“Building a new stadium down the street does not work unless (Ron) Lancaster spilled some DNA in the lot where they’re going to build the new stadium,” he added. “You have to refurbish (Mosaic Stadium). You’ve got to can all new ideas you might have and use the sacred ground. Fenway did that and that is why Fenway is loved. The new Yankee Stadium isn’t the same as it used to be.”
The former Boston Red Sox and Montreal Expos pitcher will not be running for the vacant mayor’s position in Regina later this year. With his opinion on the new stadium, he wasn’t sure he would garner many votes anyway. But that is nothing new to the former member of the Rhinoceros Party. Lee ran on the Rhino ticket in 1988 for president of the United States. Not surprisingly, he didn’t make the ballot in a single state. He said one of the high-ranking members within the party gave him a six-pack of Molson Canadian and asked him to run for president.
“I adhered to their funny philosophy,” Lee said. “My campaign slogan was ‘No guns, no butter. They’ll both kill you.’ And I only campaigned in federal prisons where I knew they couldn’t vote, and I only accepted a quarter in campaign contributions.”
With it being an election year in the U.S., Lee said he is all in for the re-election of Barack Obama.
“The only time (Mitt) Romney opens his mouth is when he needs to change feet,” Lee said of the Republican nominee. “If Obama does lose this, which I can’t see happening, then it’s because of a lady in Florida who works for Jeb Bush and Diebold, the voting-machine company. If Obama even comes close to losing this election, it’ll be fraud.”
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Wouldn't the inverse automatically assume that because Ray is more conservative than Nate is, that he's naturally biased against Nate?
Joe is the one making the argument that Silver's models must be biased because he's liberal, even though Silver is transparent about his models and yet Joe remains willfully ignorant of their workings. Let's not conflate Joe and Ray.
The GOP SuperPACs all just recently canceled their PA ad reservations for this fall -- PA looks to be falling off the board. They've supposedly moved the reservations to WI and NM (that's New Mexico, not Minnesota). A couple new polls yesterday showed Obama moving above the 50% mark in PA (and under an LV screen).
Of course, cancelled air time can usually be rebooked, but it would appear that at least from the GOP perspective -- they're looking for a path that doesn't include Pennsylvania.
This might also just be a function of the fact that Bob Casey is trouncing his GOP opponent - the guy, in defending Todd Akini, just said that 'rape' is just like his daughter getting pregnant out of wedlock - and together with the idea that Obama has maintained a stubborn high single digit lead, means they want to focus on Wisconsin (which has shown Ryan giving the ticket a real boost and Tommy Thompson is the favorite to pick up a Senate seat) and New Mexico (where there hasn't been much Pres level polling, and the GOP likewise has a decent Senate pickup shot).
If Nate was like Joe I think there would be very good reasons not to trust his work or findings.
The thing is Nate isn't overtly liberal with most of his content. I frequent his site weekly or so duing the heart of election seasons and mostly read his polling analysis articles. I've never really noticed a lean one way or the other with those articles. If somebody asked me a weel ago if Nate was a liberal or a conservative I would have replied that I do not know. I only know now because people are saying he is a liberal.
Joe, as is the nature of many conversations on BTF, is trying to win and have his worldview be king of the hill. If Nate took that approach with his site then it wouldn't be a trustworthy site regardless of which way he leans.
Can we get some reciprocal examples for today's science lesson?
In some sense this is rational - an incumbent with a small stubborn lead, etc... - but it can't be a good thing. But as they say it is still close enough with time enough anything could happen. It, sadly, is not yet a lock.
And Lassus, the answer is yes, you can feel free to call him stupid.
On the subject of his rapid rise: that's how the business works. You predict a major election better than most of the established players, people sit up and take notice-- at least examine your method to see if you did something no one else thought to do, or if you just got lucky. Nate was up front with his methods, where some pollsters keep their secret sauce to themselves, and that fostered more discussion about them than I think you would have seen otherwise. This is a big-money industry, and you're not going to survive in it if you allow your political bias to influence your methods-- your reputation is tied to your ability to make accurate predictions based on that method. If you lose that cred, you're just another partisan blogger.
