Assessing the Register, Briefly

Kudos to Ann Seltzer, pollster for the Des Moines Register, for releasing numbers that confounded almost every bit of conventional wisdom I had ever heard before this week and getting it right. I do not envy her for having to make the decision to release that poll, knowing that her reputation and that of the Register would live or die by the truly counterintuitive numbers she came up with.

And too bad for David Yepsen, who remained detrimentally cynical of young and first-time voter participation the whole way through. His demographic generalizations also turned out to be exaggerated or simply inaccurate. And remember his claim that heavy young voter participation would delegitimize an Obama victory going into New Hampshire? What happened with that?

Perhaps for the statewide paper of record, the win and the loss will balance each other out.