Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Dick Morris, 'The Worst Pundit of 2012'

source http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2013/02/dick-morris-the-worst-pundit-of-156255.html

With Dick Morris out at Fox News, it's worth taking a look at the old pollster's track record.

Morris, who predicted until the end that Mitt Romney would win in a landslide, was the punch line of the 2012 presidential election. Slate's Dave Weigel posits that "no single human made as many wrong, botched, bogus, and stupid predictions about the 2012 election as Dick Morris."

Harsh as it sounds, there's actually some hard evidence to back that up. PunditTracker, a website dedicated to bringing "accountability to the prediction industry," rated Morris "The Worst Pundit of 2012."

PunditTracker has graded 30 predictions made by Morris, six of which were correct, giving him a 20 percent hit rate. Among the highlights, Morris predicted that Romney would get 325 electoral votes, win the national election by 4 to 8 percentage points, win Michigan, win Pennsylvania, win Nevada, win Wisconsin, win New Hampshire, and win Ohio. He also predicted that Republicans would retake the Senate. (Morris offered a mea culpa after the election: "I called it as I saw it from the polling, and I did the best I could... and at the time that I said it, I believe I was right," he said.)

PunditTracker figures that "if you bet $1 on each of Morris' calls in a virtual political betting market, you would have lost 70% of your money."

Morris's future in punditry is uncertain. He'll be on CNN with Piers Morgan tonight, though that's hardly a harbinger of future prospects.

But it's not all bad. There was a time in human history when fortune tellers met worse fates for getting it wrong.


rest http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2013/02/dick-morris-the-worst-pundit-of-156255.html

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