WELL, A LOT OF CONVENTIONAL WISDOM has tumbled: the incumbent rule, the “taller person wins” rule (to my great personal sadness), the predictive validity of the final Redskins game before the election, the exit polls, and all the other “infallible” indicators which showed Kerry going by a landslide.

What can we take out of this? Well, some of the conventional wisdom — like how the incumbent always wins if the economy is doing okay — has held up. Until next time, anyway.

I think the big story of this election was distributed information. That starts with blogs, of course. Bloggers were able to skewer some of the SwiftVet stories, blow up Dan Rather’s big “scoop”, and in other ways bring thousands of fresh eyes and fresh analysis to important issues that might otherwise have lain fallow. The media is a bubble world; we all mostly live in the same places and talk to the same people. The mainstream media has many advantages over blogs: resources, experience, editing, time to pursue a story, rigorous fact checking (no, really, I mean it), accountability. But it’s invaluable to have bloggers around to burst that bubble when needed.

But it sure doesn’t end with bloggers. I’m probably happier about the performance of the election betting markets than I am about the performance of George Bush in this election, because they vindicated a long held belief of mine: that if you take a bunch of people, and make them put their money where their mouth is, they generally get the right answer. Oh, there was a wild ride when the exit polls started showing up, but if you look at the electronic markets the day before the election, they called it better than the pundits — certainly better than yours truly, who had been expecting a Kerry win for months. (This is the first time I’ve voted for a presidential candiate who actually, y’know, became president. It’s a rather heady feeling.)

Finally it was a victory for public opinion, and not because the public voted the way I did. America’s a pretty neat place, and it’s been taking care of itself since long before I was alive.

I’m talking about Americans’ assessment of who would win. The polls had a hard time pinning down their eventual votes, but when the pollsters asked people who they thought would win the election, they called it correctly by an overwhelming majority. Each of the people asked was their own little pollster of family and friends; collectively, they were an information processing powerhouse. So really, what we should take away from this is that we shouldn’t trust the pollsters or the commentariat; we should trust ourselves. While those of us in the pundit biz were see-sawing with every poll, your friends and neighbours knew the answer all along.

It’s been an amazing experience blogging here for all of you, especially with three such outstanding co-bloggers. I hope a few of you will drop in at my blog, Asymmetrical Information, and keep sending me emails and leaving me comments, because I’ve enjoyed your attention immensely. Thanks to all the Instapundit readers, to Michael and Ann, and most of all, to Glenn, for inviting me to spend a week here. I’ll miss you all.