By Nate Silver- “Which Polls Fared Best (and Worst) in the 2012 Presidential Race”

“The biggest reason many of the pundits got it wrong? False bravado. Most of them aren’t true “pundits”, they’re partisan cheerleaders who’d NEVER say Mitt Romney is going to lose, no matter how likely they may know it is.”

“Pundits” got it wrong because they were telling us a message, not making a prediction. They were trying to push the election towards Romney.”

“If you live in the fox news tiny, small-minded bubble and all you watch is fox news, you have no idea what real people are thinking.”

“The simple fact is that many of these so-called “pundits” are nothing but a part of the Republican spin machine with an attempt to skew the numbers in favor of their candidate. Also many of the pollsters like RASMUSSEN were nothing more than a de facto Republican spin poll to shock voters into voting for their basically said candidate! Man,.. those jokers lost major street cred!! It is what it is or……..was what it was, but people can now see it for what it was!”

“It’s simple–denial. You could see it every day on these message boards with ordinary people. All the conservative ideologues who said “The polls are skewed. They’re oversampling Democrats. Romney will win in a landslide!” They simply denied the evidence because it didn’t mesh with their personal beliefs and what they WANTED to happen. They failed to set their own personal bias aside and look at the reality of the numbers, trying to INFLUENCE the election rather than PREDICT it.”

“I think this just proves what many of us have been saying all along. The Republicans have become victims of their own groupthink. They don’t want to hear things that contradict their world view so they only seriously listen to sources that agree with them. Pretty soon it ends up such that they rarely hear anything that contradicts their point of view and when they do, they have trained themselves to dismiss it. Consequently they rendered themselves completely illiterate to the writing on the wall and they really did believe Rassmussen was the only accurate poll and Romney was going to win big.”

I don’t pretend to understand statistical analysis, but when someone predicted almost with perfection the 2008 outcome, it would seem foolish to brand Silver merely as “a man of very small stature, a thin and effeminate man with a soft-sounding voice that sounds almost exactly like the ‘Mr. New Castrati’ voice used by Rush Limbaugh on his program”. And to predict 49 out of 50 for the 2012 election (it may be 50 out of 50 when Florida reports) says a heck of a lot more about Silver’s numbers than it does for the Fox News predictions.

Seriously, when one listens to nothing but Fox, he or she has no other information than what is fed them by the likes of Morris and Rove. The listening audience didn’t even KNOW about Silver’s predictions and that was part of the reason for the shock. It’s one thing to be supportive and optimistic about a candidate but another thing to totally keep your listening audience out of the loop by predicting a Romney landslide over and over. Fox was stunned–and for good reason.

Additionally, you don’t threaten to take away a person’s right and responsibility to vote nor do you try to skew the rules so as to make voting more difficult. But the conservative officials had hoped to stymie the vote in numerous states; their blatant efforts were well-publicized and served to force positive action to offset the obstruction. Those long voting lines should never have happened. Patriotic Americans do not become obstructionists and those who do should pay heavily for their immoral and unethical intent.

1. Dick Morris: “This is going to be a landslide.” The former Clinton adviser predicted a dominant Romney win, calling it “the biggest surprise in recent American political history.” Claiming that polls were oversampling Democrats, Morris wondered if “it will rekindle the whole question on why the media played this race as a nailbiter.”

2. Roger Kimball: “Obama is toast.” The publisher of prominent right-wing book imprint Encounter Books and a frequent contributor to conservative outlets, Kimball boldly predicted that Romney “is going to win, big time.” It was easy, he could “tell you in three syllables and a few numbers…Ben-gha-zi.” Though the Benghazi story played big in right-wing media before the election, a vanishingly small number of voters reported foreign policy being the top priority in the election – let alone the Embassy issue, which the Romney campaign had completely dropped in the stretch.