Just like with the discussion on media bias, it seems like the right-wingers here have lost their faith in the market's meritocratic mechanisms.
EDIT: Fixed typos.
All with the backdrop of him being a liberal. If he were a hardcore conservative you just might view him differently.
This counterfactual is hard to address. I think that what Nate is doing is very interesting and almost unique in the field. There aren't any conservatives who do something similar.
Part of the problem is that a lot of the people in the conservative movement are pretty heavy water carriers. Who am I supposed to find interesting? Rush? Erick Erickson? I actually do find Huckabee interesting, but he's more of a So-Con.
Where are the Ezra Kleins and Jon Bernsteins writing on the right? All the technocrats and political scientists have been pushed out.
Does Nick Gillespie count? I more than occasionally find him tolerable - though, he's more theoretician/philosopher (and certainly more 'libertarian' than 'right') than he really is wonk.
The idea that Nate Silver is an "overnight sensation" is itself wrong, so the explanation of why that is the case is obviously wrong as well (as it's unnecessary and based on an error itself.) The guy spent a decade nailing statistical analysis of a fluid, constantly changing subject (baseball) and then moved on to nailing statistical analysis of another fluid, constantly changing subject (electoral politics, specifically polling aggregations.) The idea that he is a neophyte to his position at 538 is to simply misunderstand what 538 does. The NYT hired a guy that had proven over more than a decade that he was at the top of the quantitative analysis game, on pretty much any subject that interested him enough to devote his time to it, who had proven twice that he could not only manage the spreadsheets but also advance a brand identity via the web (first as the PECOTA guru at BPro and then at his own blog-shop at 538.)
Of course they're going to hire that guy. Jesus. It's not like he colored three pages of Rorschachs "correctly" such that the liberal intelligentsia agreed to let him into the inner Masonic lodge.
And in every other kind of conversation, everywhere. Your pet peeves tend to be some version of your own worst faults.
Ditto and absolutely --
Regardless of the outcome, this will probably be the last cycle from many of Team Obama's war room - some of them, I'm sure, will continue to run campaigns - but I do look forward to some of them cashing in and hitting the pundit circuit. Begala and Carville are old and their last successes were more than a decade ago. Democratic punditry badly needs some new, experienced, and SUCCESSFUL blood -- and clearly, like Obama or not, he's got some real pros with insight on his team.
You're wrong Ray. Again*. I liked Silver before I found out he was politically liberal. Your "smartest guy in the room" act has to be tough to pull off when you so consistently and so boldly fail in every one of your predictions. And your equivalency is false-- Silver's not a "hardcore" liberal. If he had a slight conservative slant to him, I'd agree with him less, but that wouldn't change the good feelings he cultivated with his writing on BPro and the tone he took in his personal responses to my e-mails. Unless you're arguing if he was conservative, his tone would have been more acerbic?
*I read on this site that the Gonzalez trade would never happen. How'd that turn out?
I don't know about that. My pet peeves are drivers who don't know how or won't execute the zipper when merging, groups of people who take up all of the space on sidewalks and hallways, people who don't know how to use the escalator, and people who don't know how to say the word caramel. I don't think any of those things are versions of my worst faults.
EDIT: Responding to the first sentence. Not sure as much about the second (as McCoy pointed out). Pet peeves are a bit different, but I tend not to trust people that call others liars a bunch and experience tells me those who think their SO is cheating are very often cheating or want to cheat.
I think it is about how people ascribe things to others that they are feeling/thinking - if that makes sense.
I agree and said as much above. If Nate was "hardcore" anything in terms of opinions he wouldn't be as big as he is now. He might be a liberal but he most certainly hasn't created a hardcore liberal political website in 538.
Who are the people doing "Who,us?"
