Counting Backwards (I Count You In)

Grover Norquist is pretty much right about the basics about the 2012 nomination process:

After the speech, he said only three of the Republicans seeking the nomination were really running for president: Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty and Rick Perry.

 “In 2012, we had ten people up on stage. Three of them were running for president, the others were looking to sell books or be radio talk-show hosts or marriage counseling or something, but they weren’t running for president,” he said.

Pawlenty, the former Minnesota governor, showed he was genuinely running for president because he quit the race when it appeared he couldn’t win, Norquist said. “The other guys, when they didn’t win, they didn’t quit because they weren’t actually planning to win,” he said.

Do I have a quibble? I do! They didn't make it to "up on stage," but Haley Barbour, Jon Thune, and perhaps one or two others might qualify as serious candidates. After all, they too dropped out when they lost.

Norquist anticipates that things will be different in 2016, with "six or seven" candidates having the money to compete.

It's certainly possible (although he seems to be implying they're stay in late into the primaries; that's not going to happen, since serious candidates who do badly in the early rounds will drop out after South Carolina or earlier). On the other hand, what may be happening on the Republican side is that the invisible primary is winnowing far more efficiently than it used to. It wouldn't shock me if we get half a dozen or so people who appear to be running now actually dropping out before the Ames straw poll, and then one or two more by fall 2015, leaving an Iowa field that looks sort of like the 2012 one -- two or three viable candidates, and a bunch of others.

What I'm also highly interested in is whether the same thing will happen on the Democratic side, or if they're pattern for at least formally announced candidates all making it to Iowa holds this time. If, that is, there are formally announced multiple candidates on the Democratic side.

(And, yes, I'm enjoying thinking about presidential nomination process stuff for a few minutes before I have to get back to the shutdown/debt limit topics. Oh well).

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Rosalind Chao, 56.

Good stuff for the new week:

1. I'm really looking forward to reading Steve Teles on "Kludgeocracy in America."

2. If you're following the CR and the Senate, then Sarah Binder's piece on procedure is a must-read.

3. Another good one from Dan Drezner on Syria and Iran.

4. David Price (the political scientist and Member of the House, not the pitcher) on the broken appropriations process.

5. And a nice one from John Sides and Lynn Vavreck; it's an excerpt from their new book on 2012, with this piece covering the post-South Carolina primaries and caucuses. It's excellent (despite an unfortunate headline that Salon stuck them with, which suggests exactly the opposite of what their analysis says). Looking back, I'm more convinced than ever that Romney wrapped it up in South Carolina -- it knocked Rick Perry out, and put the vaguely viable Rick Santorum too far behind to really have any serious chance even if everything broke right for him.

Christie, Strategic Politicians, and the 2012 Cycle

John Sides makes the point today that Chris Christie's choice to pass on WH 2012 was consistent with the pretty good chance that Barack Obama would be re-elected. Strategic politicians, John says, consider the chances of winning in their decisions about running, and that

a strategic candidate might have looked at the landscape in 2011 and said, “You know what, I’ll have a better shot in 2016.”  And we aren’t suggesting that there aren’t idiosyncratic factors at work either.   It’s just to say that Christie’s decision was nicely in line with what political science says.

Put that way, I would have to agree. And yet.

If we can assume that Christie really did have a very good shot at the nomination...had he asked me at any point in 2011 whether he should run or not, I would definitely have said to go for it.

Yes, the economy plus a first-term president made any Republican a legitimate longshot. However, the economy was rocky enough in 2011 that a significant downturn was a very real possibility. And then there's the chance that Obama would have stumbled in some other way: a scandal, mismanagement of Afghanistan, or a Katrina-like disaster.

And then there's the other side of the coin. First of all, if Christie passes and Obama does tank, then Mitt Romney is president and he has a vice president (who is almost certainly not going to be Christie; it was going to be a conservative favorite), and who knows when the next open nomination opportunity might be?

