A number of columns and purported analyses have been written already about what determined the outcome of the US presidential elections which president B. Obama handily won. Again, I am not a US Citizens but I had some understanding of the race by following more closely the various contentions between the two candidates. The outcome of the race confirms to me that as stated before, most political, like economic commentators and pundits do not know what they speak about. Not only was the conventional wisdom that the race was a statistical dead heat untrue, but many people opted to go for the pundits on TV with known ideological and party biases, while ignoring both Intrade and Nate Silver's blog which both suggested that Romney had made gains in the last month but was still an underdog late in the game.
To my own disappointment too, many libertarians and market friendly commentators stuck to a very ignorant mantra that Romney had a momentum after the first debate and would win. Their reasoning was that the endorsement of the Tea Party on one side and the stellar record in corporate reengineering was enough. Sorry, it was not purely because the president was not really as weak as it was thought. And it was only a single comment in the Samizdata blog where there was the caution that the celebrations were unjustified because the information markets still firmly predicted an Obama win.
Looking now at the result, it is clear that there will be many books and tracts trying to explain the manner of Obama's win. Starting with this piece in the NYT, there is emerging evidence that president Obama's campaign team worked with a "Dream team" of academics on the cutting edge of research, but also employed sophisticated data analysis that informed both media buying and face to face outreach. Noting also that both campaigns had professionals advising them, it is essential to compare one set against the other in order to determine how one side bested the other.
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