Vindicating the pollsters post-election

>>> welcome back. as the numbers rolled in last night, it was the nerds that proved to be leading the race with the national polls trailing behind. who better to bring in than human calculator himself, joining us now is election nate , nate cohn of new republic. how are you doing this morning?

>> doing well. pretty tired but slept in.

>> join the club .

>> polls were sort of a 12th man on the field of this election. the good, the bad and i think finally the vindicated. do you think we now stop talking about polls with a personality, polls that are skews, polls that favor one candidate over another?

>> i think that the utility of the polling average has been demonstrated now pretty conclusively. i think part of the reason why democrats, you know, have learned to trust the polling average is spending most of 2004 and 2010 distrusting them and then, gosh, they were right in the end and now the republicans had the moment because in 2006 and 2008 the numbers so clear they didn't have to suffer through a close election and the polls showed them trailing and then confirming.

>> i'm sure you were watching the returns and saying i hope my predictions is right. and it turned out that you were correct. krystal with the perfect map and i had the same map. doesn't matter who got there first. we had the same map.

>> wait, wait. can i see toure 's actual map?

>> that is toure 's actual map and looking like the electoral college map. you will note, i got it right. steve got 49 out of 50 and so did my son picking randomly. and that's the story i'm sticking to.

>> i think there's another map.

>> let's dig down in to the map. do we have the different rit rati it rations?

>> but the game -- but the game was always that you could change throughout -- i got new information and i changed -- i got new information.

>> we are so -- had the right map first.

>> nate cohn, after you --

>> that's so wrong.

>> after you picked my map and steve edged closer to me and toure wholesale adopted my map.

>> no, no.

>> now trying to take credit. nate , how smart do you feel today, nate ?

>> as i said beforehand, i think that people that look at the polls don't deserve too much credit here. predicting 49 of 50 states in the election could have been done by any fifth grader who knows how to calculate.

>> a 4-year-old.

>> a fourth grader, i don't know. but, the pollsters nailed it. they were just as accurate as they have been in the past despite the reasons to doubt whether they could do so.

>> steve , i want to note before you get in here that steve friedman laughed at us for calling florida blue.

>> we should say nbc news not called yet.

>> not been called.

>> obama is in the lead and locks like he'll take florida.

>> right now mine's as right as all of yours.

>> not mine.

>> i wanted to ask --

>> not s.e.'s.

>> the point you made there. the poll averages work because the polls in them generally working. there were some really sort of dead-on polls. look at the pew one at the end and duds to look back and say were really just out there. the one that jumps out to me is rasmussen , favorite poll of fox news and every angle conservative e-mail to me for six months and this guy who did unskewed polls, you know, this conservativ e site that was changing the party i.d. is to show this massive romney landslide. he was interviewed and said about rasmussen . he's lost a lot of credibility, as far as i'm concerned. he did a lot of surveys. a lot of those surveys were wrong. nate , my question to you, is there going to be a price to pay in reputation for a pollster like rasmussen ?

>> i think so. when you underestimate the strength of a candidate than doing one or two polls and being off by a few points. i think it's fine when it's three points but when you do 20 polls and all show obama doing worse by three. that's the case of rasmussen , who has an unorthodox methodological system. they don't sample cell phone voters. there's just -- there are too many layers of, you know, different areas that could have been causing the errors. for when the error comes in to say, well, that makes sense. maybe that's not and we should take as seriously in the future.

>> unorthodox is as smackdown my friend nate will deliver. stay tuned for the next block as we had to see what s.e. did because she