31 Ok They got What They Wanted Now They Better Win
7/21/2024
Ok They got What They Wanted Now They Better Win
Ok I guess on one level this election is now a metaphysical quandary on two different worldviews or Weltanschauungs a la Heidegger: will past be prologue OR will “what will be” prove “unburdened from what has been?”
If the past is prologue it doesn’t bode so well as we will discuss below but maybe the future will prove “unburdened by what has been.”
FN: The GOP has mocked this but it’s actually a pretty catchy meme in my opinion. If they can make wearing a eye patch or even adult diapers a meme “What will be unburdened by what has been” seems defensible and indeed quite charming.
Again more below but past is prologue view is well encapsulated by this piece by Nadi Brizeninski soon after Joe announced his decision to step out of the race.
Kamala Harris, History and Russia. | by Nadin Brzezinski | Jul, 2024 | Medium
The best word for my mood at this moment is bittersweet or ambivalent.
UPDATE: It seems to me this was a widely held feeling that afternoon. Soon after Joe dropped out I commenced this poll on Twitter and here were the results:
That pretty well comported with my mood-a little bit of everything. As for Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett she spoke for many of us yesterday afternoon.
A. OTOH Kamala Harris was my first choice in 2020 and I’ve dreamt of her becoming President since 2017
FN: In that Senate Judiciary Committee where she whupped Jeff Sessions good the little Segregationist from Alabama on his lies about his Russian ties.
(319) Sen. Kamala Harris Goes After Atty. Gen Jeff Sessions | Los Angeles Times – YouTube
I suspect Hillary herself took notice after that 2017 hearing too.
Basically she replaced the void in my heart after they stole the election from Hillary. It goes without saying she was my first choice in 2020. As for Joe Biden he wasn’t my first choice in 2020, he wasn’t even my second-that was Elizabeth Warren-she won me over after she read the entire Mueller Report in one night and then came out for impeachment-at a time when Pelosi was saying you needed 70% public approval to impeach no matter what Trump did.
So you might think I’d be happy. But not exactly. Or more precisely part of me is but there are other parts of me too as in that poll-also angry at the way Joe Biden was treated and how much he accomplished in 4 years and how he got credit for NONE OF IT. So the words that best sum up my mood at this moment were choices 3 and 4 in my poll: ambivalent and bittersweet. First of all what matters is not having my favorite optimal candidate on the ticket but winning this election over the most dangerous, fascist, authoritarian candidate in our history.
And it’s still far from clear the Democratic party did the right thing in forcing out a historically successful, incumbent President. If life isn’t fair Exhibit One is Joe Biden. Think about it-he’s the most progressive President since LBJ-and got LBJed. And we know what happened after LBJ dropped out: the Democrats lost.
UPDATE: More about the unfairness of life to Joe Biden both personally and politically either here or below in Nate Silver part?
Which as I’ll discuss more below, is a large part of my misgivings. Soon after the news this afternoon I was watching Dlyan Burns’ stream and even though Dylan’s basically a left-liberal-he voted Bernie in 2020 but was NOT a Bernie Bro, decidedly NOT Bernie or Bust-and a number of his viewers were claiming Kamala is somehow “unlikable” and “not a good candidate”-ie clearly they will try to Hillary Clinton her.
FN: And again this the sentiment of left-liberals-as opposed to the Far Left a la Hasan or worst yet the Grayzone cum Jimmy Dore people they’re on the outer left but still participate in the electoral system-who watch someone like Dylan who is fairly liberal. Yet Dylan had to chide some viewers for what he took as racist bromides against her; if anything I suspect the animus is driven as much by her gender as her race.
But another point was some viewers pointed to a poll that shows Harris doing less well than Biden was. Which is just how I knew this would go-folks are only going to notice her poll numbers ON AVERAGE are no better than his only now that he’s out. This brings us back to my point that if life is unfair Joe Biden is Exhibit One. Now that he’s given in to their bullying they’re willing to praise him for his wonderful career and Presidency.
FN: Fetterman put out a barn burner of a tweet did he take it down?
