In the aggregate, political commentary and analysis is misleading. It has a bias towards volatility. Looking at the final results, there's no doubt that if you had managed to avoid every utterance by every prognosticator and instead looked at nothing but a rolling average of poll results, you'd have had a much better understanding of the likely outcome of the election. Conversely, if you had just listened to the talk shows and heard about Obama's soft support in Pennsylvania and Joe the Plumber and all the rest, you'd have thought the race far closer than it actually was. Pollsters just have to report numbers. Pundits have to explain why you should be interested in the race, and thus why you should continue supporting their product. And this goes, incidentally, for pollsters who are also pundits. One day last week, Zogby's poll showed McCain in the lead. Zogby explained the result: "McCain outpolled Obama today, 48% to 47%. He is beginning to cut into Obama's lead among independents, is now leading among blue collar voters, has strengthened his lead among investors and among men, and is walloping Obama among NASCAR voters. Joe the Plumber may get his license after all. Obama's lead among women declined, and it looks like it is occurring because McCain is solidifying the support of conservative women, which is something we saw last time McCain picked up in the polls." Actually, it now looks like that data point was just a fluke. Zogby's final poll showed Obama winning 54% to 43% (too high, incidentally). Presumably, the change was not caused by McCain doing really well for one day among independents and blue collar voters, then losing all of them again five days later. If you'd just been watching the data, you would have simply assumed that. But because Zogby felt the need to explain his poll, he had to mislead. Also, Nate Silver was pretty clearly this election's MVP, at least so far as media goes. What I love about his story, incidentally, is he starts as a DailyKos.com diarist, and blows up to become a major media figure. Ten years ago, there would have been no way for him to break into the industry. But because of the open platform and easy publicity provided by community blogs like DailyKos, he could wander right in, identify a market need for good data, and fill it. That's progress.