But the ability to port an expertise in modelling baseball data to modelling political data was certainly an untested one, which is why Nate's success at predicting elections outcomes, as opposed to baseball outcomes, mattered so much. A lot of pollsters (I'm thinking of Zogby here, because that's the one I'm most familiar with) can float around the edges of success without being noticed, until they get a big election more right than anyone else. With Silver, this happened remarkably quickly.
That latter part is probably the bigger deal (as bitter mouse pointed out in #4211) than we're giving it credit for.
I find your fetish for being boldly and arrogantly wrong in a public forum more than fairly hilarious. To each his own.
They don't work very well. The electorate is always missampled (e.g. Rep/Ind/Dem breakdown of pop. is constantly in flux, turnout varies, etc.), a huge % of people either don't answer or don't have home phones anymore, and people flat out lie to pollsters.
Fine. I was 100% correct. I said the trade would never go through if the Red Sox were only sending $10 million. It turned out that they sent $11 million. Correctness achieved, yet again.
I really like and respect the fact that Ray is willing to be bold and put his opinions out there. I disagree with him on most everything, but I find his participation makes threads much more interesting. He is right on some things and wrong on others, but his "boldness" means we remember the wrong very vividly.
Of course his habit of "Bill Clinton" like use of language to avoid some of the fallout of his boldness and his occasional dishonest arguing and arrogance I could do without, but in total I think Ray is a definite plus to the site and the thread.
EDIT: My inability to type "thing" correctly is very annoying. So is my inability to spell. I wish this computer gave spelling suggestions like my other one does. Stupid IE.
Agreed. If Nate had jumped from PECOTA to 538 and failed he would have been a failed blogger. But he stepped into political polling data, announced his intentions and approach, and then launched rockets out of the park in back to back to back at bats. The idea that he was hired by the NYT because he was "liberal" rather than because he created a dead on predictive model from scratch, built a hugely popular web brand at his own site, and continued to improve it as he went... That's some stupid #### right there. The NYT acquired 538 for the same reasons any large, established company acquires a smaller, niche company that's successful in an expansion market space; it was cheaper and more effective than trying to replicate that success in-house.
And Ray's just making a fool of himself in this sub-thread.
Being a liberal makes him more likable to a lot of the NYT reader base, but even if he were a righty, he is not the shrill type, and as noted, in the business he is in, making good predictions is the key. I don't go to his site to read his qualitative observations; I can get liberal-slanted qualitative observations anywhere. Silver gets clicks due to the numbers working and the methodology being explained.
Ray was good at first, then...
I believe that Whitesox fans did frequently accuse BPro/Pecota/Silver of being biased against them
I've always been a firm supporter of abolition of polling. Elections are more fun when you don't know what's going to happen!
I do agree with the tendency to piece together other people's thought processes based on our own personalities. Though some of the most fruitful conversations I've ever had have been when I couldn't piece together at all what the other person was thinking, and we had to work through each other's steps to find one another...though that describes some of the most frustrating conversations of my life too.
either works irrespective of your political leanings
Concur. Also, polls can effect turnout, and become a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Ray once again finds himself to be right, even when he's wrong. Film at 11.
And then they rushed the field and assaulted an umpire.
To be fair what you said was this.
"You heard it here first: this deal is not happening. It hinges on the money, and the Red Sox would have to be crazy to kick in a lot of money, and the Dodgers would have to be crazy to take on this much age-30 payroll.
The deal is DOA."
Not to jump on board with picking on you, but just in case you're wondering why some people seem to really enjoy it.* It's not so much that you're wrong, it's the way you go about it. It's one thing to say "I don't think this is going to happen" and telling people they're being silly for even discussing it because it's so obviously not going to happen. When a claim like that turns out to be wrong people look for the same kind of cathartic release they get from when a villain gets his at the end of a movie.
*maybe you aren't wondering, and couldn't care less about what people think, which is fair enough.
Fortunately I think either HRC or Cuomo would crush him in the primary.
On the GOP side are Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Chris Christie the early favorites? They feel that way to me, but I could see a Rand Paul or Susan Martinez making a bit of a run as well.
All assuming Obama wins in 2012, otherwise the calculus changes a great deal.
A Clinton vs. Bush matchup in 2016 would be both amusing and horrible. Hundreds of millions of people and the same families keep showing up?
EDIT: For some reason I wrote Crist and meant Chris Christie. And now I am doubting that is the NJ Gov name. Gak.
Okay guys, this is just silly. Ray is dead wrong on the "liberals like Nate Silver because he's a liberal" tangent he's no here, and he was obviously wrong about the Red Sox-Dodgers trade. And what with his being Ray, he's going to say something else pretty soon that's going to be equally and as incredibly wrong. It's like his mutant superpower.
With that said, you guys really need to start figuring out how to read his tone and his humor a little better. It's not like he's a newbie on his second month of BTF registration and posting. He was *obviously* being a sarcastic smartass with the "I said 10 mil, and they sent 11" bit. Good lord.
If you wanted to know that John Edwards was a phony, you only had to know that Shrum ran his first campaign for the senate. I blame Shrum for the Gore 2000 debacle.
Edit:
Dem's haven't nominated someone as old as HRC or Biden in a long, long time. I'm pretty sure it's Cuomo's to lose. It really does make me think that the R is going to win. I can't imagine Sandra Lee as the first lady. What a disaster that would be.
Dem's always skew young, R's skew old. Institutional biases.
Link
Assuming an Obama second term, a Joe Biden ticket in 2016 would ensure a Jeb Bush presidency. Maybe John Huntsman wants to be his VP or something.
what is weird is the claim that the tea party is dead is a "liberal" meme- it is the "establishment" Repubs who keep making the claim,if anything the liberals are more than eager to egg the Teapers on.
one thing I've noticed about bot wings of partisans- to the rightwinger, Americans or the People equals GOP primary voters, the GOP party base- to the leftwinger Americans or the People equals Dem primary voters, the Dem party base...
Jonathan has a pretty extensive "Plainly Worth Reading" list. Not sure how many (if any) are right-leaning wonks.
2004, RCP final average (President), Bush 48.9 to 47.4, actual Bush 50.7 to 48.3
2006, RCP final poll average (House) Dems 52.1 to 40.6, actual Dems 52.0 to 44.1
2008, RCP final poll average (President) Obama 52.1 to 44.5, actual, Obama 52.9 to 45.6
2008, RCP final poll average (House), Dems 47.6 to 38.6, actual Dems 53.2 to 42.5
2010, RCP final POll average (House), Repubs 50.7 to 41.3, actual, Repubs 51.6 to 44.8
Gosh, you are right, they don't work at all :-)
They don't work very well. The electorate is always missampled (e.g. Rep/Ind/Dem breakdown of pop. is constantly in flux, turnout varies, etc.), a huge % of people either don't answer or don't have home phones anymore, and people flat out lie to pollsters.
All of this is true, but more so with some polls than others, which is why the poll aggregators are usually better than any given poll, and why those like Silver who know how to adjust for the biases of those polls usually do very well in their own predictions.
My sense is that you're really more opposed to polling from a philosophical standpoint, and that POV I can see, but that's a whole separate question. I follow RCP and Nate because they form a joint reality check against any sort of subjective biases I might bring into the election, either my wishes (that Romney and Ryan get caught by a camera while sharing a stall in a men's room) or my fears (that the PAC money will wind up being determinative).
Also, from what I can remember, you've got pretty much a "plague on both their houses" POV to begin with, but not all of us are that indifferent to the stakes involved, and hence our interest in polls.
Me too. I'll simply have to decide how afraid of the new Republican party I am. News today that, for the first time in my life, I live in a swing state.
So, you were wrong, right?
Wait, your vote for Johnson, or your vote for Obama?
Though it's hard not to respect the consistency of principle that shines through in 4244, # 4247 makes me feel even better that you don't live in Ohio.