Then there's the possibility that the economy keeps Obama afloat through 2012 and then really gets going after that, putting the Democrats in excellent position for 2016. John refers to Gary Jacobson on strategic politicians, and rightly so, but waiting for a shot at a House seat is a lot different from strategic choices for presidential elections -- there are just far fewer opportunities.

And that's also true on the nomination side. If it's really true that Republican party actors were ready to ditch Romney for Christie and he therefore had an excellent chance for the nomination, it may turn out to have been by far his best shot at that prize. And he could have known that in 2011, too. A significant feature of the 2012 cycle for Republicans is that thanks to Democratic landslides in 2006 and 2008 followed by a Republican landslide in 2010, there were a surprisingly small number of potential Republican candidates with conventional credentials in 2012 -- but an unusually large number who were on track to have those credentials for 2016. That's something that a strategic politician needed to take into account, too.

However...

I'm really not convinced that Christie had much of a chance at the nomination. John is reacting to an anecdote from the new Dan Balz book, that (as David Lauter puts it) "Republican notables, including Henry Kissinger, Nancy Reagan and some of the nation's wealthiest businessmen" were trying to get Christie to run. Okay, I haven't read Balz, but: meh. If Kissinger is one of the big names recruiting you...well, ever, but certainly in 2012, then you really don't have much. It's not at all clear that Nancy Reagan has had any significant independent clout within the GOP for some time now. As for those "wealthiest businessmen," if they aren't important players within the party, then I'm not sure why we should be so impressed by them. Even if they were ready to open their checkbooks.

What I actually think Christie shows is, in part, how conventional credentials work. Christie gets elected in 2009; unless he's ready and willing to run right out of the box, he's getting a very late start. Was it possible? Maybe. But surely it wasn't for those elected in 2010. By the time they could have got started, too many people had made too many commitments. And it's very possible that was the case for the class of '09, too.

But if he really had an inside track to the nomination...I'm not even sure I would have advised against going for the 1984, 1972, and 1964 nominations for out-party prospective candidates. I definitely would not have advised Christie against a run on the basis that Obama was a small, but solid, favorite.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Lena Dunham, 27.

Some good stuff:

1. Kevin Drum on the new fuel for Benghazi. Plausible.

2. John Sides has an overview of WH 2012 and electioneering. Helpful.

3. And Dan Drezner on the Richwine dissertation. Clarifying.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Martha Quin, 54.

The good stuff:

1. Elspeth Reeve on generations nonsense.

2. A timeline on jumping into Senate races, from Shira Toeplitz. Useful!

3. Seth Masket, Robert Duffy and David Brown on funding political science.

4. And Boehner and his conference, from Brian Beutler.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Candice Bergen, 67.

Some good stuff:

1. If you care about turnout, you obviously don't want to miss Michael McDonald on the demographics of the 2012 electorate.

2. Much more on 2012 and campaign effects from John Sides and Lynn Vavreck. 

3. And Marc Ambinder on Benghazi.

Today in Comic Relief

Sure, there's war, and unemployment, and all sorts of other terrible things...but at least we get the unreported story of the 2012 nomination battle: that Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich almost formed a unity ticket to take on Mitt Romney.

Okay, granted, there's apparently less to this than meets the eye, or at least the headline ("nearly toppled Romney"). The story (nicely reported by Joshua Green) is apparently that in the run-up to the Michigan primary, the Santorum campaign pushed the disgraced former Speaker to drop out and endorse the struggling defeated Pennsylvania Senator. Newt, with typical Newtness, instead tried to get Santorum to go for a "Unity" ticket with Newt on top. The negotiations got as far as face-to-face meetings between the candidates, but eventually fell apart.

Now, this was after Santorum's big day on February 7 in which he posted surprise victories in Colorado and Minnesota caucuses and a Missouri beauty contest...it was at the high point of the Santorum campaign. But it was also a month after Romney had pretty much locked up the nomination. More to the point, there was no large Gingrich constituency ready to follow him to Santorum; to the contrary, if they had really named a Santorum-Gingrich ticket it's extremely likely that Santorum would have drawn fire from the large portion of the GOP who didn't want Newt anywhere close to the White House.

The truth is that if party actors wanted Rick Santorum, they would have rallied to him, and they very much did not. They did not after his win in Iowa; they did not after his CO/MN/MO big day. Even in the extremely unlikely even that a Newt endorsement would have been enough to push him past Romney in Michigan (Santorum lost 41/38 there, with Newt pulling 7%), Romney still would have won the day by winning the Arizona primary. And party actors still wouldn't have rallied to Santorum. Especially not to Santorum/Gingrich.

As for Gingrich/Santorum...well, if there's one thing that was clear from the beginning of the nomination process to the end it's that practically everyone who ever knew or worked with Newt Gingrich thought he would be a simply awful presidential candidate, much less president. And while many of them were willing to play along up to a point, every time he had any momentum at all they came out of the woodwork to make sure that whatever debacle Republicans would suffer through in 2012, at least it wouldn't be that debacle.

I'll give the last word to Jonathan Chait:

This is not surprising: Gingrich is always making elaborate historical arguments, and they always seem to justify his political self-interest at any given moment. If Santorum were really clever, he would have accepted the vice-presidential spot and waited for the inevitable Gingrich impeachment — misappropriating funds for jewelry? starting a war with Mars without Senate approval? declaring himself president for life? all the above? — and taken over then as a comparatively reassuring figure. Sadly, the world will never know.

2012 and GOP Candidates

Dave Weigel on Friday argued that there's been too much emphasis on disastrous GOP Senate candidates, especially the Tea Party ones; Ramesh Ponnuru follows up on that today by pointing out (again) that Mitt Romney ran ahead of most GOP Senate candidates. I think I agree with the main point each of them makes...but there's a lot going on here. I'll go bullet-point style:

* As I've said many times, the out-party candidate challenging an incumbent president just isn't very important.

* The big thing that the out-party candidate can get wrong is being perceived as an ideological outlier; in my view, Romney probably did about as well on that as any Republican could have done in 2012.

* That still leaves open the possibility that Romney lost a point or two on ideology; if so, it was certainly because of the GOP, not him.

* I agree with Weigel that the direct costs of awful Tea Party candidates is probably a bit overstated, and almost certainly gets more attention that it deserves.

* However, the indirect effects are likely large -- because fringe primary winners, including those who go on to win general elections, surely deter strong candidates from entering in the first place.

* While it's impossible to prove a direct one-to-one connection, that recruitment failure was the actual big story of 2012, with Republicans unable to nominate strong candidates in potentially competitive states including Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.

* To the extent it's true, that recruitment disincentive is a potentially huge effect (there can even be third-order effects from it, with Democrats able to deploy resources better because of dud GOP candidates).

* That said...Republicans certainly had solid-on-paper candidates in Hawaii, New Mexico, and North Dakota, and none of them did well. In Wisconsin, they just mistook former Governor Tommy Thompson for a strong general election candidate; can't blame Tea Partiers for that one.

* Although in at least some of these cases, the party may make it difficult for those candidates to run their strongest races.

* While, again, I think the general point that Romney did okay given the fundamentals is fine, one needs to be very, very, careful about comparing presidential results with any single other statewide race; candidates and campaign can make a large difference in the latter, so one can't really judge the presidential candidate by simple comparisons to state-election results.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Tara Strong, 40: She's Timmy Turner, and Bubbles, and she was on Boondocks. That's a pretty good combination! Dozens of other things, too.

You probably want some good stuff, too:

1. Turnout in 2012, by Michael McDonald.

2. Health care costs and the budget, from Annie Lowery.

3. And an old, but terrific, post by Matt Glassman on why the SOTU matters.

Q Day 3: Massachusetts Romney?

Another anonymous commenter asks:

What do you think would have been the result of the 2012 presidential election if Romney had campaigned on his record?
* Said that he did his job of creating wealth for stock holders at Bain even though people lost jobs and that he would do his job of president to get more people working.
* Stood behind Romneycare.
* I think he was for cap-and-trade before running for president.
* Proposed tax policies that actually added up.

