Nothing that I could say here without getting into trouble. :^)
Yes, it turned out Silver’s model was dead on yet again. The polls were right - and an average of polls are incredibly accurate.
People need to stop disputing polls. No more whining about D+ samples, for the most part the pollsters know what they are doing.
1. Romney/Ryan got less votes this year than McCain/Palin did in 2008.
2. Romney/Ryan won in every state that had voter ID laws.
Is this reasonable, or is something else at play?
With regard to Nate Silver: Don’t blame the messenger. I blame myself for hanging high hope on the words of Dick Morris and Michael Barone. Even the vaunted Scott Rasmussen, who missed by a couple critical percentage points here and there, gave me some misguided optimism.
He was dead-on right. Amazingly.
I really thought turnout would overcome his predictions, but... nope.
They keep citing demographic vote turnout that simply doesn’t reflect observable reality.
College campuses around the country had little or no activity, yet turnout was reported above 2008 levels.
That theme was repeated across many demographics.
For that reason I continue to believe massive, organized vote fraud was a major factor in this election.
He’s a damn cheat. Almost certainly he got the Zero internal polls again.
He was accurate because he factored in the vote fraud endemic in the early voting, the bloated registrations, the Democrat machines across the country, and the fecklessness of the GOP to do anything about it.
Nate Silver schooled the clueless anecdotal echoers at FR like it was nobody’s business. I have never seen someone who was so derided by the masses here turn the tables on us so convincingly and so completely. It was an utter failure of FR contributors in ignoring polls and creating fantastic conspiracy theories to debunk them. Silver single-handedly eviscerated the establishment opinion on FR.
I am always correct and look incredibly brilliant when the outcome is something I am privy to in advance.
This is why he looks like a guru. He really isn’t. He is just the guy they use to soothe worried lefties.
Jeepers creepers, any idiot can aggregate polls and predict winners. Silver is only right if the polls are right. The pollsters deserve the credit.
And as a math person, I’m highly annoyed at the implication that if I think Silver is overrated then I don’t get math.