I have some small measure of sympathy for what Dick Morris is saying in this exchange with Sean Hannity about his bullish predictions for the election:
“Sean, I hope people aren’t mad at me about it… I spoke about what I believed and I think that there was a period of time when the Romney campaign was falling apart, people were not optimistic, nobody thought there was a chance of victory and I felt that it was my duty at that point to go out and say what I said. And at the time that I said it, I believe I was right.”
Please notice that while Mr. Morris begins and ends with assertions that he was sincere in his analysis, what he actually says is that he felt he needed to provide some hope at a critical time because he sensed that the Republicans were on the verge of collapse.
For much of the last year, I was bullish on Obama’s chances of winning a victory bigger than 2008. I based that in part on a good and stable polling advantage. I based it in part on the last 150 years of history, in which incumbents simply weren’t reelected by narrower margins than they were elected in the first place. I based it in part on how badly Mitt Romney performed as a candidate and how well I knew the Obama campaign was organizing. I was sincere in my belief that a landslide was a strong possibility.
But I also wanted to help make it happen. And I knew that demoralizing the enemy was actually the key to making it happen. There came a point after the conventions when the GOP was on the verge of collapse. Dick Morris noticed it, and I noticed it, too. I ramped up my mockery and my confidence level both because we really were crushing them and because I wanted to tip their whole campaign over on its side. I had no way of knowing that the president would badly lose the first debate. It certainly wasn’t something I thought highly likely. I expected a performance much more like what we saw in the last two debates.
I’m not going to blame my overconfidence on one debate performance, but it did significantly stall what appeared to be a march to a major blowout. Most importantly, in the aftermath of the debate I watched the data and I shut my mouth. I adjusted my predictions accordingly. I called the Electoral College exactly, missed the Senate by one (assuming they ever confirm Carmona lost the Arizona race), and overestimated gains in the House by nine to fourteen seats.
Compare that to how Dick Morris’s predictions panned out.
So you ended up giving Obama Florida after all? I thought about that state long and hard, even through Governor Volermort’s shenanigans. But what tipped my hand was that I saw the organizing, and I figured the AA community would crawl over broken shards of glass for 8 hours to vote. I wanted to give NC for the reasons Al Giordano listed, but the polling just wasn’t close enough.
Anyway, what happens to those provisionals, and why were there so many? I got the Senate right, with Heller being my Republican win. If they didn’t have that stupid “none of the above” choice, it may have been an upset. Assuming we win 201, I’ll have been off in the House by 7.
Link from Election Day.
That’s remarkable. Great job!
Wow, man. It’s almost like “the fix was in”. :0
“…I spoke about what I believed…”
“…I believe I was right.”
Believe. Belief. GW Bush ‘believed’ Saddam had WMD. Pat Robertson ‘believes’ America was punished by God on 9-11. Fundie idiots ‘believe’ that God created the world in 6 days in the year 4004 BC. Romney ‘believes’ that his 20% tax cuts will balance the budget. Ryan ‘believes’ Obama won because of urban voters.
‘Belief’. It’s the ultimate conservative excuse for failure, and the ultimate excuse for being wrong. Every goddamned time. Use that word, and you’re accountability-free. Every goddamned time.
I’m beginning to hate that word. Every time I hear it, I hear the excuse waiting in the wings.
Yes, Boo, you saw the changing circumstances, and shaped your predictions to reflect the new reality. Dick Morris saw the changing circumstances, and shaped his predictions to buck up his allies.
That’s why he makes the big money, and you don’t. Well, that and the prostitutes. They’ll never admit it, but with a certain type of fundie guy, that’s street cred.
Maybe all that toe sucking rotted his brain.
Boo – There is no doubt that you predicted a major win long before anyone else and that you explicitly put your reputation of good election predictions on the line when you did so. You deserve a lot of credit for that.
I based that in part on a good and stable polling advantage. Well, the polls never were THAT good for Obama. He never trailed, but we never saw the kind of groundswell that was apparent in 2008 – and remember in 2008 the economic indicators were suggesting a 7% victory even before the Lehman crash. Even when everything was looking rosy after the conventions and we were all hopeful that you’d be right the polls still weren’t as good as you predicted.
