Dick Morris, famously "benched" by Fox News (whatever that means) for being generically terrible and constantly wrong about politics, returns to his own blog today, where he continues to push around the wreckage of his 2012 prognosticating career in the hopes that something exculpatory emerges. As you might imagine, so far it hasn't happened. And pathetically, he is still trying to make Hurricane Sandy some sort of culprit.
If you remember from previous Morris bleatings, Hurricane Sandy -- with an assist from New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie -- was the bugaboo that hurt the Romney campaign the most, by stealing focus from Romney's efforts to ... I don't know -- make a futile "play" for Pennsylvania or something? It's not something that Morris had made particularly clear, beyond casting Romney as one of the "victims" of the hurricane.
But now, it's no longer Romney who was Hurricane Sandy's chief victim, it is Morris himself. You see, Morris has recrunched the numbers and has realized that in 2012, "whites stayed home" and, subsequently cost Romney the election. And Morris, don't you know, would have totally seen that coming (and thus he would have not made a bunch of terrible predictions about a coming Romney landslide that was going to sweep through Oregon!) if Hurricane Sandy hadn't suspended the Gallup poll.
There was no good national polling after Sandy struck. Gallup, for example, suspended its polling. At the last minute, it put together a national sample -- with lots of disclaimers about the dangers of inaccuracies due to the difficulty of sampling storm-hit areas -- and it showed a slight Romney lead.
That is not, strictly speaking, true. Yes, Hurricane Sandy did force Gallup to suspend polling for a few days, right at the end, but whatever impact the Hurricane had on "national polling" writ large, it only seemed to throw Dick Morris, and people who are inclined to believe Dick Morris, off their games. Hurricane Sandy didn't prevent HuffPost Pollster from calling the election correctly, at any rate, and I feel pretty certain that Nate Silver would say the same thing.
What's more is that Hurricane Sandy should not have impacted Morris' ability to get the 2012 voter demographics correct. There was plenty of warning, going into the election, that those who presumed that Obama's African-American and Latino base would not turn out again, or that their 2008 turnout was a historical outlier, were going to find out they were wrong. Morris was one of those -- in fact, he had previously just admitted he was wrong about this. Now he's suggesting that Hurricane Sandy and the Gallup organization combined to create circumstances that prevented him from having a chance to get this right.
But that raises the question: "What Gallup organization was Morris paying attention to?" Because on Oct. 26 -- when Hurricane Sandy was hitting the Bahamas -- Gallup posted this:
The composition of the electorate for the 2012 presidential election is looking quite similar to what it was in 2008 as well as 2004, according to an analysis of the demographics of Gallup's likely voter sample since Oct. 1. Thus, key elements of President Obama's electoral coalition, such as racial minorities, women, young adults, and postgraduates will likely turn out at rates similar to those in 2008.
Morris goes on to claim, "Romney was, in fact, leading before Sandy and that his chances blew away in the storm with its famous bipartisan photo of Governor Chris Christie with Obama."
Nope! Romney was losing -- looooooosing! -- before Sandy. Only the most committed hustlers are saying otherwise. This is a claim that you can laugh off, from now until the end of days.
Morris goes on to say that the Romney campaign's decision to not respond to the Obama campaign's "Bain attack ads," was a key factor in Romney's demise. He's on more solid ground with that critique. Nevertheless, Morris complains that "Republican consultants are so enamored of negative ads that they do not appreciate the impact of rebuttal media and its capacity to wipe away negatives and trigger a backlash against the candidate who airs them."
Yeah, well, maybe, but even on their worst days, those Republican consultants were at least better than Dick Morris.
RELATED:
The Hill Reporters Speak Out On "Laughingstock" Columnist Dick Morris [Media Matters]
PREVIOUSLY, on THE HUFFINGTON POST:
Dick Morris Falls On His Sword For Wrong Predictions, Misses Sword
Dick Morris Admits That He Is A Partisan Hack
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