It's an important question because it has a clear, certain answer: that Romney could not have been nominated by the 2012 Republican Party. He would have been knocked out, receiving Hunstsman-level support if that, depending on whether "campaigned on his record" meant only those things or extended to guns and abortion.

A candidate Romney who flipped (back) on these things after winning the nomination by sticking to the GOP platform would have risked a horrible mess...some Republicans would have stuck with him, but the odds are very strong of a major, debilitating party revolt, with Romney reduced to winning Utah and maybe a handful of others.

I'll add one more. Forgetting about the specific issues, what about a supremely skilled candidate Romney who was able to fully pull off the "moderate technocrat" image that was his best bet? My guess is that at best it gets him a couple of points, leaving him still a solid loser. Indeed, I haven't looked post-election but in the fall if I recall correctly his reputation among voters was, indeed, moderate technocrat. The bottom line is that the out-party candidate's image just doesn't matter very much in presidential elections when there's an incumbent on the ballot.

But the key thing here is that parties really are not going to nominate someone who opposes their consensus positions. Just not going to happen. And the 2012 position on health care, taxes, and climate didn't allow for Romney to deviate at all.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Robbie Ftorek, 61. My all-time favorite hockey player, from his three years with, and the only three years of (how could it have been only three years?), the WHA Phoenix Roadrunners.

And now, after a long holidayish break, back to the good stuff:

1. John Sides on early ads in 2012.

2. Suzy Khimm has 5 facts about the fiscal cliff vote yesterday.

3. Also yesterday: Public Domain Day.

4. Ed O'Keefe noted that the fiscal cliff was also the end of David Dreier's House career; I think he was a pretty good Member.

5. Paul Krugman, being brutal.

Friday Petty Complaining 1

Yes, this is petty. But so what? He deserves it. Charles Krauthammer:

This is entirely about politics. It’s Phase 2 of the 2012 campaign. The election returned him to office. The fiscal cliff negotiations are designed to break the Republican opposition and grant him political supremacy, something he thinks he earned with his landslide 2.8-point victory margin on Election Day.

"Landslide 2.8 point victory"?  Well, no. Krauthammer does link to the WaPo election map, but it hasn't been updated. David Wasserman's spreadsheet, however, tells us that Barack Obama's lead over Mitt Romney is currently 3.65 percentage points.

Krauthammer's sneering reference to Obama's "landslide" is both wrong and silly. "Landslide" is subjective, and I wouldn't use that, but it was a pretty solid win, probably winding up close to 4 percentage points when all is said and done (the remaining votes to be counted are thought to be mostly in NYC). The electoral college win was even larger, not only in the number of electoral votes but in the across-the-board margin (about 5.4 percentage points) needed to flip the election. It was certainly a much more substantial win than, say, either of George W. Bush's, and I don't recall Krauthammer insisting that Bush should practice restraint because of his narrow wins. Nor do I see Krauthammer mentioning anything at all about John Boehner's own landslide win, which was purchased with over a million Republican votes fewer than Democratic candidates for the House received.

Regardless: the whole premise is silly. The president is the president, whether by 49 states or by a tiny and highly contested electoral college margin while losing the national vote. They don't automatically (or, for that matter, at all) get "political supremacy," whatever that is, but they get to be president. Just as Republicans get the majority in the House, even though they were outvoted. End of story.

Postmortem Fun

Jill Lawrence over at National Journal writes up the Harvard campaign postmortem by organizing it around four things that, she claims, "changed the course of the race and possibly even of history." Via Ezra, who tweeted that "You can never know for sure, but I doubt any of these things would have changed the outcome of 2012."

Yup. All four are worth thinking about.

One is that without his back issues, Rick Perry might have run a much better campaign and been nominated. I think that's probably a plausible story -- but it's hard to see him doing a lot better than Mitt Romney in the general election. Well, let me back up a bit.

