Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: More winners and losers

CNN exit polls NY Times exit polls

CNN on exit polls:

More voters in the swing states of Florida, New Hampshire, Ohio and Virginia blame George W. Bush than Obama for the state of the U.S. economy. Florida, Ohio and Virginia were still too close to call late Tuesday night.
And exit polling suggests that in the critical battleground state of Ohio, 59% of voters polled approve of the federal government's aid to U.S. automakers while 36% disapprove.

NY Times:

Mr. Obama recognized that to a certain extent, he had walked into a trap that Mr. Romney's advisers had anticipated: His antipathy toward Mr. Romney ' which advisers described as deeper than what Mr. Obama had felt for John McCain in 2008 ' led the incumbent to underestimate his opponent as he began moving to the center before the debate audience of millions of television viewers.

But as concerned as the White House was during the last 30 days of the campaign, its polls never showed Mr. Obama slipping behind Mr. Romney, aides said. The president was helped in no small part by the tremendous amount of money the campaign built up, which had permitted him to pound his Republican rival before he had ever had a chance to fully introduce himself to the nation.

TPM:

Mitt Romney lost Latinos by unprecedented margins ' even worse than the initial exit polls showed ' according to a study by Latino Decisions.

An election eve poll of 5,600 voters across all 50 states by the group, which has researched the Latino vote throughout the campaign, concluded Obama won by an eye-popping 75-23 margin. Their research concluded that CNN's exit poll estimate of 71 percent of Latinos breaking to Obama likely undercounted their support, although they agreed with the assessment that turnout equaled 10 percent of the electorate.

CNN:

The stunning defeat alarmed Republicans who fear extinction unless the party can figure out how to temper the kind of hardline immigration rhetoric that Romney delivered during his Republican primary bid.

"Latinos were disillusioned with Barack Obama, but they are absolutely terrified by the idea of Mitt Romney," said GOP fundraiser Ana Navarro, a confidante to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio.

The Economist:

But the strong performance of the publicly available polls does offer two lessons for future forecasters. The first is that pollsters' much-criticised methodology for predicting voter turnout is working just fine. The best argument that the polls overstated Mr Obama's support, advanced by Dan McLaughlin and Ted Frank and implemented in the 'Unskewed Polls' compiled by Dean Chambers, was that they predicted a big advantage in Democratic turnout that was unlikely to materialise. In fact, exit polls show that the makeup of the electorate was almost precisely as the polls foresaw: there were a lot more Democrats than Republicans, but the independent vote went heavily for Mr Romney. This supports the interpretation offered by Josh Marshall, that a lot of voters calling themselves 'independents' were really disgruntled former Republicans, presumably alienated by the tea-party movement. Although they have cast aside their party identification, they remain conservative, and preferred Mitt Romney to Mr Obama by a large margin. The conclusion is that re-weighting polls by party identification as well as demographics is a very bad idea. People can and do change their party affiliation, and if pollsters try to control for that by imposing a different turnout model on their sample, they wind up erasing the very signal'a change in the electorate's preference'that they are trying to detect.

Nate Silver may have missed the North Dakota Senate race but Huffpost didn't http://t.co/... (h/t @EL_Swan)
' @samsteinhp via TweetDeck

National Journal:

It's easy to understand why some Republicans and pollsters dismissed the idea that the Obama coalition from 2008 would be fired up and ready to go in 2012. Not possible. Not with the unemployment rate at 14.3 percent among blacks, 10 percent among Hispanics, and 11.8 percent among adults under 30.

Yet, fired up or just trudging to the polls, those groups were among President Obama's principal bulwarks against defeat in decisive states. In some cases they made up a greater share of the national electorate than they did in 2008. The outcome confounded some conservatives and surprised even some pollsters.

Let this WaPo piece sink in:

Republican leaders awoke Wednesday to witness their grim future. Without a makeover, a party that skews toward older, white and male voters faces political peril in an increasingly diverse and complex America.

President Obama's decisive victory over Mitt Romney served as a clinic in 21st-century politics, reflecting expanded power for black and Hispanic voters, dominance among women, a larger share of young voters and even a rise in support among Asians.

And here's the guy that called it in The Emerging Democratic Majority, Ruy Teixeira:

Republicans can't keep playing on the turf they've been playing on.

The nine lives of Obamacare is fairly remarkable: filibuster, Scott Brown, Supreme Court, yesterday ... And now it's all but guaranteed.
' @DLeonhardt via Twitter for iPhone
Jon Ralston:

There is a lot to say about what happened in Nevada on Tuesday ' today and later ' but only a few things are crystal clear:

1.     Registration matters

2.     The Republican Party is irrelevant

3.     The Hispanic vote here is a growing and potent force

4.     Labor matters

5.     Harry Reid is God (or the devil)

Michael Tomasky:

There was also no way Obama voters were as enthusiastic as Romney voters. Just no way. The enthusiasm gap. Everyone bought it. Again, the opposite was true.

Americans were going to be outraged by Benghazi. Chicago made up jobs numbers. Florida was a done deal. Romney had momentum until Sandy. And on and on.

Conservatives say these things with such conviction. I think they believe them to be true. And there's a reason for that. Not so long ago, when conservatives said these things en bloc, they would come true. They'd happen. Back in Clinton's day, say. Or Bush's, before the debacles really hit home.

But then at some point, the majority of Americans stopped buying conservative bullshit. It must have been after Iraq. And Katrina. But now, conservatives can't make surrealities come true just by saying so.

Monkey Cage:

As [Nate] Silver's work has increased in popularity, so has the scientific approach to studying politics, which is good news for political scientists who want to share their work with a broader audience. Much like the publication of Moneyball sent shivers down the spines of traditional baseball scouts who feared for their jobs, the traditional pundit class knows the more quantitative approach is catching on and has therefore been highly defensive (as witnessed by the attacks by David Brooks and Peggy Noonan).

Silver draws a mixed reaction from an informal poll of political scientists. While we don't fear for our jobs, there is no doubt there is some professional jealousy at Silver's success. But there are good reasons for some healthy skepticism while at the same time respecting Silver's work ethic and flair for explaining statistics to the public.

Felix Salmon on Nate, Simon Jackman and other quants:

Silver is the most visible of the quants, partly because of his perch at the NYT, partly because he has a new book out, and partly because he's very good at taking his complex mathematical model and turning it into bite-sized English-language blog posts. If you think that the value of Nate Silver is in the model, you're missing the most important part: there are lots of people with models, and most of those models are pretty similar to each other. The thing which sets Silver apart from the rest is that he can write: he can take a model and turn it into a narrative, walking his readers through to his conclusions.

Ian Reifowitz:

The president's re-election should serve to cement the sentiment among nonwhites that they are indeed full members of the American community; a person of color can become our leader -- even twice. A second Obama term does not mean we are a post-racial society any more than did his first. And the president must help bridge the gap between culturally anxious white Americans and the minorities who, taken together, are projected to be the majority within two generations.

But our country has made undeniable progress toward inclusion in recent years. With any luck, we've seen the last presidential candidate whose campaign plays on racial divisions and stereotypes.