Keyword: natesilver
-
During the 2012 election, and to a lesser extent in the 2010 cycle, it became popular for poll-watchers on the right to dig into the sample data of individual polls, compare that sample available exit polling, and apply some judgment as to whether or not that poll was likely to accurately reflect the results on Election Day. In 2012, however, too many on the right began reflexively engaging in this practice for every poll with the aim of diving preferred results out of an otherwise disappointing poll. A few thoughtless types on the left would shriek, and not without...
-
The Des Moines Register’s Iowa Poll always makes news and with good reason: The pollster that conducts it, Selzer & Company, is among the best in the country, according to FiveThirtyEight’s pollster ratings. On Saturday evening, the poll had an especially interesting result in Iowa’s Senate race. It put the Republican candidate Joni Ernst six points ahead of the Democrat, Representative Bruce Braley. Most other recent polls of the state had shown a roughly tied race. Consider the implications. Republicans need to pick up six seats to win the Senate. Right now, they’re favored to win the Democratic-held seats in...
-
When we officially launched our forecast model two weeks ago, it had Republicans with a 64 percent chance of taking over the Senate after this fall’s elections. Now Republican chances are about 55 percent instead. We’ve never quite settled on the semantics of when to call an election a “tossup.” A sports bettor or poker player would grimace and probably take a 55-45 edge. But this Senate race is pretty darned close.What’s happened? The chart below lists the change in our forecast in each state between Sept. 3 (when our model launched) and our current (Sept. 15) update.As you...
-
The FiveThirtyEight Senate model is launching Wednesday. We’ll be rolling it out in stages, with additional features, functionality and further methodological detail. We’ll also be unveiling our new set of pollster ratings and publicly releasing our database of all the polls used to calculate them. So there’s a lot more to come. But if you’re looking for a headline, we have two. First, Republicans are favored to take the Senate, at least in our view; the FiveThirtyEight forecast model gives them a 64 percent chance of doing so. The reasons for the GOP advantage are pretty straightforward. Midterm elections are...
-
The resounding victory that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell scored over "tea party" businessman Matt Bevin this past week has thrown the media into a tizzy. Is the "tea party" dead? Did the GOP establishment kill it? Or did the GOP subsume the tea party, taking its candidates, its issues, and its ideology for the GOP? Nate Silver writes that recent "tea party vs. establishment GOP" stories are inadequate: The term “tea party” is applied very loosely by the political media. Was Missouri Rep. Todd Akin a member of the tea party, for instance? Weigel says no: Most groups associated...
-
And yet just when the news is getting good, Rove is calling Silver's whole methodology into doubt. On Wednesday, he tweeted a link to a National Journal column titled "Why I Don't Agree With Nate Silver: Number-crunching Senate prediction models are fun to follow but are not very useful." "Smart piece: may disagree w/ some specifics, but major point is correct," Rove wrote. The major point is that the methodology behind Silver's projections is flawed: "Unlike baseball, where the sample size runs in the thousands of at-bats or innings pitched, these models overemphasize a handful of early polls at the...
-
Now,Jindal wants to withdraw the state of Louisiana from the Common Core standards, whether the state legislature approves measures to do so or the governor himself begins the withdrawal process.
-
The Republican Party has grown more conservative over the past couple of decades. But news commentators sometimes wrongly imply that GOP voters take an extremist position on every issue. As I described on Friday, for example, Jeb Bush’s support of Common Core educational standards isn’t likely to hurt him if he runs for president in 2016; the issue is neither all that relevant to most Republicans nor all that divisive. If candidates running to Bush’s right are looking for a wedge issue, they’ll probably have some better choices.
-
We recently published a forecast that described the GOP as more likely than not to win the U.S. Senate in November. But our analysis was less bullish on Republicans’ prospects of flipping the seat in Iowa currently held by Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin, who is retiring. There, Democrats appeared to have a strong candidate in Rep. Bruce Braley, who has cleared his primary field. Republicans, meanwhile, face a contentious primary with a number of candidates who have never won races for statewide or federal office. After we published our forecast, the Republican PAC America Rising released a video of Braley,...
-
A New York Times columnist has expressed substantially more negative sentiments about FiveThirtyEight since it left The New York Times, according to a FiveThirtyEight analysis. The columnist, Paul Krugman, who writes about economics and politics for The Times, has referred to FiveThirtyEight or editor-in-chief Nate Silver 33 times on his blog. FiveThirtyEight classified each reference based on whether it expressed a favorable, unfavorable or neutral sentiment toward FiveThirtyEight. …
-
Much to the delight and self-satisfaction of the reality-based community, “Big Data” has been en vogue of late, and to such an extent that it has promised to make hipsters of the terminally uncool. In the space of just a few weeks, both Nate Silver and Ezra Klein have launched brand new websites, which, although imperceptibly different in their core objectives, both promised to overlook the “fundamentally useless” “pundits” that sully the nation’s media and to replace them with the calm explication and modest objectivity that one can only get from the sort of detached, numbers-driven pragmatists who made their...
-
Democrats aren't taking Nate Silver's latest Senate prediction lying down. In an unusual step, the executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee on Monday issued a rebuttal the famed statistician's prediction—made a day earlier—that Republicans were a "slight favorite" to retake the Senate. Silver was wrong in 2012, the political committee's Guy Cecil wrote in a memo, and he'll be wrong again in 2014. "In fact, in August of 2012 Silver forecast a 61 percent likelihood that Republicans would pick up enough seats to claim the majority," Cecil said. "Three months later, Democrats went on to win 55 seats."...
-
When FiveThirtyEight last issued a U.S. Senate forecast—way back in July—we concluded the race for Senate control was a toss-up. That was a little ahead of the conventional wisdom at the time, which characterized the Democrats as vulnerable but more likely than not to retain the chamber. Our new forecast goes a half-step further: We think the Republicans are now slight favorites to win at least six seats and capture the chamber. The Democrats’ position has deteriorated somewhat since last summer, with President Obama’s approval ratings down to 42 or 43 percent from an average of about 45 percent before....
-
Five-Thirty-Eight's Nate Silver mocked New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman as a "hedgehog" who "only knows one thing." When asked to describe what a hedgehog is, Silver pointed to Friedman specifically and the op-ed columnists at the Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal: ... They don’t permit a lot of complexity in their thinking. They pull threads together from very weak evidence and draw grand conclusions based on them. They’re ironically very predictable from week to week. If you know the subject that Thomas Friedman or whatever is writing about, you don’t have to read the column. You can...
-
For the last few months, FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver has been largely absent from the political forecasting scene he owned in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections. But that hasn't stopped the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee from sending at least 11 fundraising emails featuring Silver in the subject line over the past four months, even as Silver was building the foundation for his new website that's launching Monday and was not writing regularly. It's all part of a digital fundraising game that will increase in intensity as the election draws nearer, as candidates, political parties, and other groups bombard their...
-
That's been my impression of the coverage of the shutdown: The folks you see on TV are much too sure of themselves. They've been making too much of thin slices of polling and thinner historical precedents that might not apply this time around. There's been plenty of bullshit, in other words. We really don't know all that much about how the shutdown is going to be resolved, or how the long-term political consequences are going to play out.
-
Republicans might be close to winning control of the Senate after next year's elections, according to New York Times statistician Nate Silver. Writing in his "FiveThirtyEight" blog on Monday, Silver said this weekend's announcement by former Montana Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer that he would not run for the Senate "represents the latest in a series of favorable developments for Republicans as they seek control of the chamber." The GOP, which holds 46 seats in the Senate, likely will lose New Jersey's special election in October to replace the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg, according to Silver. The loss will leave Republicans...
-
Following former Gov. Brian Schweitzer's decision not to run for Montana’s open U.S. Senate seat this weekend, New York Times polling guru Nate Silver predicted Monday that Republicans will hold 50 to 51 seats in the upper chamber after all ballots are counted in the 2014 Congressional mid-term elections.
-
According to Nate Silver, the New York Time's never-wrong politcal statistician, Scott Walker is the third most conservative governor in the country, based on his score in three categories: Congressional Voting Record, Rightwing Fundraising, and Public Issue Statements. Walker, of course, has no congressional voting record, which makes his average score of 57 slightly below the leaders that have congressional voting records. However, if just rightwing fundraising appeal and public issue statements are considered, Walker wins the title as the most conservative governor in the country. Walker isn't just conservative, he's off the charts into rightwing luny land. He beats...
-
Given that we now know that the Federal government used its full weight and resources to stop the voter participation in the 2012 elections we know see how an insider could make better predictions.
|
|
|