A few words about FiveThirtyEight
natesilver.net
natesilver.net
I think part of my cynicism comes in the wake of the 2016 election, in which the forecast rightfully counted some scenarios in which either candidate could win, upon which conclusion of the model was basically "the result fits in with the forecast, because either candidate could have won according to the model" - in which case I personally concluded, if no matter what the result, we can always just say "the candidate who won could always have won given the forecast" - what are we really adding to the conversation here? We can simply look at polls and understand who is generally ahead, and not be any better or worse off.
Disney killing 538 is broadly a loss for political journalism in the US, imo, because most other American media is more interested in sensationalism and hyping imaginary culture war issues, i.e. exacerbating exactly the disconnect with reality that 538 was trying to combat with its more evidence-based reporting. From my perspective the only place still doing this kind of work outside of niche, single-topic outlets like SCOTUSblog is ProPublica, and even they don't tend to be as politics-centric as 538 was. So I definitely will miss the site, and the pod. I don't have the stomach for most other American media.
> We can all look at various polls and get an assessment of who is generally ahead.
I probably could, but there's a lot of polls to look through and I don't really want to spend the time. Much rather have someone else do it for me.
> if no matter what the result, we can always just say "the candidate who won could always have won given the forecast" - what are we really adding to the conversation here?
Isn't this hypothesis testing? If you have a weighted coin and a guess as to which side is heavier and by how much, you're going to need multiple flips to see if you are right. And it doesn't even really make sense to talk about how right/wrong you are about a single flip, only on the aggregate.
It's possible someone has already compiled FiveThirtyEight's results to get some aggregate accuracy, I haven't checked. If they have and he's wrong on average and that's what you are referencing, my apologies.
An aggregator saying "foo has a 65% chance of winning" may seem like it's providing more information than a single historically reliable poll (say Reuters/Ipsos) stating "foo is up by 2 points but there's a 3 point margin of error" - but isn't it just an illusion? High quality pollsters very seldom deviate very much.
And even if you grant that the aggregator is closer to being "right" than any single pollster, is that difference actually meaningful enough to impact any real world behaviors? Would you do anything differently with a 50% chance of victory versus a 70% chance?
I've honestly come to think of them as entertainment, with no real value.
538 democrasized the numbers that were the domain of political whizzes. I don't know if that's a good thing.
Industry gave up on the more extreme claims fairly quickly because it wasn't able to produce. But it lingered on in other places where there was less direct feedback or it was telling people what they wanted it to hear.
To add to this, it became obvious that many of the leaders in this "field" were people who believed they had an expertise that was far beyond their actual capabilities. Nate Silver ended up accusing much of the polling industry of fraud recently, because he wasn't able to do basic statistical math[2].
[1] https://slate.com/technology/2017/10/what-happened-to-big-da... [2] https://x.com/JustinWolfers/status/1853302476406993315
89% of counties turned red. Looking at 1.5% total difference is missing the forest for the trees. Trump got all swing states.
To quote: "this is absolutely a mandate."
edit: facts cannot be insolent. The youtube link is a guest on the view named Stephen something, from this week, saying the words that i typed into the comment box. Not clicking it is doing yourself a disservice; as it is "source cited."
Don't get mad at me for relaying this information.
It is an election using First-Past-the-Post counting. A 50:50 probability doesn't mean the final count will be close, it (usually, anyway) means there is evens odds which side is about to win decisively. The county results are expected to correlate, as are the swing states in all likelihood.
You'll note that the distribution mode for a Trump win was 312 electoral votes; which is what he got. They do a good forecast - it suggests there was a 50-50 chance Trump wins, and if he wins the most likely outcome is ... exactly what happened.
If it was a Harris win the best bet is she would have gotten 319 electoral votes with high correlation in the swing states too.
^ The person in the video explains why thinking it is 50-50 chance is detrimental to the liberal cause.
Here's a fun stat: literally 40 states have a population that is less than the population of Los Angeles county alone. Why doesn't Los Angeles itself have 80 senators?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...
Setting aside 2000 and 2016 (EC winners lost the popular vote), you'd have to go back to 1968 and Nixon's squeaker of an election over Humphrey to find a closer popular vote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presiden...
The electoral college internally balances the power of a population against the difficulty of holding land. Look at New York State, where NYC mostly holds court. If it were a country you’d see rebellion. Because while the city outnumbers the country, it’s culturally more similar to itself than the country, and that in practice leaves lots of people disenfranchised.
(Personally, I think the President should be popularly elected. But the Senate should continue resembling our geography.)
Unless and until this is fixed, there's no meaningful "geographic representation" in the Senate, so it's strictly a negative.
Because in a federal system it is often considered important to provide the less populous states with some protection against the more populous states always getting their way. The US Constitution does this by balancing representation based on population (the House) with equal representation of each state (the Senate).
The US is not the only federal constitution to do this - the Australian constitution has the same design (indeed, copied off the American model), except having 6 states instead of 50, Australia went with 12 senators per a state instead of only 2 - hence Tasmania (population 571,200) gets 12 senators, and so does New South Wales (population 8.153 million).
Things don’t have to be this way - instead of a federation one could have a unitary system. But in the case of both countries, protecting the power of the smaller states was considered important at the time of the constitution’s drafting - and the smaller states likely would not have agreed to it otherwise
Where it is different, is Australia doesn’t have the same “red state” vs “blue state” dynamic the US does. In Australia, while some states lean more one way than the other, they essentially all are “swing states”
by whom?
Definitely not James Madison who only grudgingly accepted this framework in Federalist No 62: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed62.asp
Well, both by the majority of the drafters of the US Constitution, and the majority of the drafters of the Australian Constitution.
And the authors of the German Constitution – the German upper house, the Bundesrat, represents the German states (Länder), and although (unlike the Australian and US Senates) it does give more populous states a greater number of seats, the number of seats is still out of proportion to population: in Bremen there are 223,830 people per a seat, compared to 2,977,586 people per a seat in North Rhine-Westphalia.
And the authors of the Swiss Constitution – the Swiss upper house (Council of States) gives two seats each to twenty of the country's cantons, and one seat each to the other six (which six are traditionally referred to as "half-cantons")
And I'm sure I could dig up more examples – globally, the majority of federations have an upper house which provides, either equal representation to each state/province, or if not equal, then at least representation that deviates significantly from proportionality to population.
> Definitely not James Madison who only grudgingly accepted this framework in Federalist No 62
I'm not sure if Madison should be interpreted as "only grudgingly" accepting this framework – but even if that's true (Madison was very much an advocate of centralized power and supporter the interests of the big states over that of the smaller states), many of the other delegates at the 1787 Constitutional Convention viewed it more positively, even as a necessity – the majority of delegates agreed to the Constitution containing this provision, and it is unlikely such a majority would have if it had been ommitted.
To be fair, though, in the US, the House also has unfortunate proportional-representation anomalies, too, because the total number of Representatives has not changed in over a century. See Wyoming vs. California for an illustrative example.
Something that affects someone living in Los Angeles County may not affect someone in any of the other "2xxx" counties that have less population. For instance, i have a well for water. I don't worry about water shortages in California when i run my well. My water usage doesn't affect Los Angeles at all. And not even in the "butterfly" way because the jetstream goes the other way. This, again, is a trivial example.
Policing in L.A. is different than policing in LA. roadworks are different. Disaster preparedness is different. Fire risks are different. Taxation is different. Health needs are different.
What this boils down to: Californians, and specifically the valley and L.A. County residents, have a loud enough voice to push this agenda, but only when someone they don't like wins. California was happy to put a republican actor in office when the republican actor was "from California."
Their adoption in other states completely bypasses the national legislature due to the real world economic power of the Califonia market. They dictate external behavior by regulating their internal market.
