The Breakfast Meeting: Numbers-Crunchers Defeat Pundits, and Sex Film Industry Is Stung

While everyone was watching how voters would settle the Obama-Romney contest for the presidency, they also settled, for now, another dispute, Michael Cooper writes: the pundits versus the number crunchers. It was the number crunchers in a landslide, as polls - especially when they had been looked at cumulatively as a so-called “polls of polls” - were quite accurate. The political pundits, including those with a partisan bent - like Karl Rove, Dick Morris and Michael Barone - were far from the mark with their predictions of a big Romney victory.

• Karl Rove's awkward on-air confrontation on Fox News on Tuesday night, challenging the decision by Fox News experts to project President Obama's victory in Ohio, exposed the unprecedented role he plays in contemporary politics, Jeremy W. Peters writes. At 11:13 p.m., Mr. Rove, a Fox commentator, was on the phone with a senior Romney campaign adviser who insisted that Fox News had blown the call. Mr. Peters writes of M r. Rove:

Was he acting as the man who oversaw the most expensive advertising assault on a sitting president in history, unable to face his own wounded pride? The fund-raiser who had persuaded wealthy conservatives to give hundreds of millions of dollars and now had a lot of explaining to do? Or the former political strategist for George W. Bush, who saw firsthand how a botched network call could alter the course of a presidential contest?

• The influx of multimillion-dollar campaign contributions from megadonors to the Republican side in the end didn't tip the scales in the presidential race and in many Senate contests. The best that strategists like Mr. Rove could tell these donors, Nicholas Confessore and Jess Bidgood write, is that without the hundreds of millions of dollars the races wouldn't have been as close. And the megadonors still had a deep impact on the 2012 campaigns, they write, including “reshaping the Republican presidential nominating contest, clogging the airwaves with unprecedented amounts of negative advertising and shoring up embattled Republican incumbents in the House.”
• Los Angeles County voters on Tuesday approved a ballot measure that requires actors in pornographic movies to wear condoms. Its backers said they consider it to be a “referendum on the subject of safer sex,” The Los Angeles Times reported. While the industry, which says its system of aggressive testing for H.I.V. has been a success, is threatening to move outside the county. The Times has a nice roundup of commentary on Twitter, including one actor's looking-on-bright-side Tweet: “measure b seemed to pass… Hopefully people will learn safe sex from it and at least now I get to travel… a lot!!!! (Always an up side)”

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the man behind the anti-Islam YouTube video that in September ignited bloody protests in the Muslim world, was sentenced to a year in pris on for violating the terms of his parole in a bank fraud case, Brooks Barnes writes. The charges in the plea bargain didn't relate directly to the video, “Innocence of Muslims,” but the prosecutor spoke about Mr. Nakoula's film project - and the deceitful manner in which he carried it out - as part of his sentencing argument.

Noam Cohen edits and writes for the Media Decoder blog. Follow @noamcohen on Twitter.