Simultaneously, the notion that his ideological leanings have no impact on whether people "like" him or not is equally dumb. Some people here, while happy to accept the notion that the unwashed masses are not rational actors, are apparently unable to accept that those same rules of biology apply to them as well.
I've said I was wrong, multiple times, even though that has been utterly self evident since Saturday. I remain unclear what the point of the question is.
Bingo.
Simultaneously, the notion that his ideological leanings have no impact on whether people "like" him or not is equally dumb. Some people here, while happy to accept the notion that the unwashed masses are not rational actors, are apparently unable to accept that those same rules of biology apply to them as well.
I'm sure I'm glad that Nate is whatever degree of liberal he is, but whether I "like" him or not, it's (as you say) the results that count. Anyone with Nate's track record, no matter what his personal ideology, would command the same respect from me.
Damn your facts!
But Snapper on polls - I think this is the brilliance of Silver's (and other aggregater's) work. Polls taken out of context -- like comparing stats accumulated in 1968 Dodger Stadium vs. 1999 Coors Field - are borderline worthless. By normalizing, regressing and de-biasing them you get a much more complete picture. In theory at least - which has been born out by the results of the last 4 years. He also predicted something like 34 out of 37 seats in the 2010 midterms, although he underpredicted the number of Republicans to win house seats by a fair large margin (9 seats, I think... BIAS). This actually makes sense - there simply isn't enough comparative polling data to make accurate predictions in house seats. When you aggregate across districts and states (as in the General) a huge amount of polling error is going to get washed out.
Is the electoral college* the only thing preventing a shattering of the Republican party at the national level??
Of course, pre-Clinton we were talking the same about the pathetic, out of touch democrats.
In case this logic is hard to follow:
The Conservates/Republicans hold the Southern states in Lockdown. But Red states are only "states" in a General because of the EC. The real divide is, of course, urban/rural (look at any county-by-county red/blue break down of ANY state). Being able to hold 50.1% Rural states with the SocCon/FisCon alliance is keeping the Republican party afloat. But I think they would CRUSH the Democrats in a popular vote count if they could flip 10% in major urban areas at the national level. But no way can they flip with the Fundie anchor.
/wishcasting
Right now, Nate Silver's model thinks it's more likely that Obama wins the electoral college but loses the popular vote than that Romney does the same.
EDIT: If you're looking for a story of inevitable future Democratic triumphs, the most plausible is still the Judis/Teixeira "Emerging Democratic Majority" thesis. See this recent interview in New York Magazine:
/wishcasting
Welcome to the wishcast club, bro. If suffrage were truly universal in fact rather than just in theory, the crushing would be of a quite different nature. Of course that plus $14.00 will get the Dems a day's worth of rides on the Washington Metro..
If you believe demographics is destiny then the GOP is hosed for the near future. If you think the two party system basically ensures rough parity then no matter what happens the GOP will find it's footing (after perhaps a few elections). If you believe the US is truly a Center-Right nation then the entire premise of the question is wrong. If you think the entire system is corrupt and coopted by corporations then again your premise is flawed.
I think the EC structure does help the more "rural" party and hurts the more "urban" party (not coincidentally we see this in the Senate as well), and that is basically functioning as designed (unfortunately). I don't think it is a big enough advantage to change that much though.
In the medium term I think the GOP will win plenty of elections, but will have a stretch where national elections are more about winning despite the party brand rather than because of it (see the Democrats fortunes post LBJ).
It's a republic, obviously, so just as easy to say maintaining a stranglehold on a few heavily-populated coastal states is the only thing keeping the Dems afloat.*
I sure wish pollsters / forecasters / news services would stop pretending they don't know that the electoral college, and not the popular vote, decides who becomes President.
EDIT: * or, what MCoA said.
My understanding is that Oklahoma actually tends to be more conservative urban and less so rural, but that is relying on my terrible memory. But yeah basically it is Urban Vs Rural, with the Suburbs deciding things.
Right, but as minority blocks grow, whites become more Republican. And, as Hispanics (50% of whom self-identify as white) get more prosperous and assimilated they will likely trend Republican too.