3. Karl Rove: “At least 279 electoral votes.” “It comes down to numbers. And in the final days of this presidential race, from polling data to early voting, they favor Mitt Romney,” Rove wrote in a WSJ op-ed ignoring the fact that most polls showed growing momentum for the president. He predicted that Romney will win 51 percent of the popular vote and “at least 279 electoral votes.”

4. Peggy Noonan: “There is no denying the Republicans have the passion now.” Noonan is one of the most respected political columnists in the country despite her penchant for deciding things based on her gut rather than actual data. But her Romney prediction wasn’t exactly well thought out even by her own standard. According to Noonan, “all the vibrations [were] right” for a Romney win because “something old was roaring back.” While this might be the right way to open an H.P. Lovecraft novel, it probably isn’t the best way to think about presidential elections.

5. Larry Kudlow: “Yes, that’s right: 330 electoral votes.” CNBC personality Larry Kudlow bet Romney would “sweep the Midwest,” a point on which Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio beg to differ. He was so excited about his prediction that Romney would get 330 votes that he repeated it twice — despite the fact that he was making the call two weeks out from the election.

6. Fred Barnes: “Romney will be elected the 45th president of the United States.” Barnes, the editor of the Weekly Standard, didn’t attach a particular number to his prediction, but his reasoning for betting on Romney was beyond silly. According to Barnes, despite the fact that “there’s no empirical evidence” that undecided voters break for the challenger before the election, “it helps Romney.” He also bet that Romney would win because of significant advantages among seniors, evangelicals, and gun owners — that is to say, Republicans.

7. Michael Barone: “Fundamentals usually prevail in American elections.” Considered by many to be the dean of Washington politics coverage, Barone predicted a 315-223 Romney blowout in which Romney took easy Obama states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Barone’s principal reason for calling it huge for Romney, the economic fundamentals, looks even stranger, as they actually favored Obama.

8. Dean Chambers: “The race has shifted profoundly in favor of Mitt Romney.” It appears the election has unskewed the unskewer. Chambers, the proprietor of the famous “correcting biased polls” UnskewedPolls.com, made two predictions before the election. While both obviously called a Romney win, the first one predicted a landslide — 359 electoral votes, even larger than Barone’s — the second, more sober assessment called a more modest 275. Chambers may owe Nate Silver, whom he described as “a man of very small stature, a thin and effeminate man with a soft-sounding voice that sounds almost exactly like the ‘Mr. New Castrati’ voice used by Rush Limbaugh on his program” in what appeared to be a takedown piece, something of an apology.

9. Newt Gingrich: “A Romney landslide.” The former House Speaker predicted that Romney will take 53 percent of the popular vote and at least 300 electoral college votes. “My personal guess is you’ll see a Romney landslide, 53 percent-plus . . . in the popular vote, 300 electoral votes-plus,” Gingrich said. He also predicted that Republicans “may come very close to capturing control of the Senate.” He apologized for the faulty call the morning after the election.

10. Jim Cramer: “The presidential race is nowhere as close as the polls suggest.” The Mad Money finance “expert” famous for being humiliated by Jon Stewart predicted an Obama landslide, 440-98 in the electoral college and 55-45 in the popular vote. To put this in perspective, Obama would have had to win every semi-competitive state and, er, Texas, Georgia, Indiana, Nebraska, Kentucky, Missouri, and West Virginia.

I did not expect Nevada to break republican but with the country’s highest unemployment rate and foreclosure rate I can’t see why people vote for more of the same. I have not heard our President speak of any new economic policy for this term.

I hope the plan is more than printing more currency and gridlock in congress. The latter responsibility is on both parties and our President.

What surprised me most about the election was seeing how well Romney did. He was no shining star in the primaries, he’s detested by many leading figures in his own party, he has religious beliefs that many Christians must find very troubling, there’s his history of outsourcing jobs and off-shore tax havens, and there are the things mentioned in the Salt Lake City editorial that kicked off this discussion. Think back a year ago, Contrarian. You weren’t a Romney fan either.