Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: Dumb and dumber

David Wasserman's ongoing total popular vote count

Note that Mitt Romney is closing in on the ironic 47% vote total. Meanwhile, Obama leads by 4 million votes. And Obama's overall totals are off his 2008 numbers by ~ 2%. That, in a campaign aimed solely at swing states. So will Romney get there?

Greg Sargent:

When all the votes are counted, could Mitt Romney really end up achieving perfect poetic justice by finishing with  47 percent of the national vote? Yup. Dave Wasserman of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report says new votes in from Maryland put Romney at 47.56 percent. He predicts with certainty that with all of New York and California counted, Romney will end up below 47.5 percent of the vote.

Once the Ohio provisionals are counted seems likely North Carolina ends up as closest state in the country besides Florida
' @ppppolls via web  

Fivethirtyeight.com:

In 46 states and the District of Columbia, President Obama did worse in 2012 than he did in 2008, winning by less or losing by more. The vote in most counties, too, shifted to the political right.

But separating out the national political environment from more fundamental and potentially longer-lasting political shifts at the state level is harder. Relative to the national popular vote, the picture is muddled: 29 states and the District of Columbia shifted toward Mr. Obama, and 21 states shifted toward the Republican Party. But the partisan lean in most states moved only slightly, and only one state flipped from leaning toward one party to the other.

U.S. Deficit Shrinking At Fastest Pace Since WWII, Before Fiscal Cliff http://t.co/...
' @ritholtz via Twitpic

The stupid. It burns.

Dean Chambers, the man behind the 'Unskewed Polls' website, has a launched a new website declaring the election was stolen by Democrats.

The website, www.BarackOFraudo.com, identifies four 'black states' Chambers claims were stolen by President Obama through massive voter fraud and suppression operations. According to the website, Democratic ballot stuffing was the reason Obama carried the critical swing states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Florida.

Politico talks to someone smart:

'It's about the candidate. It's about the message. It's about where they're going to lead this country with a vision,' [Jim] Messina said at POLITICO's Playbook Breakfast on Tuesday in his first on-camera interview since the election. 'Because that's why millions of Americans went online and signed up for Obama for America. It wasn't because they got a sexy T-shirt'It wasn't because of the great bumper sticker. It was because they deeply believed in Barack Obama.'

Here are 10 things about campaigning Messina learned along the way:

Post first-debate there were 29 polls conducted in Colorado. You know how many had Obama's lead at 5+ pts (where it is now). 1. That was PPP
' @ForecasterEnten via web
Tom Friedman touts the fiberoptic backbone in Chattanooga:

How fast is that Chattanooga choo-choo? The majority of Chattanooga homes and businesses get 50 megabits per second, some 100 megabits, a few 250 and those with big needs opt for a full gigabit per second, explained Harold DePriest, the chief executive of EPB, the city's electric power and telecom provider, which built and operates the network. 'The average around the country is 4.5 megabits per second.' So average Internet speed in Chattanooga is 10 times the national average. That doesn't just mean faster downloads. The fiber grid means 150,000 Chattanooga homes now have smart electric meters to track their energy consumption in real time. More important, said DePriest, on July 5, Chattanooga got hit with an unusual storm that knocked out power to 80,000 homes. Thanks to intelligent power switching on the fiber network, he said, '42,000 homes had their electricity restored in ... 2 seconds.' Old days: 17 hours.

That network was fully completed thanks to $111 million in stimulus money. Imagine that we get a grand bargain in Washington that also includes a stimulus of just $20 billion to bring the 200 biggest urban areas in America up to Chattanooga's standard. You'd see a 'melt-up' in the U.S. economy. We are so close to doing something big and smart. Somebody needs to tell the Congress.

If only Obama weren't so... small, Tom says. If only the GOP got out of the way, sez I.

For reasons unclear to any sentient human, Jennifer Rubin still has a job at the Washington Post. She'll be writing "Benghazi is a scandal" columns until 2052. Then again, the GOP has nothing else they want to to talk about. P.S. No one buys this stuff. Benghazi was a tragedy, not a scandal.

Dana Milbank:

In truth, Petraeus's behavior doesn't even merit the label 'scandal.' L'affaire Petraeus lacks every element of the definition.

Brad DeLong:

Two criticisms of Nate Silver that may be valid:

Silver introduces noise into his estimates by placing weight on a not very well-founded model of fundamentals-- witness his failure to get the North Dakota Senate race right.

Silver's model on election eve did not say that Obama had a 90% chance, it said Obama has a 99% chance. But Silver introduced a fudge factor: a completely arbitrary 20% chance that this model was completely wrong, and hence a 10% chance of a Romney victory. He would have been better advised to say: "My model says Obama has it nailed, but my model might be wrong--pulling a number out of the air, if you think there's a 20% chance that I have my head completely up my #%$, you can assign Romney a 10% chance. That would have aided communication.

And, below the fold, a [big] bunch of criticisms of Silver and hunch-based forecasts that are not valid: