It’s infuriating to me when political journalists lack the most basic understanding of quantitative data. For instance, I just heard a podcast of an NPR story about President Bush’s political legacy in which Mara Liasson referred to “the president’s decisive re-election victory in 2004.” But as many people (including me) pointed out at the time, Bush’s win was hardly “decisive.” For instance, as Ron Brownstein noted, Bush’s Electoral College margin was the second narrowest for an incumbent since the passage of the 12th Amendment — only Woodrow Wilson got a lesser share of the available electoral votes.

Update 1/22 3:39 PM: In comments, David suggests that Bush’s victory was decisive with respect to the popular vote, but that’s not true either. As Brownstein points out, “Bush beat Kerry by just 2.9 percentage points: 51% to 48.1%. That’s the smallest margin of victory for a reelected president since 1828.”