Like always, far ahead of the Washington pundits.
It appears Chuck Todd and his crew of insiders have
taken note of
this fact:
Is the independent vote overrated? In our latest installment looking at the exit polls from last week's presidential election, here's something you might not have known: Romney actually won the independent vote, 50%-45%. So now twice in the last three elections -- in 2004 and 2012 -- the winner has lost the indie vote. What does this mean? Well, party ID appears to matter much more: In 2004, it was even; in 2008, it was D+7; and last week, it was D+6. Also, many polls have different ways of deciding who is an “independent”; some pollsters include “lean Dems and lean GOPers” in their independent number which lately has given the indie number a GOP skew. If you move the leaners into their own parties, then you get a more pure indie subgroup (and you also realize how really small of a subgroup it is).
Might not have known? No Chuck. You didn't know. At Daily Kos, we knew.
The day before the election Mark Halperin couldn't understand how President Obama could possibly be ahead in so many swing states while losing the independent vote. We were told by the pundit class that 2010 "independents turned against Obama." One could cite pundit after pundit who believed in the supremacy of independents. More Halperin on Morning Joe, in a quote blasted all over Breitbart and Drudge:
Even in the Michigan Q poll that shows the President leading substantially, he's losing independents. That is the strongest argument the Romney campaign will make against all these polls that show the president up. Which is, you may be oversampling Democrats in some of these polls. If Romney's winning independents in Ohio they think he's gonna win.
Wrong. More Democratic leaning independents are proud to call themselves Democrats under the leadership of President Obama. Republicans want to be independent because the Republican brand ranks slightly below gangrene in favorability. In 2010, their independents turned out and ours didn't. This year, more of ours preferred to be called Democrat. No oversampling, just pride.
Nate Silver began his work here at Daily Kos. So did Sam Wang. Our analysts, from Greg Dworkin to Steve Singiser to Jed Lewison and David Nir provide some of the best political analysis in the business. Our polling is at the very top of accuracy. The number crunching of folks like dreaminonempty and MattTX provide some of the most thorough in depth electoral analysis you can find. And our guy called the election dead on. You never once heard any of that ridiculous "it's a toss up" garbage coming from these pages. Time after time after time, we prove ourselves concise, accurate, truthful and prescient. On issue after issue, election after election, our reality has a consistent bias towards being the truth.
It might come as a shock to "very serious people" that I ask why it is the media pundits get so much exposure despite being consistently wrong (or far behind) about everything. Obviously, because we are just Cheeto-eating basement dwellers, we don't deserve the spotlight. While we cannot expect to get anything close to the exposure of a Mark Halperin or a Dick Morris, our being consistently correct should count for at least a measure of respect.