Beyond the fundamentals of the campaign, which seems to call for a narrow Barack Obama victory, it seems possible that Mitt Romney was somewhat hurt by the unpopularity of the GOP. But he didn't himself have a reputation to overcome as an ideological extremist; the party did, but he was somewhat shielded from that.

So the question is whether a GOP candidate could have emerged with less of an ideological problem. Could Perry? Seems very unlikely; his campaign was entirely based on going to the right of Romney, Pawlenty, and any other mainstream candidate.

What about Romney himself? Another items basically suggests that -- the possibility that Romney could have taken a more moderate position on immigration. But in fact Romney's immigration position was, if not entirely forced, certainly a logical reaction to where the energy was within the party. On immigration, as with every other issue, there just wasn't room for Romney to moderate and still win the nomination.

The other two points, I think, are even less convincing. Lawrence cites the Ames Straw Poll's roll in knocking out Tim Pawlenty, but I'm pretty sure that gets the causation wrong; Pawlenty did poorly in Ames because his campaign had stalled overall. Yes, I'm sure Romney's campaign was worried about Pawlenty; who else would they be worried about in spring 2011? But they beat him, and while Ames may have provided a marker, it's unlikely it was really an important causal factor.

Then there's Bain. Yes, it was a vulnerability for Romney, and may have even hurt him a bit, but every candidate has vulnerabilities. It's hard to, in the abstract, guess at whether a particular attack hurt a candidate more or less than some other hypothetical attack on some other hypothetical candidate.

I really need to write a post at some point about how to think about election results and the fundamentals when fundamentals models diverge some, as they did in 2012. But overall, the consensus of the models certainly pointed to Obama winning, if not by as much as he did. My general sense is that the key factor (most of) the models don't account for had nothing to do with the individual candidates and instead were about the GOP itself -- both its reputation for extremism, and its reputation for botching the economy and Iraq. I don't have hard evidence for that, but it's consistent with all the evidence I've seen so far, and my guess is that we'll see it when more careful studies of the 2012 election show up in a while.

Romney Campaign Still Math-Challenged

A bunch of liberals (here's one; here's another) had good fun yesterday with an op-ed by Romney strategist Stuart Stevens yesterday. The main point of the ribbing was that Romney's campaign apparently still doesn't quite understand that all the votes count, not just those from the groups they really liked.

But unless I missed it, no one noticed that Stevens still doesn't seem to have any idea of just how badly Romney lost. He says "Nor are we idiots because we came a little more than 320,000 votes short of winning the Electoral College in 2012."

320,000 votes? I don't think so. By my count, that's off by over 200,000 votes.

The final totals still aren't in, but looking around...

Romney won 206 electoral votes.

He lost Florida narrowly, by only 74,000 votes. Had he won Florida, he reaches 235.

Next closest was Ohio. He lost Ohio by 164,000 votes. FL and OH get him to 253.

Virginia was next. He lost Virginia by 149,000 votes. FL, OH, and VA put him at 266.

Oops! That's already 387,000 votes, and he's not there yet.

To get over the top, he would have had to win at least one more state. Pennsylvania and Colorado have been going back and forth as the votes are counted for the state that did it for Barack Obama...right now Obama's lead in Colorado is slightly less, and it's smaller, so we'll give him that. But Mitt Romney lost Colorado by 138,000 votes.

That means Romney needed not the 320K he said, but 525,000 votes, and again they're still counting in some of these. Regardless: Stevens was off by an impressive 64%. Which will presumably only increase as the last few votes are counted. That's a pretty big miss!

(Fine, you want to get technical? I'm sure that it's possible to find some electoral votes for fewer votes, but a whole lot less practical. For example, those last votes could have been found not in CO or PA, but in New Hampshire, which Obama won by a very slightly larger margin but of course with a lot fewer votes, only 40,000. But that's about it. Obama won Nevada by only some 68K votes, but that's only 6 EVs. Iowa, also 6 EVs, had about a 90K vote margin, so that doesn't really do anything for him. Obama's lead was under 100K in New Mexico and Delaware, but I don't seen any combination which lowers the overall total, and it's not as if that small number in Delaware was actually easier than the bigger number in Virginia).