Before Biden dropped out today I had been working on a chapter which argued Joe Biden had a chance to be Harry Truman 2.0 that 2024 was strikingly like 1948 in a number of respects. Among the brutal frenzy against Joe Biden, the only prominent media person-in reality former media person- to make a case in favor of Biden was Chris Matthews who indeed evoked Harry Truman arguing like Truman, Biden could run against the elites in the media and indeed in his own party that didn’t believe in him.
Chris Matthews: Biden critics are ‘going to pay for it’ (msn.com)
Chris had argued that the elites coming out against Biden were going to pay for it.
Biden critics are ‘going to pay for it’
It would have been a great comeback story-Americans love a great comeback story-and I’d really been pulling for Biden to hold on to take his nomination and tell Nancy Pelosi-Barrack Obama and the rest of his turncoat friends to get stuffed. But it was not to be.
Again I love Kamala indeed she’s been my dream candidate since 2017-after James Comey and Friends stole the 2016 election from my previous dream candidate. But at the end of the day to quote Richard Nixon-of all people-YOU HAVE TO WIN.
FN: Ole Tricky Dick said that after he basically stole Jerry Vorhees CA House seat from under him-by playing some extremely dirty pool including slandering Vorhees as a Communist. After Nixon won he admitted Vorhees was no Communist but “The thing you have to understand if you have to win.”
FN: Find Wiki quote
I had thought all along that the case for dropping Joe was questionable-if not question begging-at best. I’m still not entirely sure though I do think PROVIDED KAMALA IS THE NOMINEE. we still has a puncher’s chance but I’m not still not sure it’s a better chance than just sticking with your incumbent.
UPDATE: I wrote this paragraph on Sunday afternoon, just over a day later it became a foregone conclusion-more on this below.
As was argued on Alan Litchman’s show tonight-by a commentator-the Democrats had the simpler and the more complicated path to the Presidency and they chose the more complicated path.
BIDEN HAS DROPPED OUT! WHAT NOW?!?! | Lichtman Live #59 (youtube.com)
UPDATE: A very important point but perhaps move it to Nate Silver section.n
Again I’d planned to write this big chapter on the analogy between Give Em Hell Harry Truman’s 1948 win and the campaign Biden could have run to won 2024. I still think that could have been very successful and it would have been very interesting to see a candidate run against his entire party and win. There were certainly signs he was going to do this-like his huge Detroit rally a few weeks ago where he called out the media’s brutal treatment of him and the crowd booed-upsetting Chris Cillizza and getting a few of his hairs out of place. In contradiction to the media’s brandishing of polls showing the majority of voters the majority of voters said he was too old and his low approval ratings-the Detroit crowd chanted ‘Don’t you quit.”
CF: Cillizza tweet
I still want to lay out my case for why I’ve been arguing for the last three weeks that I believed-and still suspect-that sticking with Biden might well have been the right choice-for if nothing else, posterity. Before making it let’s look at what Nate Silver is saying today-the data wonk cum expert on everything according to himself who has been banging on about Biden needing get out of the race because he’s old for close to a year.
Not surprisingly Silver was insufferably smug today-I mean he is every day but today especially so as he gets to feel that he won something.
(4) Nate Silver on X: “Today was a good day for rational behavior. https://t.co/5WxeS26FNq” / X
About what you’d expect-he feels vindicated-the world has been proven to be rational as it listened to himself. We can debate wether or not this makes him right or not-that this was the best move.
FN: And as we’ll discuss below, there’s still an argument it wasn’t, or at least it’s not entirely clear this was the best move…
However I completely disagree with this:
I’ll talk about this more below but right off the bat-with the hindsight of just over 24 hours after Silver wrote this-there is already a pretty good case that IF dropping Biden was the best move, the way it ended up happening might have been the most optimal way contrary to Silver’s belief., that if he was going to step down he stepped down at the optimal point and that we as Democrats may now-which seemed unthinkable on Sunday morning-be in the best of all worlds.
.”
But was it? Seems to me that remains to be seen-we’ll have a better idea on November 5. But clearly Biden’s exit gave Silver a sigh of relief.
“Undoubtedly the biggest mistake of my forecasting career was insisting, until relatively late in the race, that Donald Trump wouldn’t win the 2016 Republican nomination for president. I was getting worried that I’d made a similar mistake in my prediction that Joe Biden would eventually exit the 2024 race — something he was insistent he wouldn’t do until he announced his decision to step aside at 1:46 p.m. today.”
(15) Biden and Democrats make the rational choice (natesilver.net)
Again, what you’d expect-Silver is claiming vindication, stinking up the place with his farts. About what you’d expect from such a smug and condescending know-it-all like Nate Silver. And look if he’s simply taking credit for correctly predicting Biden would eventually drop out then-ok-I mean that’s undeniable he called that one right though this still doesn’t settle dispositively wether or not this was the right call-we won’t get any kind of clear read on this for months if not until November 6-only a prediction of Biden’s likely behavior, at the end of day the proof is in the pudding do we win or not?
UPDATE: Even if Silver correctly predicted Biden would eventually drop out, his larger proposal for what Democrats should do if/when Biden dropped out-he discussed it in this piece-doesn’t pass the laugh test and his argument about Biden being a singularly bad candidate remains at least debatable as no other prospective candidates have polled better against Trump including now presumed in all but name nominee Kamala Harris as we will look at in more detail below.
Indeed today-Wednesday 7/24 three days since Biden dropped out Silver is still spiking the ball
The “most midwit take of all time?” Not exactly as we will see below in taking a look at his bright idea at the time he predicted Biden would step down for what the Democrats should do then if that proved to be the case. It was considerably more “midwit” to say the last, indeed it truly didn’t even begin to pass the laugh test.
Indeed many besides Silver were quick to claim vindication though it’s not clear exactly what they think has been vindicated.
I mean literally how has Litchman been proven wrong?
FN: We’ll talk more about Litchman below, but there are a lot of bad and unfair arguments being made against Litchman-that his model is entirely subjective or malleable.
What matters in a model is if it has any explanatory power or predictive value and there’s a good argument Litchman’s 13 keys do.
End FN
FN: Silver also admits how wrong he’d been about the 2016 GOP primary though an interesting question is has he learned the right or wrong lesson from it? It has seemed to me that Silver thought Trump couldn’t win because he totally violated the tenets of what normal serious major party Presidential candidates do. Silver’s way of explaining this has been to normalize Trump in future campaigns. He has tended to treat Trump as a normal candidate post 2016 assuming that voters are still motivated by the small bore, not to say petty optics and “gaffes” that his model has always assumed underscored by his dismissal of the Democrats framing elections against Trump as “democracy is on the ballot’ as a suboptimal political strategy. More on this below.
In fairness, Silver also got a lot of unfair criticism for being wrong about the 2016 general which is actually the opposite of the truth-he had warned folks that Trump has a serious chance to win in the last few weeks in 2016 and gave Clinton only a 71% chance to win the EC-he had many times made the point in 2016 that the big difference between HRC 2016 and Obama 2012 is that while both candidates had close to a 90% chance to win the popular vote, the electoral college had been much more favorable for Obama in 2012-as he tried many times post 2016 to point out before finally sort of giving up. And he did have that really good thinkpiece that analyzed in granular detail the self evident fact that the Comey Letter cost Hillary Clinton the election.
End FN
But, of course, this isn’t enough for Silver he has to further spike the ball and kick Biden when he’s down-and after Silver baselessly suggested Biden is currently unable to perform his Presidential duties
FN: Find tweet. Even though he also admitted elsewhere that Biden actually has been a pretty good President.
Unlike some commentators I respect, I’m not inclined to shower Biden with praise after his decision today. Instead, I’m more ambivalent. I do give him credit for leaving now instead of prolonging the agony further — I’d figured we were in for a really ugly week for Democratic Party, and today was about the last possible moment at which he could have exited with most of his dignity intact. However, as someone who was early on the Biden skepticism beat, I think Biden should have stepped aside many months ago when there still would have been time to have some semblance of a competitive primary. I think the people who thought it was a good idea to run this version of Biden for another term — from family members like Hunter Biden to strategists like Jen O’Malley Dillon, Mike Donilon and Ron Klain — should be regarded with skepticism and shouldn’t come within 100 miles of the war room of Kamala Harris or whomever else the Democratic nominee turns out to be.”
FN:
Kamala Harris thankfully didn’t listen to Silver on this either indeed she did the opposite-she hired Jen O’Malley-Dillon as her campaign manager, and indeed, kept on the entire Biden campaign team-which is usually a decent rule of thumb to handle “advice” from Nate Silver: do the opposite. Indeed, as we’ll discuss below, dropping Biden wasn’t the disaster I-and many Democrats including insiders like Jim Clyburn-who we’ll quote below-feared it would be but this was because the Dems ended up doing the opposite of pretty much everything Silver-and others like Ryan Grim to say nothing of Cenk Uygur, and many other hackish pundits too numerous to list-suggested behind replacing Biden. Clearly Kamala’s instincts are thankfully far superior to Nate Silver and Cenk Uygur-which is what you would-and should expect. If this weren’t so She would self evidently not be the right one for the vitally important task of defeating the most dangerous, fascist candidate in in American history.
On first glance it’s striking how uncharitable this is-is it really necessary to spike the ball on the head of a beaten man? Even more, I totally disagree with him-if anything I would argue that even IF this was the right move-and again I’ll argue below this has been far from conclusively proven-there’s a good argument that this ended about as optimally as it could have been under the circumstances-those being three of the most toxic, potentially damaging weeks any party has ever inflicted on itself in US political history and this started on June 28 a few days after the Trump’s Republican Supreme Court-he’d appointed three of them himself and five of the six were appointed by Trump and George W. Bush two Republican Presidential nominees who’d “won” the Presidency despite winning only a minority of the popular vote-had declared Trump had absolute immunity basically in the commission of any crime. Yet the Democratic party responded by running against not Trump but Joe Biden the next three weeks.
On MSNBC Saturday morning, Jim Clyburn quite persuasively argued that if the Dems were going down the path of a 1968 style DNC convention chaotic, toxic dumpster fire they really did face cataclysmic defeat.
I like Joe Manchin the whole lot. And Joe Manchin said this morning that this is not the Democratic Party of his father. And that is a great thing, because my father — I remember when my father got the right to vote or cast an effective vote here in South Carolina.
It was not until 1948 that the Democratic Party opened itself up to African-Americans. No, this is not the Democratic Party of my father, and that is a great thing.
And so let’s go forward with these improvements that we have been making in this party, opening this party up to everybody, and keep it open to everybody. So the process is there. And I think we ought to utilize that process and go to Chicago and, when we open on the 19th of August, do so on one accord.
So, whatever is going to happen, all these people who are interested in getting into the process, the process is open. Get into it. Look at the rules. It’s there. And I have said, you could use this process to effectively have a mini-primary, if that’s what you are interested in having.
But if you go to the convention, have an open process in the convention, it will come out the same way it came out in 1968, 1972, and 1980, when we had contested processes on the floor of the convention. And, in 1980, we lost an incumbent president. And, in 1972, we carried one state, Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia, and all of us know what happened in 1968, when we took — we ran Lyndon Johnson out of the race.
He argued that if by the convention the Dems weren’t having a “lovefest” they’d be in trouble. At that time on Saturday Morning 7/20 a “lovefest” in the party seemed pretty far off-the last three weeks had been utterly toxic with a constant stream of leaks from high ranking Democrats against their own nominee. For the last three weeks post the 6/28 debate most of the party leaders seemed to be running not against Donald Trump but Joe Biden. The idea of a party “lovefest” any time soon seemed pretty remote and hard to picture.
Yet just over two days later in the evening of Monday July 2022 that was pretty much where Dems were as Kamala Harris had become the presumptive nominee in all but name after she nailed down in one day the required delegates for the nomination and the DNC vowed to go full steam ahead with a virtual vote to nominate her by August 7
Vice President Kamala Harris moved swiftly to assert herself as the de facto Democratic nominee for president on Monday, her first full day as a candidate, as virtually every potential remaining rival bowed out and she clinched the support of enough delegates to win the nomination.
The Associated Press said late Monday that Ms. Harris had secured the backing of more than the 1,976 delegates needed to capture the nomination in the first round of voting. The pledged support is not binding until the delegates cast their votes, which party officials said would take place between Aug. 1 and Aug. 7.”
