NOAH MILLMAN thinks my argument is wrong and that there isn't any significant trend of Republican or conservative defections over Mitt Romney's recent embarrassing videos and inept campaigning. On the list of conservative voices I named, he says Conor Friedersdorf doesn't really belong (which is true, he's non-pigeonholable and I shouldn't have had him in the list), while Ross Douthat and Bill Kristol are longtime critics of Mr Romney who will vote for him anyway. David Brooks, meanwhile, ends the column I cited with a plea for Mr Romney to run a better campaign because his "entitlement reform ideas are essential". (Appropriate response to this claim here.) Mr Millman says "that is not the sound of somebody thinking about switching teams. It’s the sound of somebody despairing that his team doesn’t seem to know how to play the game."

There’s no elite “defection” going on here. When Brooks supported Obama in 2008, that was a defection. If he said he was voting for him again, that would indeed be a signal – and who knows, maybe it would even make a small difference to a slice of high-information voters who actually read op-eds. But until that happens, this is just hedging – pre-positioning in the event of a Romney defeat to be able to say, “I told you so.” The fact of that hedging may be an indicator – a sign that these elites think Romney is going to lose, and their opinions may (or may not) be worth something. But it’s not going to contribute to that loss.

Mr Millman is right that these guys are still going to vote for Mr Romney, and I didn't mean for my use of the word "defection" to imply otherwise. They aren't actually defecting to the other side. I'm not sure what the better word would be, but I think GI's may have come up with something during the Vietnam War: they're not deserting and joining the Viet Cong, but they are finding ways to refuse to go out on missions, and instead going AWOL, heading into Saigon for unauthorised R&R, and openly telling any liberal reporters they run into that we're losing the war and the generals are idiots. The point is that these are people you'd expect to be going all-out for their side right now, but who are instead spending their energy criticising their own candidate. In the meantime, we've had Peggy Noonan joining the AWOL list, and Scott Brown making it clear he doesn't want to be associated with Mr Romney either.

Daniel Larison gets it about right: "Romney has lost some movement conservative pundits in the narrow sense that he has said something so preposterous that they aren’t going to try to defend or excuse it. He has 'lost' them to the extent that some of them were willing to defend earlier absurd claims Romney made (as Kristol did after Romney’s comments on the embassy and consulate attacks) but are not willing to associate themselves with the remarks captured on the leaked video." But I still think this somewhat understates the significance of what's going on. The conversation among Republican elites is shifting to who will bear the blame if Mr Romney loses, or how the likely post-defeat civil war inside the party might play out. As Mr Larison's recentposts describe, if party players fear Mr Romney is going to lose, they inevitably have to start to position themselves for the I-told-you-so narratives that will emerge in the aftermath. That's especially true if, as Rod Dreher writes, such a scenario threatens to become "Robespierre-like". Party players who start slamming their own candidate in order to hedge against the risk of a loss are contributing to the loss. South Vietnamese generals weren't defecting to the enemy when they withheld their divisions from the offensive to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos; they were hedging against the likelihood of defeat. In doing so, they made defeat more likely.