Should we care? Oh, probably not, although I wouldn't put a whole lot of stock in any of the other empirical claims he makes in the op-ed (I haven't checked any of them). I don't really know where he gets the numbers; my guess is that it might be election night results, but who knows? I mean, I can't really blame Team Romney for not obsessively clicking on David Wasserman's wonderful spreadsheet every few hours, but then again if they want to write about the numbers, they might want to get them right.

Or, to make the obvious point, maybe that's exactly the kind of careful attention to reality and detailed quantitative study that was typical of how the whole campaign was run. But that's just silly talk. Right?

Catch of the Day

To Nate Cohn, who previewed the vote counting and reminded us before the election (as Andrew Sprung reminds us today) that Barack Obama would gain considerable ground on Mitt Romney after election day -- a lot after election day.

The Cook Report's David Wasserman has been keeping tabs on the current vote totals, and finds today that Obama's lead is up to 3.1% nationally, and still rising. That's up from 2.3% the morning after election day; I'm not sure what it was when the networks closed up shop on election night. That's a pretty large swing! It seems pretty likely that Obama's lead will wind up a full percentage point higher than it was at that point. Of course, no one really cares that much is a national lead goes from 2.3 to 3.1 percent, but they sure might if it were to go from a 1% GOP lead on Election Day to, say, a half a point lead for the Democrat when all was said and done.

Meanwhile, Colorado was at 4.7% on the morning after and is now at 5% even (actually a 4.98% lead, just below Obama's 5.02% lead in Pennsylvania as of now).

So a five point shift to Romney, with uniform swing, would have put Romney in the Electoral College lead on the morning after the election, with a 0.3% margin in Colorado, and with a fairly massive 2.7% national vote lead. Two weeks later, Obama would have emerged as the winner by taking Colorado by the narrowest of margins, while still trailing the national vote by just under 2%. Yeah, that's gonna cause some trouble. Indeed -- Iowa, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Nevada and Minnesota would all have been very close, and in this scenario all of them would be subject to recounts, allegations of voter fraud, challenges to provisional ballots, and the rest of it.

I'm not sure there's much to be done about any of this, but Cohn deserves the Catch for pointing it out in advance, and it's really something that everyone should be extremely aware of in advance next time around.

Of course, another reasonable reaction would be to find a way to make the mechanics of elections a lot smoother.

Anyway, all of this is at least a mess just waiting to happen.

Nice catch!

Catch of the Day

To Dave Wasserman, who first of all has been performing a terrific service to everyone by updating the presidential election results when most or all of the major news organization sites haven't been, and second notes:

4,000+ new votes reported in Colorado, now within 0.03% of losing "Tipping Point State" honors to Pennsylvania

Which means that everyone owes a major apology to Team Romney. Even if Pennsylvania doesn't wind up as the state that put Barack Obama over the top, it was pretty close, and Romney's campaign was entirely sensible in putting resources there; indeed, the real question is probably why they didn't do more earlier.

Now, there are caveats. We don't know whether uniform swing is a reasonable assumption. Perhaps if the nation moved four points towards Romney, Pennsylvania would have only moved, say, two points, so that other states would have overtaken it and become more likely to actually flip than the Keystone State. I'm also curious about what effect if any Sandy may have had in PA. If it hurt turnout in a way that helped Romney, then perhaps it wound up closer than people expected.

But at least as the numbers have it now, Pennsylvania was a very reasonable investment for Romney's campaign in the last few days.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Xavier Nady, 34. Someday, while I'm trying to fall asleep by remembering the roster of the World Series Champion San Francisco Giants, he'll be the one I can't get. That day may be next week. But still...