I based it in part on the last 150 years of history, in which incumbents simply weren’t reelected by narrower margins than they were elected in the first place. The problem is that this is such a small sample size. It sounds like a lot, but the number of elections with an incumbent running isn’t that high, and in this case economic conditions were unique – actually pretty weak but slightly improving and not nearly as bad as they were four years earlier.
I based it in part on how badly Mitt Romney performed as a candidate and how well I knew the Obama campaign was organizing. I think we all learned a lesson in underestimating one’s opponent. No, Romney is not likable, but he did work very hard at preparing for the most critical moment of the campaign, the first debate, and performed exactly as his handlers wanted him to. Yes, he lied his butt off, but they caught Obama flat-footed.
I was sincere in my belief that a landslide was a strong possibility. But I also wanted to help make it happen. And I knew that demoralizing the enemy was actually the key to making it happen. There came a point after the conventions when the GOP was on the verge of collapse. Dick Morris noticed it, and I noticed it, too. I ramped up my mockery and my confidence level both because we really were crushing them and because I wanted to tip their whole campaign over on its side.
Fair point – though I’m not sure anything any liberal blogger said would have any effect on them. You sure did energize our little world, however, until ….
I had no way of knowing that the president would badly lose the first debate. It certainly wasn’t something I thought highly likely. I expected a performance much more like what we saw in the last two debates. Yes. When his second term is over and the analysis begins that will be one of the big negatives … that performance may have cost a lot of House seats, though we’ll never know for sure.
Oh well, lessons learned. But yes, unlike Dick Morris your predictions were honest and sincere throughout. But then, that’s true for everything, not just predictions.
The difference is this.
My premise was that the polls were accurate but that they would tip to Obama in a significant way at the end. They tightened and then tipped, leading me to overestimate the size of our win.
Dick Morris’s premise was that the polls were totally wrong.
My assumption was that Obama would wind up winning more Electoral Votes and/or a bigger popular vote margin. I was wrong, but my final projections recognized that I had been wrong and were, thus, highly accurate.
Dick Morris was just lying to try to change reality.
If you look at Nate Silver’s trajectory of the race, you can imagine a trajectory with no tightening after the first debate. Plot that line and you’ll see the results I was predicting.
At some point many true Republicans (including those who call themselves independents now) were going to come home an in fact they had started to before the first debate. The first debate helped but if it wasn’t that it was going to be another event or series of events.
There was just no way they weren’t so I think people are still over emphasizing the first debate as a game changer. It wasn’t at all. Winning the house was always a long shot and even with the first debate Romney’s chances of winning only reached 38% on 538
I never believed that the House was winnable. Mostly I think it was the terrible economic numbers. There have been a series of Presidents who didn’t win the House for their parties during their re-elect: Eisenhower in ’56, Nixon in ’72, Reagan in ’84, and Clinton in ’96. I guess Truman and W were the anomalies.
never had the kind of margin that got close to 2008. The chart below takes state polls and projects the national vote based on the shift in the state poll from 2008.
Before the debate there WAS a sign that Obama was headed for a 6 to 8 point lead, though for reasons I described below I don’t believe that was ever in the cards.
As someone else said, how much effect would you on this blog have? I come here for reality, not spin.
In the real world, you get both. Booman stayed true to the facts and presented them as positively as possible. He was correct until the first debate – and then the trajectory of both the race and Booman’s predictions changed.
the problem with Morris is that he is presented as a savvy, honest pro – when he is anything but. He is a shill and nothing but a shill. I don’t have a problem with Booman presenting a Dem line of argument – so long as he doesn’t actually tell lies and tells us “facts” that aren’t in fact true.
I don’t want to waste time reading someone if I have to independently fact check his every assertion. I like people to be straight and up front with their opinions, but if they lie to me on facts – well I find that an unforgivable breakdown of trust. Morris has harmed himself and the credibility of every program he appeared on – if presented as anything other than a shill or an object of comedy. People he fooled shouldn’t forgive him – or watch channels which channeled him again..
If I have a problem with Booman, it is that he was so contemptuous of Romney, he came to imagine that Romney could never do anything right. In the real world there is never such a thing as a perfect campaign – Team Obama may have done 99% of things right, but that 1% costs you – and they were operating in a very hostile environment where nothing comes easy.