So for me, Clyburn and many Democrats this was a relief. But it was the opposite for pundits like Cenk Ugyur and Shadi Hamid.
FN: Find links.
They were bitterly disappointed that post Biden stepping down the Democrats didn’t go the path of some kind of chaotic, fan fiction open primary or chaotic convention as Clyburn had vigorously warned against.
FN: In this we will argue below, Biden deserves a huge amount of credit contrary to Nate Silver-as Lawrence O’Donnell very persuasively argues on his 7/24/2024 episode-just after Biden’s public address after dropping out of the race.
And Nate Silver too suffered from the same illusions as Cenk-Shaid-Ryan Grim and others on the media’s Bad Take Express.
For Cenk to say absurd things like that Biden should follow LBJ’s 1968 example and get out the way is, while absurd, understandable due to his clear ignorance about any history beyond what he ate for breakfast this morning.
But it’s stunning that anyone as smart as Nate Silver says he is could write this:
“As compared to Republicans’ decision about what to do about Trump, I thought Democrats had more agency about Biden following his disastrous debate. Unlike Republicans in 2016, Democrats hadn’t even bothered to hold a competitive primary — if they had, Biden’s flaws might have been even evident earlier — so the will-of-the-voters argument was weak. And unlike Trump in October 2016 following the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape — after which some Republicans called on him to drop out — Biden wasn’t even the Democratic nominee yet since the party convention hadn’t been held. And Biden has always been a loyal Democrat who got a huge boost from the party establishment in wrapping up the nomination in 2020 — not someone who gave his party the middle finger.”
His point about Biden not being someone who gave his party the middle finger proved an accurate bet. But his complaint that the Democrats were less fair than the 2016 Republicans who at least had an open primary is a total misnomer that has been repeated by many the last few years-while I love Vaush he has many times repeated this canard though again, Nate Silver is supposedly this data nerd cum polling genius so it’s pretty surprising he also commits this canard: the 2016 Republican party and the 2024 Democrats is apples to oranges as the 2016 GOP was the out of power party while the 2024 Dems are the incumbent party-incumbent party’s don’t normally run competitive primaries-that’s one of the number of advantages of incumbency-the incumbency that Cenk-Silver and Friends demanded the Dems drop so casually.
One of the big advantages of incumbency is you don’t have to have a chaotic, divisive, not to say toxic open primary. Indeed towards the later stages of the Democratic primary in 2020, many rank and file Dems on Twitter were griping that they couldn’t wait for it to end already-there was real relief when Biden took control in South Carolina-by definition primaries can be very toxic precisely because you have candidates in a dog fight for their survival even though they agree on 90-95% of the issues-as there is minimal substantive, policy difference between the candidates it can get personal not to say petty.
To use a contemporary Twitter meme: open primaries are bad actually, and while this might scandalize Cenk Uygur party unity is good actually. It goes without saying open primaries are sometimes necessary–by definition when a party is not in power-but they are necessary evils, as opposed to someone like Cenk who has a fetish for a bruising, fatuous primary. He had been criticizing Biden for not doing an LBJ failing to even realize, apparently, that the Democrats lost in 1968 so how is that a helpful example for his narrative?
Contrary to this fetish for an open primary historical precedent shows a pretty powerful correlation between running an incumbent President unopposed and winning reelection.
Opinion: Don’t bet on those Trump ‘landslide’ predictions just yet (msn.com)
The Case For A Democratic Surprise On Election Night | FiveThirtyEight
Nov 4: What’s pretty interesting is that Silver’s foil, Bleu, was right-the lite was more accurate than deluxe. j
Ie it’s a good thing Biden held out for as long as he did.
UPDATE: Once again Biden is Exhibit One for the proposition that life is unfair
Well yeah because the process was seamless-she was effectively the presumed nominee in 33 hours after Biden stepped down. Now if they’d taken Silver’s really bad suggestions and had this fan fiction Dem primary reality show in three weeks monstrosity it’d be pretty different.