How about some good stuff:

1. A Monkey Cage post-election report for Puerto Rico, by Juhem Navarro-Rivera.

2. Adam Serwer on Barack Obama's coalition; Kevin Drum on Obama's weak spot.

3. Evaluating the forecasters: Senate races. From Brice Acree.

4. Dan Drezner on the Petraeus scandal and trust in the military. My guess? There's a major priming effect here, so that the way to hurt trust in the military is to get them out of combat. When the American people are evaluating the military on the basis of their competence at fighting, they'll usually get good marks. Take that away, and the military will then be evaluated on other things, where they're less apt to do well.

5. Seth Masket on Republicans and learning.

6. And Alyssa Rosenberg, who apparently is the only one out there who likes "Dick" more than I do, suggests four Washington scandal movies.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Whoopi Goldberg, 57.

Plus a bit of good stuff:

1. More on how Team Obama used social science insights, reported by Benedict Carey. I'll keep linking to this stuff, because it is interesting...but be careful; there's a strong tendency to want to attribute election results to campaign actions, and stuff like this has an enormous appeal to people. Especially people who are reporters. We don't know how important any of it turned out to be.

2. More discussion of pollsters, pundits, and how Team Romney could have been so wrong, from Henry Farrell. Same caution as before: we only know that Romney's campaign is saying that they were sure they were going to win; we don't know whether that's true, and if so exactly how.

3. And a defense of the Electoral College from Richard Posner. I tend to agree with his first and fourth reasons, and perhaps his fifth. My more general feeling about it is that even if you buy the argument that the flaws of the EC method exceed it's virtues, it's a close enough call that reform energy should be directed elsewhere.

Nice Calls!

I did a pre-election Sunday Question asking for predictions. Some of them were excellent! If Nate Silver can be a big star for calling 50 of 50 states, in my view my commenters deserve at least a little Plain Blog stardom...so here's the best calls from that thread.

Curtis nailed the 332 to 206; so did one anonymous commenter, and William Ockham, and "merrily row." Best predictions on that? Brendan Garbee said:

a good way to tell if you're a liberal is if you wanted to write that you're using Drew Linzer's model to say 332 electoral votes for Obama, but you hesitate because of how confidently the Romney campaign is howling (minus any data) that Rom is going to win by a landslide. What if they're right and liberals actually can never ever win?

Indeed -- liberal commenters generally picked Obama to win, but more were pessimists, putting Florida and in several cases one or more other state, in Romney's column; none of them went optimistic by adding not only Florida but also North Carolina.

And Jeff said:

I predict that a lot of people who were hearing from Fox News, just days ago, about Romney's likely 400-EV landslide will be wondering what could have gone so wrong. And to find out, they will turn to the one source they know they can trust: Fox News.

On Senate seats, Lester Freamon nailed it:  "Dems pick up MA, IN, and ME, GOP picks up NE. Net D+2." He also had the national vote as a 3 point win for Obama, which looks pretty good right now -- it's at 2.7, but reporters are that the uncounted votes remaining are likely to favor Democrats.

We still don't know how the House will turn out yet, but most likely it will be 234-201. Closest call? Erik M. went with "about 200" seats -- not bad!

Commenters generally were correct about the marriage ballot measures they discussed, but no one called a clean sweep. And there are several other nice calls on other races; click over to see them all. Including those who got things wrong, of course; no need to talk about those.

Thanks to everyone who participated! I had fun reading them.

What Mattered This Week?

Hey, I heard there were some elections...

Of course, each one mattered. If you're looking for something that was particularly up in the air coming in, I'd probably go with the North Dakota Senate seat in particular, and the +2 result for the Democrats in the Senate overall; going in that was certainly plausible, so it's not a last-minute shock or anything, but it easily could have been 53/47 or even 52/48.

On the other hand, if I had to pick one of the close Senate elections which mattered the most, I'd have to go with Tammy Baldwin.

What didn't matter? How about those teams of lawyers ready to contest the results, fortunately.

Well, that's what I have. What do you think? Either any of the specific elections, or the reaction, or the rest of the world -- what do you think mattered this week?