What part of this is undue? States and individuals should have the ability to exercise power through self regulation, essentially threating to take their ball and go home.
Where I find more fault with California and Californians is when they interfere directly with external state politics. The classic example of this would rich Californians dumping money into political campaigns and ballot initiatives in other states, influencing their 'internal* politics.
Uh, i am unsure if i used "affect" correctly. Substitute "effect" if i used it wrong.
There's North Carolina and South Carolina, North Dakota and South Dakota, Virginia and West Virginia – why not North California and South California?
But when it comes to changing the boundaries, you need the state legislature and Congress acting in agreement. And state boundaries are inherently a partisan political matter at this point because every new state is going to be either "red" or "blue", and this then means the corresponding adjustments to Senate representation (and House too, actually, it's just less pronounced) as well as EC. If, say, Republicans drafted a bill to split red rural areas off CA into its own state, as often proposed, what sane Democrat would ever support it knowing that it means +2 Republican senators in Congress? For the same reason, we aren't going to see statehood for Puerto Rico or DC anytime soon. The only way it could possibly work out is if states are carved out in pairs - e.g. separate deep red areas from CA, but at the same time also do the same for deep blue areas of Texas. But deep blue areas also tend to be the ones that bring in the most taxes, so Texas Republicans might balk at that on economic grounds...
Truth is, our system is too broken to recover. Too many deadlocks. It was possible in the past, when fewer issues were quite so partisan, but of course back then the need for it was also much less obvious. But now, I think it's just going to deteriorate until the dysfunction on federal level gets so bad that the country literally cannot proceed without a major constitutional reform. At which point it'll likely break apart because we won't be able to agree on the new constitution.
> The only way it could possibly work out is if states are carved out in pairs - e.g. separate deep red areas from CA, but at the same time also do the same for deep blue areas of Texas. But deep blue areas also tend to be the ones that bring in the most taxes, so Texas Republicans might balk at that on economic grounds...
Couldn't they find some way of splitting CA into 3 states, two "blue" and one "red", such that you'd get two new Democratic Senators and two new Republican Senators, which would cancel each other out?
> For the same reason, we aren't going to see statehood for Puerto Rico or DC anytime soon.
Puerto Rico isn't a solid lock for the Democrats. PR's new Governor, Jenniffer González-Colón, is a Republican, and prior to becoming the Governor, she was PR's non-voting delegate to Congress. Of course, it would be a gamble for the GOP, but not one they'd be guaranteed to lose. Especially if you consider Trump has made significant inroads with Hispanic voters over the last two elections, and the GOP might do even better if they were to pick a Hispanic candidate.
DC, I agree it is unlikely Republicans would agree to it.
But, admission of a new state only needs a simple majority of Congress – in a Democratic trifecta, like Biden had 2021–2023, or Obama had in 2009–2011 – that DC or PR statehood didn't happen then was ultimately due to decisions made by the Democrats, not by the Republicans – if the Democrats had been totally committed to it, it would have happened over Republican objections – but obviously they weren't.
A Democratic trifecta could easily happen again – e.g. Trump II turns out to be really unpopular, and Democrats have a big win in 2028 – but will Democrats do anything more about PR/DC statehood in 2029–2031 than they did in 2009–2011 or 2021–2023? I doubt.
This is not unique to the US either. Section 24 of the Australian constitution guarantees each "Original State" [0] a minimum of five seats in the House of Representatives. On a population basis, Tasmania should only have 3 seats, but due to this clause they have 5 instead. This means Tasmania gets one seat per 114,240 electors, compared to one per 179,021 for NSW. This means Tasmania's seats-per-population in the House is 1.576 times that of NSW.
