Election Wrap-up II: All Hail the Great Nate Silver

One of the prominent themes of the final weeks of the campaign was the exponential increase in visibility of New York Times writer and FiveThirtyEight Blog editor Nate Silver. As pundit after pundit crowed about the imminence of a Romney victory (Andrew Sullivan has a good round-up), they were increasingly forced to push back against Silver's prediction of a fairly hefty Obama victory. They did this in various ways and for various reasons.

When Jonah Goldberg called Silver's model a "numbers racket," or when former GOP Congressman Joe Scarborough referred to Silver as an "ideologue" and a "joke," one could safely assume that this was just right-leaning pundits keeping the hope alive and trying to stave off negative press on their guy. Then there are the non-partisan pundits like Politico's Dylan Byers, who wrote the following:

Election Wrap-up I: "Squeaker?"

During his post-election bloviating (as to be distinguished from his pre-election bloviating), Dick Morris made a statement about the election results that has been echoed by many conservatives:

I predicted a Romney landslide and, instead, we ended up with an Obama squeaker.

I've also seen reference to how Obama "eked" out a slim victory, and various pundits refer to the fact that this victory fails to bring with it an electoral mandate, due to the closeness of the final result, as well as the fact that the GOP retained their House majority (the subject of an upcoming post). Karl Rove is a great example of this: