The hackiness of much of the American punditry was exposed by last week's election results. Both
Dick Morris and
George Will predicted a Romney landslide. But it was Dan Rather who demonstrated the talking heads' weakness best,
by citing his "gut" in predicting "a good day for Romney." Never has it been so clear that a lot of news personalities have no idea what the hell they're talking about and are just making it up as they go along -- or worse, are spinning what they do know to reflect their biases.
But calling a Romney landslide, based on absolutely nothing but ideological optimism and wishful thinking, wasn't the only way to make a bad call on election night. The idea of a popular vote/electoral college vote split --
a la 2000 -- was a lot more prevalent in the media. Just about
every news outlet going ran the story at one point. And just every news outlet going was just making up news.
Yes, an electoral college/popular vote split was possible, mostly by virtue of not being
impossible. But Nate Silver's last forecast before the election gave that result a 5.3% possibility. There's a difference between a real possibility and a
realistic possibility. When there's a 94.7% chance that your prediction is going to be wrong, you aren't courting the realistic...[
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