…This kind of looks like a penis. [Pollster]

In the months leading up to the presidential election, the single most important time of the day, every day, was late in the afternoon, when Nate Silver’s “Today’s Polls, dd/mm” from FiveThirtyEight would appear in America’s Google Readers. Nothing excited liberals more than seeing a new SurveyUSA poll showing Obama +7 in Virginia, for example, precisely because Silver told us all that SurveyUSA was a good pollster. But you know who else was good, and got less credit, was Mark Blumenthal over there at Pollster.com. Poor underappreciated Mark Blumenthal! He used fancy regressions on his poll averages too, you know!? Well we haven’t looked at either of these sites since November 5, but this random Andrew Sullivan post tells us that Silver and Blumenthal are still doing poll analysis — and they’re reaching shockingly different conclusions. MORE »

And this is the story of the last six or seven weeks: snipers, Wright, flag pins, Ayers, Bitter, flipping the bird, whatever else consumed the 2-hour news cycle, it’s all led to this Pollster aggregation of polls that shows Hillary’s once-sizable lead deteriorating into a merely “solid” lead. Nice work, everybody! [Pollster]

What Hillary needs to win: less racism last month. What Barack needs to win: four extra days; more Clinton racism last month. [Pollster]