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TPM Editors’ Blog Opinions, Context & Ideas from TPM Editors

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Into the Fever Swamp

I’m just posting this video because it’s bizarre. Glenn Beck on his new private web TV network just before the election talking about the Benghazi cover-up conspiracy. Good times.

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Josh Marshall

Collision

Looking back we’re likely to see what we might call the Unskewed Poll or Poller Truth movement as a late-breaking and somewhat hard-to-explain-in-retrospect part of the 2012 campaign cycle. But lets note some of the tie-ins to our everyday and on-going political lives.

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Josh Marshall

Inside Gallup’s Epic Fail

How did Gallup end up being one of the most inaccurate pollsters of the 2012 cycle? In a word, they earned it. Obviously the mammoth lead Gallup showed for Mitt Romney once they moved to a ‘likely voter’ screen caused considerable heartburn for Democrats while seriously heartening Republicans. They crept back to something like the consensus after taking a week off polling after Sandy. But how did they end up getting the election so wrong?

It ends up there’s a very simple and I think even unitary answer: race. Gallup somehow seemed to think the electorate would be much whiter than it ended up being.

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Josh Marshall
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The Record, the Numbers

So PollTracker. How’d we do? Pretty damn well.

PollTacker accurately predicted the results in 49 of 50 states last night. The one exception was Florida. The final PollTracker Average was Romney +1.2. Though it hasn’t been called yet, it’s pretty clear President Obama will take the state with something between a .5% and 1% margin.

On the Senate side PollTracker did even better. PollTracker accurately predicted every Senate race in the country. The only half-miss was North Dakota. The final PollTracker Average of the Heitkamp v. Berg race was an exact tie. And I mean, exact: 46% to 46%. Not even a difference on the decimal point.

Josh Marshall

Did Anyone Learn Anything?

Let’s recap, shall we? For months Barack Obama and Mitt Romney waged a fierce, substantive battle against each other over some (though not nearly all) of the most consequential issues facing the country. At the broadest level, they debated the state’s natural role in providing support and mobility to working people and how to pay for it. Obama won that debate, pretty decisively.

And yet, it only took about an hour after the networks called the election for Republicans to renew their opposition to raising taxes on high income earners, leaving us right back where we started.

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Brian Beutler
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Not Over Yet!

Two incumbent Republican congressman are headed to a Dec. 8 runoff in the LA-3. Rep. Charles Boustany lead 45-30 over Rep. Jeff Landry, a tea party fave, in yesterday’s primary but fell short of the majority needed to avoid a runoff.

David Kurtz
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