Underestimating The Voter Suppression

David Atkins via Hullabaloo:  Peggy Noonan's now-famous column predicting a Romney win has been widely mocked as the musings of an ignoramus unwilling to admit obvious polling data--the dying gasp of a political crowd that trusts its gut "vibrations" over scientifically available evidence. All that is true.

But there's also a revolting cynicism at play about what constitutes the "American people" for pundits like Noonan. Consider this passage: 

 Among the wisest words spoken this cycle were by John Dickerson of CBS News and Slate, who said, in a conversation the night before the last presidential debate, that he thought maybe the American people were quietly cooking something up, something we don’t know about.

I think they are and I think it’s this: a Romney win.

One could interpret this as a belief that Romney's support was undercounted by the polls. But that doesn't make much sense: all the enthusiasm and likely turnout models were actually more favorable to Republicans than the eventual result. It's hard to believe that GOP pundits really thought that the polls were underestimating Romney's legitimate base support.

And in fact we know that's not the case. The reason that conservative pundits from Dick Morris to George Will to Peggy Noonan were predicting blowout wins for Romney was that Romney's own people were expecting that, too. But not because they believed the polls were undercounting Romney support. Instead, Romney's pollsters believed a Romney blowout would result from base Democrats simply not showing up to vote.

That's almost correct.  But a more accurate description of what happened is Republicans believed that victory would be born from Democrats simply not being allowed to vote.  The only thing they underestimated was the effect of their voter suppression efforts.  And all you have to do to know that's true is listen to the Republicans themselves.