Nate Silver: 2/3 of America's op-ed columnists are "worthless"

Also regarding people who believed Peggy Noonan:



That was only the Greatest Moment In The History Of Cable Television Now And Forever.

 

Romney lost solely because all of the black, Hispanic and female voters want free stuff. [/billoreilly]

 

You continue to overrated narrative and underrate a well-oiled political machine. Obama won because his people build a MASSIVE machine that got people to go out an vote, be they young, black, white, Hispanic, alive or dead. Silver was always adamant that, even though the polls were tightening, a lot of the polls that were tightening were severely underestimating turnout. His model worked because it correctly predicted the demographics of turnout -- twice.

 

This is unequivocally untrue. I understand perfectly that Obama had a tremendous apparatus that turned voters out.

I'm not spouting narrative. But I do think that he's largely been the beneficiary of a series of fortuitious coincidences. Everyone who reaches his statute needs a few things to break his or her way, no? George Washington, for example, as Ron Chernow's biography points out again and again, was the beneficiary of a fortuitious series of deaths.

Obama has been both lucky and good. It's not an either/or proposition. He did a tremendous job turning out voters in 2012, yet again. But it was in some ways an uphill climb, because he had the economy albatross to contend with.

It's easy to impose inevitability after the fact. But he was in danger of letting it get away from him after the first debate. That's how bad he was.

 

I think the first debate was a disaster, but that (despite what polling suddenly suggested) wasn't going to suddenly turn Romney's GOTV apperatus into a winning one. It was awful. Truly, truly awful, and it showed on election day.

The reverse was actually true in 2004. Kerry waxed Bush in every debate -- and it didn't matter a lick. Because the GOP had actually figured out how to get voters to the polls.

Obama has been the recipient of a lot of luck and circumstance. No arguing that. And I think he's been something of a meh president. But the guy's campaign operation is probably the greatest in history. While the GOP was busy mocking people like Nate Silver for believing in science, the Dems finally got wise and hired them. And it was science that figured out how to isolate voters through data mining and get them to the polls that won the election, not debate performance.

 

Most of the Presidents elected have benefited from circumstances but that's hardly the No. 1 thing that got every President elected. Some may have mostly benefited from that, but not all.

As mentioned, Obama benefited because his people knew how to get voters to turn out at the polls. As far as Obama losing the first debate to Romney, he wasn't the first incumbent to lose the first debate, then win re-election. People forget that Ronald Reagan lost the first debate to Walter Mondale, and that Reagan even admitted it to his advisers. Reagan then won the second debate with Mondale... and years later, Obama won the second debate with Romney.

Did Reagan benefit from circumstances? Of course he did. But that doesn't mean that's why Reagan won, any more than why Obama won. Reagan knew how to motivate voters too. He knew how to sell his message and communicate effectively to them. Obama demonstrated that as well when he was first elected. He did appear to be coasting against Romney at first, but that changed after the first debate.

 

While all of what you guys say is true, it really comes down to just one thing.

There was NO chance a Republican was going to get elected after two terms of an unpopular GOP president whose approval rating was 25 percent on Election Day.

 

Damn. Thanks Songbird! I'm going to follow this story for a while. This is one crazy story.

 

This is one of those "X happened, so in hindsight there was *no* chance Y was going to happen" things that people say that isn't really true.

 

Elections and athletic events seem to both be written this way quite a bit, with narrative imposed after the fact. If Gordon Heyward hits that half-court shot against Duke, we would have been deluged with one story after another of the inevitability of Butler's national championship. And dozens of gamers are written that way every day, after close contests.

 

So ... Nate Silver's pick to be his numbers-crunching science writer? Turns out he's a climate-change denier who is often accused of distortion by the larger scientific community.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/03/19/3415984/nate-silver-science-writer-ignores-data/