This is actually more disproportionate than the US House – Wyoming gets 1 Representative for 587,618 people, California gets 1 per 758,269 people – hence Wyoming's seats-per-population is only 1.290 times that of California. (Australian politicians have significantly fewer voters electing them, but that's almost inevitable with a population over 13 times smaller than the US – although consider Ireland, who have 174 seats in their lower house, but only 5.308 million people, meaning each TD only represents 30,000 people – that would be like Australia's House having 888 members, or the US House having over 11,000; if the US House had Australian-sized districts, it would have around 2000 members)
One difference is the size of the US House is at the discretion of Congress, so by increasing the size of the House, they could reduce the disproportionality. That is not possible in Australia without a constitutional amendment [1] since the Australian constitution requires the House to be "as nearly as practicable" twice the size of the Senate. Since the Senate has six states with 12 senators each, for 72 senators (plus 4 territory senators, but the High Court has ruled they don't count for this purpose), the House must be "as nearly as practicable" twice 72, which is 144 members. Currently the House has 151 members – but the 5 territory representatives don't count for this calculation, which brings us down to 146, which is "as nearly as practicable" to the required 144. The phrase "as nearly as practicable" lacks a precise definition, but it would seem any deviation big enough to significantly impact proportionality is likely to be ruled unconstitutional, while the small deviations (a handful of seats) that have thus far gone unchallenged are unlikely to make much of a difference to it. One method which wouldn't require a constitutional amendment would be to significantly increase the number of states, by splitting the existing six states into multiple parts, which in turn could significantly increase the size of the Senate and hence the House – but that is even less likely than a constitutional amendment is.
[0] an "Original State" means a state at the time of the Australian constitution's enactment. Australia currently has six states, all of which are Original States – like the US, the Australian constitution has a procedure to admit new states, but unlike the US, that procedure has thus far never been used
[1] the procedure for amending the Australian constitution is very different from that of the US – a national referendum, with both a majority nationwide, and a state-wide majority in a majority of states. What it has in common with the US constitution, is being very difficult to amend in practice – because most attempts to change the Australian constitution end up failing to pass the referendum
Counting by counties combines the unrepresentativeness of the Electoral College with the legal irrelevance of the popular vote.
The more interesting map is the one where you weight the display by population, since it gives a much more accurate representation of how the USA is divided: https://engaging-data.com/pages/scripts/d3Electoral/countyel...
The tool on that website is actually pretty informative to play with if you want to quickly see how adjusting the map style can change the perception. https://engaging-data.com/county-electoral-map-land-vs-popul...
anyway, the reason for the east/west divide in population density is that the west is dry. See maps at climate.gov (https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/new-ma...). By convention people refer to this line as being at the "100th meridian" but the 98th may be more accurate.
Moving east from California, you have the great basin desert, followed by the Rocky Mountains, and then the relatively dry great plains.
Population follows precipitation.
https://gisgeography.com/us-precipitation-map/
https://www.thoughtco.com/geography-shapes-us-regional-weath...
I know that my understanding can be wrong, but this is what i've heard and perusing some maps bears out at least some validity.
there are 3300 counties in the US. People live in all of those counties.
why is everyone assuming that i'm not intelligent enough to know that "land doesn't vote"? The county voting maps are a proxy.
I understand that counties can have various sub-regions and cultures and all of that, but not every county does. there's 3300 counties, and people live in all of them. Knowing that your neighbors voted for Trump might incline introspection.
at least that's what i hoped i could point out. Apparently shoot the messenger!
>note: not clicking that because you disagree with me is really doing yourself a disservice.
I won't click the link because I'm here for discussion with the users of this site, not some random video you thought was interesting/useful.
Why do you find it interesting/useful? What arguments are made? How do those arguments comport with your beliefs?
Let's have a discussion. So tell me what you think, don't link to some rando on youtube.
Anyway, my computer can’t play YouTube (ad blocking issues).
The underlying thing that is annoying people, I think, is that this is (as far as I can tell based on what you’ve written) a factual mathematical issue. That sort of thing is easily conveyed via text and equations. Why would anybody want to watch a video of somebody explaining math?
This is a fallacy. I repeated numbers, that person was also repeating numbers, however, they're on a national news program and no one has given any reason that the numbers stated were wrong. It does not matter who says something, you have to weigh it on the merits of the statements.
It isn't a "factual mathematical issue" it's a sociological issue, and it's bearing out in this comment thread - burying one's head in the sand because "Los Angeles is bigger and has more people" or "land doesn't vote" or "so what, it wasn't a majority" is missing the forest for the trees. Something about the platform did not work for our neighbors. A platform that worked in 2008, 2012, (2016 if you reckon the pundits are correct), and 2020 - it ceased working in 2024; and merely "doing the same thing" going forward won't work.
I think the unspoken part is this: "If the left just pushes on as it has been, the midterms and 2028 aren't going to be '1.5%' margins"
People often assume i am part of the opposition party.
And to answer your question, the video is a guest on the view who i don't know, saying the exact numbers i quoted. I was quoting the person on the view, which aired yesterday or something.
what's interesting, is instead of discussing what i said prior to the link, you chose to instead try and make me feel bad for linking a video.
Keep it classy, HN.
also what bias? I didn't make the stats up. Statements of fact cannot be insolent. If you disagree with the facts, then let's talk about that, and look for more data. However, what has happened in this thread is thinking i have an agenda, other than i think people need to hear what they were talking about - in that clip
The mentality that "it was real close to 50-50 and trump didn't get a majority of the vote and therefore we can keep on doing what we're doing" is what the video clip was talking to. It didn't work, and the tactics need to change if anyone wants to see change.
I don't care that people want to argue with me personally. But it's not doing themselves any favors, as it pertains to getting people elected they want to see in office.
Others had already rebutted your assertion at least as well as I could, so I didn't feel the need to repeat what had already been offered.
However, given your initial rationale:
>>note: not clicking that because you disagree with me is really doing yourself a disservice.
was a poorly constructed straw man. Which I noted. It wasn't that I was rejecting you, I was clarifying that I (and likely many others) come to HN to discuss matters of interest to us.
If I wanted to watch videos, I'd go to youtube and the like. I came to HN instead.
I'd point out that you didn't make clear that you were "citing your sources" with the video link.
Now that I know the source ("Stephen Somebody or other" who managed to get himself booked on some low-information blab fest to make his important pronouncement), my initial response, "[s]o tell me what you think, don't link to some rando on youtube," was spot on.
All that said, linking to video sources is absolutely reasonable. In fact, I've referenced stuff from videos several times.
But each time, I made sure to explain the context of the video, the text of the quote and, most importantly, who was being quoted.
As I did here:
The thought that the vote was "real close to 50-50" and "trump didn't get a majority of the vote" and "therefore we just need to do what we're doing and it'll work out OK in 2028 and the midterms" is what the video clip i linked was talking to.
Specifically, nearly every reply to my comment, other than yours, argued that "the number of counties that switched" is irrelevant, as if that happened by accident, as if your neighbors apparently changing from blue to red for the 2024 election isn't a bellwether of something else. Trump still got a plurality of votes. Asking "why" is something that needs to be done.
Nearly every comment assumed something about me, because i quoted a statistic. I knew, because i have been on internet forums for over a quarter century, that no matter how i phrased my comment, i was going to get downvoted and argued with.
Yes. Both of those things are true. Other folks correctly mentioned that.
>and "therefore we just need to do what we're doing and it'll work out OK in 2028 and the midterms" is what the video clip i linked was talking to.
Who said that? Not me. Not anyone else on this thread.
Rather, various folks rebutted[0][5][6] your assertion (whether you're quoting some rando or not) that "there absolutely is a mandate." Which is a ridiculous statement, as the current incumbent only received 1.5% more votes than his opponent. That's not a mandate, that's a squeaker.
What would constitute a mandate? Contrast the results with the 1972, 1984 or 1996 elections, which actually conveyed a mandate. Go ahead and compare the results of those elections (definitely mandate elections) with the 2024 presidential election where[4]:
Trump won the Electoral College with 312 electoral votes,
while Harris received 226...
Trump won the national popular vote with a plurality of
49.8%.
1984: "Reagan won re-election in a landslide victory, carrying 525 electoral votes, 49 states, and 58.8% of the popular vote. Mondale won 13 electoral votes: 10 from his home state of Minnesota, which he won by a narrow margin of 0.18% (3,761 votes), and 3 from the District of Columbia, which has always voted overwhelmingly for the Democratic candidate."[2]
1996: "Clinton defeated Dole by a wide margin, winning 379 electors to Dole's 159 and taking 49.2% of the national popular vote to Dole's 40.7%."[3]
As you can see, 1.5% is a tiny margin compared with real mandate elections. So your youtube/The View rando is flat wrong about a mandate for Trump.
Which says nothing at all about future elections or election strategies for the Democratic Party. You're trying to put words in the mouths of others. Please stop.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43276767
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_United_States_presidentia...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_United_States_presidentia...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_United_States_presidentia...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43276365
[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43276669
Edit: Completed my comment. Apologies for any confusion after inadvertently posting an incomplete comment. Clarified prose too.
How many minutes did you spend writing all of this to me? The video i linked is less than 5 minutes long and it answers "rebuttals" you or anyone else has said.
you stop. :-)
I'm going to assume that you're operating in good faith and really don't understand (is English your native language?) not just being deliberately obtuse.
And more's the pity.
That 1.5% is the only thing that mattered for "mandate" purposes. Trump won, but on a razor's edge, and that should give him some pause. (It won't.)
I have enjoyed the meta-drama around forecasting and modeling that pops up every election season though. It's hard to beat "[Nate Silver] doesn't have the faintest idea how to turn the keys," or "I ran 80,000 simulations."
¹ https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/he-doesnt-have-the-faintest-i...
When the "upset" candidate wins, it will have been statistically likely. Yes. What they're adding are error bars in the collective consciousness.
Ironically enough, the hype pop of 538 was actually driven by people misinterpreting the stats and using them to feel vindicated in their support of Obama. The comedown was finding out that 25% is still 1-in-4 odds.
538 should be killing the horse race coverage by doing the most sober version of it. But horse race is big business. Therefore: boo 538, booooooo, they're harshing the vibe of my favorite reality show.
Since we don't run campaigns, the only value is entertainment. But that's not a negligible value for a lot of people.
Sure enough, we ended up coming in at a whopping 26% in 2019, and in 2021 won the seat with 33%. Certainly the win was in part because the incumbent was embroiled in a last minute scandal, but I truly believe the polling aggregators have a huge suppressing effect on breakout candidates— without that effect it's possible we could have taken the earlier election too.
Now that seat is "safely" Green, it's been twice affirmed with huge wins for a separate Green candidate at the provincial level:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchener_Centre_(federal_elec...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchener_Centre_(provincial_e...
I expect this year's federal election will deliver another 40-50% result for Morrice, as he's very popular locally, but there's 338 again showing a big upswing for the Liberals in Kitchener Centre, when almost certainly there is no such thing, it's all just hallucinated from national polling:
Anchor: So Nate, you say Trump has a 25% chance of winning, can you tell us exactly what that means?
Nate: Sure. So imagine I flipped two quarters, and they both came up heads. In that scenario, Trump wins.
Anchor: (shocked) Wait but that’s… that’s a thing that actually happens! You’re saying Trump has an actual chance of winning?
Nate: Well I’d rather be Hillary than Trump right now, but yes, people shouldn’t be that surprised if Trump wins, his chances aren’t insignificant.
I remember people in October still saying that Nate had to be wrong, that there was just no way Trump could win. There was even a growing market for what I would now call “cope forecasts” that “unskewed” the results to show that, really, Hillary had a 99% chance of winning, just like you knew she did (all of these people looked extremely foolish after the election was over).
