Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: Joe Scarborough digs his hole deeper

Check out the actual comment:

Joe Scarborough [yesterday]:

Since the president's reelection, liberals have been cluttering my Twitter feed with demands that I apologize to Nate for dismissing his 74.8374629% prediction in October that Barack Obama would win. I have ignored those requests because as is usually the case for ideologues on Twitter, their rage is unfocused and based in ignorance. These critics conveniently forget that I consistently predicted an Obama win throughout the year and even said on Election Day that the president's stubborn lead in swing state polls would doom Romney.

So consistent that on the day in question, Scarborough says the race is a toss-up, and no one can possibly know who will win, and he knows because he (unlike you out there who merely followed the polling aggregates) talked to the Romney camp (and you didn't.) And besides, intangibles. Mittmentum. Yard signs. Crowd size. That Nate Silver guy? Pfft. Play the above video.

Greg Sargent sums it up:

The battle over Nate Silver continues today. Joe Scarborough, who attacked Silver during the election, is back with a semi-apology, acknowledging that Silver did get it right. Andrew Sullivan excoriates Scarborough as part of a discredited political commentariat that missed Obama's structural advantage and has now been proven irrelevant...

Silver's accomplishment was to popularize tools enabling you to navigate the unavoidable reality that some individual polls will necessarily be off, thanks to methodology or chance. People keep saying Silver got it right because the polls did. But that's not really true. The polling averages got it right.

What Nate also did is stand up for geeks everywhere. He took most of the crap so everyone else could do their excellent work in peace, and then validated the approach. Good for him.

Speaking of Andrew Sullivan:

Notice the old MSM I-Never-Screwed-Up crap. Notice the "I'm not really apologizing" - but I'll add in a generic mea culpa to insure myself. Notice also that Scarborough is still too stupid to understand that Silver's model included Gallup and Rasmussen and all those "Dr Nick" pollsters, showed considerable fluctuation in the race, and yet also correctly predicted the demographic mix and state polling consensus in ways that revealed the structural advantage Obama had throughout. This took intelligence and skill that Scarborough does not have. Neither do I. But then I didn't call Nate a fool who should be banished from the Internet. I saw him as a fantastic breath of fresh air in a tired, discredited and fathomlessly self-important commentariat.

Of which Scarborough is an almost text-book case.

And speaking of the polling averages, Mark Blumenthal has an extraordinary dissection of how the Obama campaign did what it did:

At a Politico forum on Monday, Messina spoke about the campaign's "three looks at the electorate" that gave him a deeper understanding of "how we were doing, where we were doing it, where we were moving -- which is why I knew that most of the public polls you were seeing were completely ridiculous."

David Simas, the Obama campaign's director of opinion research, provided The Huffington Post with more details about those three sources of polling data...

A really good read. Blumenthal's colleague Simon Jackman was one of the quants that got it right:

So the quants and their statistical models were right, while the pundits and their guts were wrong. This was also true in 2008: Silver and Wang were both nearly perfect. But in 2012 the victory of mathematics over bloviation was even more resounding somehow, perhaps because the battle lines were more clearly drawn.

Before the election, Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal asserted that 'nobody knows anything' about the potential outcome. David Brooks of The New York Times said forecasters lived in 'sillyland.' Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post tweeted that 'averaging polls is junk.'

Can anyone seriously argue that now?

Yes, Egypt announces cease-fire in Gaza conflict is way bigger news than Scarborough, but it'll take a day or two for the pundits to mull this over. But it's certainly another feather in Hillary's cap.

Ana Marie Cox:

The "conservative entertainment complex", as columnist David Frum put it, promulgated a view of the American electorate that wasn't just objectively false, in terms of polled support, but to which they objected. That is, they didn't just get wrong how much support Romney had; they told a story about American voters that Americans themselves didn't believe.

You can't win an election by appealing solely to a class you've arbitrarily designated as the "makers" ' there are too many of us who don't believe getting back from your government is "taking". And when it comes to civil rights, you can't woo voters with a description of a future they're not part of. Ultimately, we didn't want to be the kind of country Mitt Romney and the Republican party told us we were.

Harry Enten:

How the 2012 election polling really was skewed ' for Mitt Romney

Many in the GOP were sure polls were biased against their guy. In fact, they undershot Obama's win by an embarrassing margin

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Happy Thanksgiving, folks, and if you are traveling, drive safely.