Free Republic

Everybody’s stressing and speculating on whether Donald Trump has peaked.  Jonah Goldberg expresses hope that he has, writing “It’s obviously too soon to tell for sure, but I think we’ve reached Peak Trump.”  Neil Stevens agrees with the “too soon to tell” but isn’t so sure there won’t be more up in Trump, citing one RCP poll showing a decline as insufficient data. But the point is: who cares if The Donald has peaked? I usually don’t rely on Nate Silver’s analysis for much other than bashing Republicans, but on Trump, FiveThirtyEight might be right. Media: Trump's doing great! Nerds: No. Those polls don't mean what you...

“A troll,” according to one definition, “is a person who sows discord … by starting arguments or upsetting people … with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.” The goal of the troll is to provoke a reaction by any means necessary. Trolls thrive in communities that are open and democratic (they wouldn’t be invited into a discussion otherwise) and which operate in presumed good faith (there need to be some standards of decorum to offend). Presidential nomination contests are highly susceptible to trolling, therefore. Access is fairly open: There’s...

Nate Silver fared terribly in Thursday's UK election: In his pre-election forecast, he gave 278 seats to Conservatives and 267 to Labour. Shortly after midnight, he was forecasting 272 seats for Conservatives and 271 for Labour. But when the sun rose in London on Friday, Conservatives had an expected 329 seats, against Labour's 233. The fault, Silver claimed, was with the polling: "It’s becoming increasingly clear that pre-election polls underestimated how well Conservatives would do and overestimated Labour’s result," the statistician guru wrote in the wee hours of the morning. (He also overestimated the Liberal Democrats' result by roughly 20...

President Obama's campaign mastermind suffered a humiliating end to his political career today as the British Labour party he was paid almost $500,000 to help to victory plunged to a catastrophic defeat. David Axelrod had been touted as the man to get Labour's Ed Miliband into - and the Conservative prime minister David Cameron out of - Downing Street. Instead he slunk out of Britain early, as his former Obama campaign colleague Jim Messina, who advised the winning Conservatives, crowed over a victory which had 'stunned the world'. Axelrod had already vowed that he was 'done with campaigns' after complaining...

There’s already plenty of bad punditry regarding the chances of Hillary Clinton — who officially announced her candidacy on Sunday — to become the 45th president. You can find Democrats boasting about their “blue wall” in the Electoral College and how hard this will make it for any Republican to win. Or Republicans warning that the Democratic Party rarely wins three elections in a row. Most of this analysis is flimsy. So is the commentary about the ups-and-downs in early swing state polls. And when you see some pundit declaring a minor misstep to be a “game changer,” find someone...

Roger Pielke, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, and six others are under investigation by Congress regarding testimony they've given on the subject of climate change.Pielke, a believer in man-caused global warming, can't quite figure out why he's the object of a witch hunt....................... What am I accused of that prompts being investigated? Here is my crime: Prof. Roger Pielke, Jr., at CU’s Center for Science and Technology Policy Research has testified numerous times before the U.S. Congress on climate change and its economic impacts. His 2013 Senate testimony featured the claim, often repeated, that it...

For a long time, the U.S. ostracism of Cuba has been like the vintage American cars on the streets of Havana: obsolete but imperishable. It didn't topple the Castro government, didn't force human rights progress and didn't unite the world behind us. Yet failure was no enemy of longevity. There are many reasons for its endurance. But if you're parceling out responsibility, you have to start with a curious invention of the founding fathers that we know as the Electoral College. Without it, our Cuba policy never would have persisted for so many years -- which is a reminder that...

Check out these two tables, both courtesy of Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight's fascinating live blog. First, check out the Democratic bias in the senate polling: Next, here are the gubernatorial numbers: That's a striking contrast between predictions and reality. As they say in sports, "that's why you play the game." That's why we hold elections. In this election at least, the "experts" were confident America was more blue than it wanted to be.David French is Senior Counsel and Director of Digital Advocacy at the American Center for Law and Justice.

On Sunday's broadcast of ABC's "This Week," Nate Silver of Fivethirtyeight.com said statistically, the Republican Party has strong odds for its chances of taking control of the U.S. Senate following next week's midterm elections. Partial transcript as follows: STEPHANOPOULOS: You might remember Nate Silver from 2012. He's the forecast from fivethirtyeight.com. And his statistical take on the presidential election was dead on, correctly predicting how all 50 states would break. He's inspired all kinds of imitators. This time around, all of them are predicting a big election for the GOP. The New York Times giving the Republicans a 70...

As you may have heard, we’re now only four days away from the 2014 midterms and gubernatorial races mercifully coming to an end, save for a likely runoff in Louisiana. And as you’ve also heard lately, race–for all the wrong reasons–has become a central theme for the party in blue. Speaking of the Bayou State, its likely-to-be-unemployed-after-said-runoff and current senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) had this to say to Chuck Todd (a good get via hustle by the new MTP moderator, by the way) regarding the reason behind her not inviting President Obama for help on the campaign trail: “The South...

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. …