The fundamentals for a big Dem win aren’t there yet. The economy is still in difficulty, and the world is becoming an ever more fraught place. Demographic change is happening slowly, but even that won’t go all one way – people tend to get more conservative as they get older/wealthier, for example.
So I think the history books will see the 2012 Obama campaign as a resounding success – with one major blip – and therefore almost as good as it could have been. They will also probably see Obama as a transitional figure – one who turned the ship around from ever more inequality, greed and corporate corruption – but also one which wasn’t politically powerful enough yet to do all that much to move the ship in a positive direction. Obama’.;s real legacy will be in what he will enable his followers and successors to do.
And as for Booman – he would make a great TV pundit, and I trust that some day he will. But it will take the ,mainstream political culture a few more years to be ready for him. And then you want find him, like Morris, breaking trust with the electorate. He will still remain true to the facts, even when the facts speak against his preferred position. And that is all you can ask of any commentator or player on the political scene.
Because then we
Yeah, in the end Romney wasn’t that bad. He almost overcame the 47% comment and transform himself into a “moderate” figure. It almost worked. I wish Obama could’ve run with a Clinton-type economy and not a Bushian-created disaster.
I’ve read elsewhere that Romney waited so late to pivot to keep up his fundraising.
Why would anyone who isn’t a billionaire donate to Romney when he could so easily have self funded through any dip in his fundraising? What is it with the relatively poor that they like to donate to the rich?
But it seems as if his middling success at morphing back into a moderate near the end was only possible because so many people in the media circus allowed it to happen without seriously questioning how ridiculous and transparent it was.
Mitt tried to have his cake and eat it too. And too many people were more than accommodating in allowing him to try and pull it off.
You shouldn’t even bring up Morris in the same context. he is a lying peddler who works for a political party based on supporting some of the worst most destructive policies this country has ever enacted.
“I based it in part on the last 150 years of history, in which incumbents simply weren’t reelected by narrower margins than they were elected in the first place.”
You put too much stock in this pet theory by you knew the polling tools to depend on, so at least you adjusted your projections appropriately. Morris? He continues to be the best contrary indicator ever.
However I was puzzled by your analysis at the time. In my view your biggest problem was a superficial read of that one historical trend and casting aside 3-4 other highly significant historical elements of the election. I can’t remember the details of my responses and can’t find it. It’s probably in the diary in which you said you would eat your hat.
the historic relationship between Presidential Approval and re-election, you would have never said anything other than that the popular vote would be close.
In my tracking of state polls, Obama opened up a projected 6% lead on September 30th. There was, in the days leading up to the first debate, signs of a 2008 replay – but the polling also showed Obama never really getting much over 50. You can argue all the first debate did was cause Republican leaning voters to come home sooner than they would have – but that in the end it didn’t really have much of an effect.
The real turning point in this election was actually in the Fall of 2011, when the economy that looked like it was going to double dip into another recession and instead produced 3 months in a row of good job growth. Obama’s job approval went from the low to mid-40’s to the high 40’s in this period. He never trailed as a result from February of this year.
This perception of an economy slowly recovering was borne out in the exit polls. Had the split been 31-39 on the question of whether the economy was improving rather than 39-31, the result might have been different.
So now Morris is openly admitting he is a partisan pollster and card-carrying coach for Team Conservative? I thought the Fox schtick was that Morris provided objective polling analysis? I can’t keep this stuff straight…
But as for being concerned about willfully lying to the gullible Repub stooges in order to save the Bishop’s campaign, Morris needn’t worry. American “conservatives” don’t care that what they are fed is lies, as long as the lies are what they desperately want to hear. They don’t care about their thoughts and perceptions conforming to reality too much, as far as I can determine. As long as you play on Team Conservative, you are forgiven anything, as Morris already knows, haha.
As for some Dem wave ever taking out the Do-Nothing Repub House, it now appears that the 2010 Gerrymander was so massive that this was never in the cards, and may not be reversible until the next census, if ever. This on top of the long running FL and TX Gerrymanders.
The Dems should be starting a decade long theme of the Illegitimate Repub House, and explaining how hundreds of thousands more people vote for Dem House candidates nationwide, but that an anti-democratic Repub Gerrymander has assured them of an illegitimate 35 seat majority in the national legislature. It’s complicated to explain, but these are the sort of long range stories and themes that Repubs deploy, but that we never do.