Mythbusting the 2012 Elections: Why So Much Obama-Romney CW Was Absurdly Wrong

Barack Obama and Chris Christie in New Jersey, 10/31/12. Note: this did not deny Romney the presidency.

As long as I have been writing about it, and cataloguing about 3000 polls from it, it is pretty stunning to me to say the following five words: the 2012 elections are over.

The confetti has now been swept up. The votes (well, most of them anyway) have been tallied. All that is left are the inevitable post-mortems.

This post-mortem comes from somewhere between anger and amusement. That's because the dominant theme is how much of the conventional wisdom about this election was ultimately, and profoundly, disproven by the judgment of the voters on Tuesday night.

For most of the past month, when writers on the left (here and elsewhere) criticized much of the media CW on this election as errant, those critiques were roundly dismissed, and even met with a level of annoyance. From my perspective, the most glaring example was the high-intensity hissyfit that many establishment journalists had on Twitter when those on the left accused them of basing their reportage on the perpetuation of campaign narratives, rather on the available evidence.

What the election proved, though, is in spite of their hypersensitivity, we were right and they were wrong. The swing states were never truly in doubt. The key swing states in the South were not lost to Obama. There was no "Mitt-mentum" from about October 15th onward. This was not a center-right electorate, or even really a centrist electorate.

In the final analysis, with a doff of the cap to former NFL coach Dennis Green, the 2012 election was what we thought it was. The reason folks like Nate Silver (and, for that matter, Markos Moulitsas) wound up looking like oracles is because they constructed their narrative around the data, and not the other way around, like far too many people did.

What follows are three of the more persistent bits of conventional wisdom, and how the results on election night ultimately, and forcefully disproved them.

(Continue reading below the fold)