Hot Air’s Top 40 for 2012: The top ten posts of the year

Happy New Year!  As we shrug off our hangovers and clean up the beer bottles, let’s take a look back to the ten most-trafficked posts at Hot Air in 2012.  We’ll start with a couple of open threads from the election, but those give way early to a few of the most memorable stories of the year.

• #10 – Open thread: The second debate – Interestingly, the second debate’s open thread got more traffic than the first and last, both of which were arguably more impactful to the race. I’d guess that it was Barack Obama’s ostentatious outrage over being criticized for Benghazi that triggered the traffic, but that’s just a guess.
• #9 - 7 p.m.: Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina - The election night thread that broke our hearts.
• #8 - Open thread: Wisconsin; Update: Revised exit poll says Walker by four; Update: NBC, Fox News call it for Walker - Finally, an Election Day thread we can cheer!  Walker went on to win the June 6th recall election by a slightly wider percentage and more votes than he got when he got elected as governor less than two years earlier.  The unions spent millions of dollars to force a special election that allowed voters to rebuke them directly. Priceless.
• #7 - Maryland governor flip-flops on ‘better off’ question … in 24 hours - What a difference a day makes, eh?  Martin O’Malley had to perform a do-over after his Kinsleyan gaffe of admitting that four years of Barack Obama hasn’t made us any better off.
• #6 - “National Defense Resources Preparedness” executive order: Power grab or mere update? – I’m actually astonished that this ranked as high as it did.  Congress needs to rein in executive-order proliferation, in part by reversing legislation like the Defense Production Act of 1950, and ObamaCare too, for that matter — but we need to understand the history of EOs before hitting the panic button on routine updates.
• #5 - Obamacare just raised your health care premium by $63 – And we’ll be lucky if that’s all it does.
• #4 - What’s up with Newt Gingrich? Gallup’s daily tracking poll, for one thing - Newt Gingrich generated a lot of interest, even at the end of February, when it seemed clear that his presidential bid wasn’t going anywhere.
• #3 - Video: Romney, Ryan play offense on Medicare in 60 Minutes appearance – The first joint interview of the Republican ticket was on CBS … which edited out a key argument from Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan on Medicare.
• #2 - Video: Preview of Univision’s “bombshell” report on Fast & Furious – How big is this story?  This post appeared on a weekend, and only had a preview of the Univision report — and it still was the biggest traffic-getter for us this year — at least for a post actually written in 2012.  (If you want to see the full report, click here.)

And the post that got the most traffic in 2012 was …

• #1 - Brutal: D.C. Circuit upholds ObamaCare mandate — in opinion authored by Reagan appointee – For some reason, this November 2011 post became the most trafficked post in 2012 — and the traffic didn’t even start until February.  It lasted through October.  I double-checked our stats through both Google Analytics and WordPress, and both confirm that this was the top view-getter in 2012.  I’m not sure why this became #1 in 2012, but it got nearly 2.7 million page views (over 2.3 million uniques), almost three times the number of the #2 post.  I nearly disqualified it for being too old, but decided it was intriguing enough to include.  Of course, the end of this story came in this post from June 2012.

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