Here at blog HQ the Internet is up and running again, so time to work through some overdue items. First, the choice America will make on November 6.
It is natural to have deep divisions within the country on how the presidential election should turn out. It's unusual to have such contradictory assumptions about what is going to happen just over 100 hours from now. Long ago, the film critic Pauline Kael was ridiculed for reportedly having said, after Richard Nixon's 49-state win over George McGovern in 1972, "How can that be? No one I know voted for Nixon." Apparently she never said it, but the quote lives on, in a boiled-frog-like twilight zone, as shorthand for people who are grossly out of touch with majority American opinion, and don't realize it.
But the evidence convinces me that, beyond the spin and the lunacy and the media's interest in keeping any race "close," a lot of Republicans really believe that Romney is about to win.
Meanwhile, in the "it's not just FiveThirtyEight" category, you have a large succession of models that combine and average state-by-state polls, and all of which show that things actually look tough for Romney/Ryan.
For completeness, here is the FiveThirtyEight probability-of-win chance right now.
Still, the up-versus-down difference on how things are trending and who holds the lead seems to be a case of the "separate fact universes" problem that affects other parts of our policy extending to our grasp of electoral reality. Some fraction of the population is going to have the "How can that be? No one I know... " reaction on election day. Reid Wilson our sister publication NJ Hotline goes into that likelihood here.
This view takes nothing away from the ideas that a) the "experts" are confused and b) that a momentum narrative could be self-fulfilling. But it requires an underestimation of Rovian thought to dismiss the possibility that delegitimization is a conscious strategy of the right, and that the momentum narrative is a part of it.
More on this later in the day and tomorrow. For now the point is: The perceptions of separate reality have reached a new level.