percentage point, only a few thousand votes), but this focus managed to crowd out another interesting primary next door, in Minnesota.

The stories today about the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary mostly followed one of two storylines. The first was: "How was the polling so wrong?" or (with a slightly different emphasis): "Progressives are failing to live up to their polling in Democratic primaries." The second storyline came from those pundits who could barely contain their relief that a centrist candidate had somehow managed to defeat a progressive in a contest where few people expected he'd even have a chance. Both of these storylines are probably going to prove to be far too sweeping and generic in the end, because while the political reporters all love to write about the "progressive versus establishment" fights within the party, to do so in this case means ignoring several rather large caveats.

The Wisconsin race was a weird one, for starters. David Crowley, who eked out a razor-thin victory, had earlier dropped out of the race. He only got back in the race in the midst of two other major Democratic establishment candidates also dropping out. This all happened within the last month or so. Crowley dropped out because he didn't think he had a chance of winning, in order to give other moderate candidates a better shot at defeating the progressive, Francesca Hong. Crowley then endorsed Wisconsin's sitting lieutenant governor, Sara Rodriguez. Just over a week later, Rodriguez dropped out of the race in the midst of a campaign finance scandal. A mere ten days after Crowley dropped out, he decided to get back into the race because of Rodriguez withdrawing. The sitting governor (who is wildly popular) immediately endorsed Crowley, which gave his candidacy an enormous last-minute boost (especially among late deciders). And then another establishment candidate, Mandela Barnes, also dropped out of the race at the last minute -- less than two weeks ago.

As you can see, this is not exactly the most normal dynamic for any election, with all these last-minute changes. But most pundits are ignoring all of these shakeups and concentrating instead on: "The polls were wrong!" Well, of course they were wrong, with this game of "Who is in, who is out?" going on. There simply wasn't enough time for the pollsters to accurately measure how voters felt about the choices they were going to be faced with when the election happened.

This facile storyline is wrong for another reason, too. Francesca Hong was indeed leading the polls, by double digits. But that sounds better than her poll numbers actually were. In the end, her polling was actually remarkably accurate, even though that's not what's in the headlines today. In the eight polls taken during all the shakeup in the other candidates, Hong was polling between 35 and 44 percent (with one outlier poll putting her at 52 percent). Last night, she wound up with 39.33 percent of the vote. That's pretty close (except for that one outlier poll) to where she was polling -- right smack in the middle of it, in fact. The "double-digit lead" headlines all came because all the other candidates were polling so low, compared to Hong. But when all the substitutions were complete, there was only one establishment candidate left to vote for, and all the voters who weren't already behind Hong all consolidated behind Crowley. Even with all the shakeups in the race, Hong's polling wasn't wildly inaccurate in the end, what was wildly inaccurate was trying to figure out how the rest of the voters would react to all the last-minute changes.

But that's not what most of the headlines read this morning, of course. The Wisconsin race's polling was compared, in most of today's articles, to the polling misread in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary last week. The two were conflated into the: "Progressives can't live up to their polling" storyline, which was only half true, at best (it was a far more valid argument to make in the Michigan race).

What was ignored in all of this was what happened in Minnesota last night. There, a progressive soundly defeated an establishment candidate for a Senate race. In fact, it wasn't even close -- Peggy Flanagan defeated Angie Craig by almost 20 points. Which, by the way, was in line with what the polls were predicting. Flanagan actually significantly overperformed her polling (none of the polls had her as high as 59 percent, which is the actual share of the vote she won last night). So much for the whole storyline about progressives not being able to perform well in Democratic primaries, eh? Flanagan, unlike Hong, had actually received the endorsement of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which may have helped.

There was one other story which didn't fit into the whole "progressives versus establishment Democrats" storyline, so it was mostly ignored. In Connecticut, a young candidate, Luke Bronin, beat a 78-year-old sitting House member, John Larson, who was running for a fifteenth term in office. The contest, however, was not ideological, so it didn't fit into the "young progressives successfully defeating old establishment Democrats in primaries" storyline. In fact, Larson actually campaigned to the left of Bronin, who is only 47 years old. There is indeed a generational shift happening within the Democratic Party, but that doesn't always mean it is an ideological shift as well. Because of this, the story wasn't given much prominence in the national press.

What it all comes down to is the basic truth that primaries can be messy. They don't necessarily easily fit into a journalistic storyline that attempts to explain "what is going on out there" in the election cycle. It's something to keep in mind while reading all the (sometimes overblown) analysis of last night's election results.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant