Hot Air's Top 40 for 2012: 11-20

Once again, we’re looking back at the Hot Air posts that garnered the most traffic in 2012.  We had plenty of off-the-mark prognostication in this set, but a couple of surprises, too.  Enjoy the trip down Memory Lane; we’ll be back with the top ten tomorrow.

• #20 – Video: Romney roasts Obama at the Al Smith Dinner – Mitt Romney may have had trouble connecting with voters through most of the campaign, but this was one of his best moments.
• #19 – Breitbart tells CPAC: I have videos of Obama in college and they’ll come out during the election – The videos themselves didn’t turn out to be game-changers, but my friend Andrew was one of the biggest game-changers in the New Media.  I still miss him.
• #18 – Scarborough: Something’s awfully odd about this job report – Odd?  Yes.  Conspiracy?  Not really, and as it turned out, voters weren’t even all that tuned in to the BLS reports anyway.
• #17 – Romney up 92K in OH early voting? Update: Gannett pulls link – The traditional newspaper-releases-dummy-numbers-by-mistake story.  Gannett later said they regretted the error.  I regretted that it wasn’t true.
• #16 – Wrap up: The third debate; Update: Insta-polls coming in – It’s amazing how much traffic these debate threads ended up pulling.  There are more coming, as you’ll see …
• #15 – Romney wins; Update: CBS insta-poll shows decisive Romney victory – AP’s wrap-up of the first debate, whose outcome was so obvious that few even bothered to dispute it.  The result kicked off a wave of optimism, which boosted this post to nearly the top of the list.
• #14 – Open thread: The VP debate – As I wrote earlier, this was easily the most bizarre presidential-series debate I’ve watched.  Commenters agreed, and showed up in droves to discuss it.
• #13 – Open thread: The third debate – Hey, I’m not picking these — you picked these.  These debate open threads were tremendously popular, and showed just how much interest there was in these events.
• #12 – When desperation strikes incumbents – It’s usually when they start making up attacks based on the name of their opponent.  In this case, it apparently wasn’t desperation — just childishness.
• #11 – Obama admin recalibrating Benghazi narrative — again — before FP debate? – In mid-October, the White House was struggling to avoid the obvious conclusion that they had tried to deny the truth of the nature of the attack on the Benghazi consulate.  The solution? Act offended whenever it came up.  Call it the Chutzpah Gambit.