According to this map, Oklahoma is he only state where every county went for McCain in 2008.
Theoretically the EC gives a big advantage to the Republicans. If you were to distribute those "extra" 100 EC votes among the states according to population, as is done for the first 438, the Democrats would gain a lot of EC votes.
But OTOH if the Democrats win a big state by a few percentage points, they'll more than make up for lopsided Republican wins in half a dozen smaller states, even though the total GOP popular vote in those combined states might be much bigger. So it really all depends on the particulars of the election. The EC helped Bush in 2000 and it may help Obama this year. Hard to see any permanent tilt one way or the other. Personally I like the EC just for the extra dimension it gives to the race.
That's assuming that the nativist majority that dominates the current GOP discourse on immigration does everyone a favor by moving to an ice floe and letting global warming work its wonders. I can't see that happening anytime soon.
I live in Georgia. Georgia will send electoral college voters to Mitt Romney. I could figure out a way for me and my 200 best friends to vote 200 times each and Georgia would still send electoral college voters to Mitt Romney.
Obama has been bad enough of on civil liberties that my general support of his domestic agenda + my seething disgust for the Newform Dixiecrats that form the GOP/TP alliance does not override my desire to vote for a candidate that says sane, rational things about the drug war and the national security police state run amok. I don't agree with Gary Johnson on all issues, but I'll preference his subset of issues over the subset of issues I agree with Obama on in this election, because at the end of the day, my vote doesn't really matter at all.
To Andy's point, if I lived in FL or OH I might have a different, more difficult calculus. In this regard I'm not unlike Ray, who would almost certainly vote more party-line GOP ballots if he lived in OH, but is comfortable voting his "convictions" for Libertarian options since he lives in NY and his vote doesn't actually matter at the end of the day (outside of local races.)
Nothing quite like another showing of Sexual & Racial Panic! At The Disco.
I would like to hear why you think either of these things will happen, to say nothing of both happening at once.
Plus you have to look at the young versus old. Olders voters currently skew GOP, but they are dying much faster than the younger voters are. I suppose it depends if you believe people grow more conservative as they get older (we discussed that a while back).
This can't be stressed too much (and it's a fundamentally conservative idea that MCoA's making here.) If the parties more or less split the difference on alienating Hispanics - more or less like they did for Italian and Irish immigrants during past waves - then it's possible that 3rd and 4th generation Latinos will migrate with their economic and typically soc-con principles and vote GOP. But if the GOP identifies itself as the party of people who hate Latinos, the way the GOP embraced the elements of the old Dixiecrat base that made its bones hating African Americans, the institutional memories of those voter constituencies will be long.
I did say more liberal, I never said Liberal.
EDIT: I am a typo machine today. Sigh.
Yes of course - it would work the other way if the population was distributed differentially.
What US counties are predominantly African-American, Rural, and vote democratic?
Anyway, my point is not that the EC is biased - but that it's existence forces the FiCons to ally with the SoCons or give up any power. The other stability point would be for the SoCons and Moonbat socialists to get kicked to the curb and the FiCons ally with hawkish big business friendly Democrats, but this isn't demographically stable due to the EC.
That's in Kansas, not Oklahoma anyways.
Most, if not all of the Mississippi delta counties for one.
Every time this point gets raised, it's countered by "we're only talking about illegal immigration---we love our legal immigrants."
That counterargument would be a hell of a lot more convincing if the people spouting this line were trying to remove the insane amount of red tape required for people to legalize themselves. Unfortunately, when push comes to shove there's no evidence that this is the case. Groups like FAIR are trying to restrict legal immigration just as much as they're trying to send back the swimovers.
The irony is that just a few short years ago, you had leading Republicans like Bush and McCain actually making constructive moves to put together a sane and humane immigration policy. Then along came Lou Dobbs and the talk radio crowd, and that was the end of that. How many Republican leaders today are willing to stand up and confront the nativists within their party? Not many. Instead we have Romney talking about "self-deporting" and acting all hurt that Hispanics might actually believe that he means what he says. He may find out in November that this wasn't the smartest of moves.
I wasn't disputing you.
That counterargument would be a hell of a lot more convincing if the people spouting this line were trying to remove the insane amount of red tape required for people to legalize themselves. Unfortunately, when push comes to shove there's no evidence that this is the case. Groups like FAIR are trying to restrict legal immigration just as much as they're trying to send back the swimovers.
The irony is that just a few short years ago, you had leading Republicans like Bush and McCain actually making constructive moves to put together a sane and humane immigration policy. Then along came Lou Dobbs and the talk radio crowd, and that was the end of that. How many Republican leaders today are willing to stand up and confront the nativists within their party? Not many. Instead we have Romney talking about "self-deporting" and acting all hurt that Hispanics might actually believe that he means what he says. He may find out in November that this wasn't the smartest of moves.
Luckily for Republicans, both they and the Democrats have done such a good job destroying the economic prospects for blue collar/non-college educated people in this country, that immigration is likely to be much less of an issue going forward.
A wise man said, "Why do we need low-skilled immigrant workers? Our public schools generate all the low-skilled workers we could ever need."
Yes, but that's the thing they tell themselves to validate their own assumptions and prove to themselves that they're not being racist. That argument has never and will never fly particularly well within the Latino immigrant community. At best, the GOP might hope that would play well in the East Asian immigrant communities, particularly Indian immigrants, but at that point they come up against the "we're the party of hating all Muslims" plank of their platform and they're back to square one.
I have no doubt that a conservative coalition will exist in 50 years, and that coalition will have elements of today's GOP/TP alliance in it, most likely. But tying your electoral chances to the basic premise of "we're the party white racial panic" is not a long term strategy for success.
The Nate Silver discussion is only dumb because (1) people have entirely mischaracterized my original point, and (2) the liberal screamers here don't even have the courage of their convictions.
As I've said many times, I like Nate and I like Nate's political work, and I've never accused him of cooking his numbers. My position on Nate boils down to this: I know he's a liberal, so I don't blindly accept his findings as gospel. This would be considered rational behavior in any other setting, so it's beyond me why it shouldn't apply to FiveThirtyEight.
Beyond that, it's odd how liberals here are fighting to outdo each other in their defenses of Nate's honor while simultaneously distancing themselves from Nate's key metric. All Ray and I have said is that we consider Nate's liberal leanings when reading his articles. The lefties, meanwhile, keep claiming that "Nate's track record is the best" while lining up, one after the other, to say that they believe Obama is far less than a 70 percent favorite, as Nate has been claiming for months. The lack of consistency and self-awareness is comical.
Which part of the statement you quoted was incorrect? Are liberals here not claiming Nate has the best track record since 2008? And are many of those same liberals not lining up to proclaim their belief that Nate's "70 percent favorite" number is way off for Obama?
By which you mean you handwave away anything of Nate's that gets brought up here and then cast aspersions on Nate because he is, gasp, a liberal.
The issue, as MCoA notes, isn't about your refusal to blindly accept his findings as gospel or that other people do accept blindly his findings on this board. The issue is that you tend to, and occasionally others will as well, handwave away some pretty solid facts as reported by Nate Silver because somewhere at some point Nate said something that didn't adhere to the principles that you wish for anyone to fully believe in.
It's rare that you get an honest admission to rank sophomoric relativism like this.
The EC has a decent chance of being gone by 2020, given the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. And good riddance, it leaving would improve the nature of the presidential campaign by making a vote in Idaho or Vermont mean just as much as one in Ohio.
Nate Silver:
Here's an article about Silver from just after 2008's election. My point about him was that he was doing something wholly new in political coverage, and within 4-5 months was regularly appearing on TV about it. That's a rapid rise, even if it comes from exceptional application of relevant technique for a novel application. I don't think it has to do with his political leanings, I think it has to do with his open source model, his writing skill, and the fact that he nailed the Democratic primaries in a way no one else did. I also think Joe and Ray hurt their own understanding of the election by ignoring him, but who knows, maybe I'm missing out on great wisdom because I generally ignore Byron York.
Polling:
I completely disagree with you on the value of polling, Snapper, for reasons illustrated by others. No single poll should be taken as the be all and end all of public opinion. But the problems you cite are ones that have been examined by the pollsters (for example, getting around people not picking up the phone by calling back repeatedly, and calling cell phones to reach those who don't have landlines) and they're professional statisticians, the good ones are not just going to ignore them. Likewise, the good ones release their crosstabs and give information about their methodology so you can actually look into their results and see why exactly they got them. When they seem to have screwed up, or when they give poorly constructed reasons for their methodology, you can decide if you want to discount their results.
Demographics:
I'm with the Teixeira in MCoA's post. You can already see vast differences in the 18-30 GOP cohort as compared to the older members on things like gay rights and contraception (though not abortion itself). And you could argue that they've already begun moving towards a more diverse party in terms of who they've elected recently re: Haley, Jindal, Sandoval, Martinez, Cruz, and Rubio. It would be a lot easier for them, though, if the nativist wing hadn't scuttled Bush's immigration reform. And who knows what the tipping point is when their inability to rely upon the white vote is no longer enough to win enough elections to have a good shot at majorities, and it might not come into play as soon as expected due to midterm electorates tending to be older and whiter than presidential electorates.
Apropos Brendan Nyhan, he wrote one of my favorite polisci papers ever. The results are something everyone who tries to reason out their own political stances should keep in mind.
As I've said many times, I like Nate and I like Nate's political work, and I've never accused him of cooking his numbers. My position on Nate boils down to this: I know he's a liberal, so I don't blindly accept his findings as gospel. This would be considered rational behavior in any other setting, so it's beyond me why it shouldn't apply to FiveThirtyEight.
It's all relative, Joe. Whose findings have proven to be more accurate? And if you acknowledge that his numbers are uncooked, which you have, then what adjustments are you making to them because of his political leanings? Is he supposed to adjust his figures towards the GOP on some sort of an affimative action basis just to counter his liberalism? I doubt if you're saying that, but if not, then what exactly is your point?
Beyond that, it's odd how liberals here are fighting to outdo each other in their defenses of Nate's honor while simultaneously distancing themselves from Nate's key metric. All Ray and I have said is that we consider Nate's liberal leanings when reading his articles. The lefties, meanwhile, keep claiming that "Nate's track record is the best" while lining up, one after the other, to say that they believe Obama is far less than a 70 percent favorite, as Nate has been claiming for months. The lack of consistency and self-awareness is comical.
I can't speak for anyone else here, but I make the same distinction that Nate himself does, one which you don't seem either to understand or acknowledge. That "70 percent favorite" number is only true as of today. That number changes nearly every day as new polls come out and adjustments are made. That is NOT the same thing as saying that today's number is going to emerge unscathed in November, since between now and then anything can happen. The world isn't static, and neither are elections.
Now if you think that Romney would have a better than 30% chance of winning an election held today, then you have a real disagreement with Nate. But if all you're saying is that the economy (or something else) will cause Romney to surge ahead in the coming weeks and win in November, then you're simply boxing a shadow, since that's not Nate's line of work. Go back to 538 on election eve if you want to engage him on that particular subject.
Also, a friend of mine met him and said his boyfriend was catty. So, liberal and poor choice in men!
I'm citing this as an example of what Nyhan wrote about in "when corrections fail" considering that multiple people have said that one reason to follow Silver is because his methodology is out in public for anyone to see, and thus we're not saying that you should take his findings as gospel. It's a factual argument that seems unable to gain resonance and acceptance due to a previously held position.
Let us fervently hope so. The EC is a bad idea.
Apart from that I happen to roughly agree with his ~70% figure, but mostly because my gut feel is pretty close to that.
* I like his output, not really him, since I don't know him at all. I know people who know him though, but we have never discussed him.
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