I also feel like good models provide valuable pushback against media narratives that try to characterize the “closeness” of a race. In 2016, people wanted to hear that Trump had no chance of winning, but Nate/538 correctly pushed back that the race was actually pretty close and both candidates had a good chance. And he did the opposite in 2012: Pundits wanted to cast Obama and Romney as being neck-and-neck (which makes for a more exciting story) and Nate had the stats to push back that actually the race was not very close at all. If Romney had won in 2012, Nate would’ve had to eat crow, but Romney didn’t win.
Nate and 538 also do senate races, which are super valuable if you’re figuring out which candidates to donate money to. Often there are Democratic candidates in totally doomed races against Republicans I really don’t like, and the data helps me look at those situations and go “yeah I hate Lindsey Graham, but his challenger has no chance, I’m going to donate to the milquetoast Nevada senator whose race is on a knife’s edge instead”.
I could probably just look up polls, but the way Nate/538 process the polls into results with error bars and probabilities makes it a lot easier to reason about.
25%, 15%, 5%, even 2% chances happen with a decent amount of frequency. I don't understand how people can say that people don't understand probability because they think a 25% chance won't happen, but then turn around and treat a 15% chance the very same way.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20171120175008/https://election....
I still come across it every once in a while and it probably has the highest ratio of level of infuriating-ness to low-value of the stakes of the opinion of just about any political opinion I can think of.
So, I kept listening and kept learning. It was sometimes difficult, not because of their storytelling skills, but because the news was hard to consume. But the cold numbers helped me manage my emotions with clarity and not disengage.
There's something wonderful about journalism backed by data. The line between news and editorial has long been blurred beyond visibility. 538 was a rare example of a place where smart people could express strong opinions but always had to show the work behind their conclusions.
I'll miss 538. They were an amazing team.
I had growing conflicted feelings about the site's overall impact on media, sadly. It felt like, although it was good that they existed as a dedicated organization, they contributed to (or were a symptom of) the overall media landscape's slide into politics coverage as mostly coverage of the horse-race. Sometimes I want to hear what the Scottish teens think a news story means... but more often I want something deeply reported about policy.
Imo part of what made 538 work post-blogosphere heyday was exactly that it had backing from legacy media and the funding to continue sharing information with the public without a paywall. As soon as sites go behind a paywall they become a personification of the "media elite" stereotype, where only rich people have the privilege of being informed. But how otherwise to fund not just a cheerful host but a team of data scientists, editors etc in this day and age? Seems like the only interested billionaires do it with strings attached.
In a world where Kevin Rose can reboot Digg, Nate has every chance of acquiring and reviving 538. Good luck to Nate.
I never really followed the "Nate Silver" controversy after 2016, but it basically seems to boil down to a bunch of liberals being mad because they felt lied to for no apparent reason.
FWIW I don't think he's controversial because of the 2016 polling miss, most people who follow 538 understand what 538 does and that it wasn't his "fault." He's controversial because he posts scalding hot takes on Twitter and then goes to the mat to defend them. He also has a penchant for getting into Twitter beefs with other big names in his industry.
I think, actually, he needed to sell content and resorted to ragebait for attention; the transition happened when he and Disney parted ways, and he stopped being a creator sponsored by a media corporation and started being an independent content seller.
I'll never forget being called racist because I showed someone a 538 poll that said the presidential election was at best a toss-up to someone who was sure Kamala Harris would sweep the swing states.
Almost. This means that they were perfectly willing to, but rarely had to.
If it were otherwise, as Chomsky said, "You wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting".
So Silver still seems to have the rights to the important stuff that made FiveThirtyEight what it was. He can (and has been) more or less building a new version of it, using all his old IP as a base.
I'm not really convinced that conversations around elections add anything. <-- period.
for me, 538-style coverage is great substitute for having to listen to myriad opinions that are generally facially flawed, and neither a representative sample.
Did Trump's policies cause the layoffs, or does Nate just happen to mention Trump's address? (forgive my ignorance - feels odd to mention the address if it had nothing to do with the layoffs, but I'm not aware of any obvious connection)