And for this a great deal of credit goes to Joe Biden as Lawrence O’Donnell persuasively argued last night after Biden’s historical speech discussing his decision to step down. Link above. A crucial part of his stepping down was explicitly endorsing Harris. According to some reporting, notably Mark Halperin, it was claimed Biden was going to step down without endorsing her. By endorsing contrary to this reporting, Biden gave the impetus for the party to very quickly unify behind VP Harris seamlessly. Ie thankfully the Dems didn’t follow the path Cenk-Silver and Friends but Biden’s.
It’s also been striking HOW bearish Silver had been about Biden’s chances:
It’s worth remembering that a lot had to break right for Trump to win in 2016. Without the Comey letter, Clinton would probably have held on. Then there was a polling error in Trump’s favor, and he won the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote — whereas Biden is at an Electoral College disadvantage.”
Apparently he thought Biden’s chances of beating Trump in 2024 were less than Trump’s beating Clinton in 2016. That’s one thing-though even that is questionable-Clinton’s lead was much larger most of the 2016 race than Trump’s in 2024 which was never on average more than the margin of error-ie within a normal polling error.
But not only did Silver believe Biden’s 2024 path was weaker than Trump 2016 but much less plausibly less even than Trump’s 2020 path.
This brings us to an interesting catfight between Silver in the 2020 campaign and his good friend-having fun as Silver has explicitly stated he doesn’t like rival data nerd cum polling analyst G. Elliot Morris.
FN: Why I don’t buy 538’s new election model – by Nate Silver
In 2020 Silver and Morris got into some Twitter fights over their respective models and the predictions of the two models.
he forecasters are fighting. Sometimes it’s a subtweet: “The blindingly obvious lesson of 2016 for election modelers is ‘it’s super easy to build an overconfident model, so think carefully about sources of uncertainty’ but sometimes people are endlessly creative in finding ways to avoid the obvious lessons.”
But for much of the summer and early fall, it was quite direct, to the point of Nate Silver, the forecasting supremo and FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief, using the work of The Economist’s 24-year-old data journalist G. Elliott Morris and his colleagues as an example of the failures of the modern “data-science curriculum.” Silver had taken issue with Morris’s promotion of The Economist’s 2020 election model’s “record” on how it had worked in forecasting previous U.S. presidential elections. Silver, who would later release a model that was far less certain of an eventual Joe Biden victory, was not impressed with the fact that The Economist’s model, published for the first time by this team in 2020, had a good record of predicting elections that had already happened.
When FiveThirtyEight first published its forecast for the 2020 race, it put Biden’s chances to win at 71 percent, while The Economist set them at 87 percent. Today the two have gotten significantly closer: FiveThirtyEight has an 87 percent chance of a Biden win, and The Economist has 91 percent. But while this may make it seem as though the difference isn’t that great — they both round to Biden having a nine-out-of-ten shot — the distance they traveled to get there illuminates the defining question of a race in which one candidate has had a sizable, steady lead virtually the whole time. How likely, especially considering [waves hands] all that’s going on right now, are such leads to remain, and how do we think about the impact of things that are fundamentally difficult to anticipate and may not be in the data we look back on in order to project forward?”
In retrospect it might seem like much ado about nothing as they both got to basically the same place in the end-Biden’s odds at roughly 90%. And Silver’s more cautious position in August, 2020 at 71% doesn’t necessarily look indefensible with the benefit of hindsight. Though I’m not quite sure what made 2020 “special” as he’d suggested.
But the weeks of sniping and sometimes substantive debate before and after Silver’s model came out largely centered on the question of uncertainty and whether there was something special about 2020. Morris described Silver’s projections in August of this year and in 2016 as “fundamentally irreconcilable,” saying it was “a bit humorous that you were surprised the model was bearish on Biden when you just added like 30 percent more uncertainty because your gut told you so. What else would have happened?” Silver was just as eager a participant — saying Morris and the economist were “completely irresponsible … not to think about the effect that COVID-19 will have … The job of a forecast is to reflect the real world, and COVID is [a] huge part of the real world today.”
Covid in a word he seemed to believe made 2020 special or less predictable:
“The Economist’s model accounted for COVID by smoothing out how an economy that gyrates from steep recession to rapid recovery can affect the race. Silver, however, spun up an “uncertainty index,” which included a number of factors, some of which tamp down on uncertainty (polarization, the stability of polling averages) and some which amp it up (economic volatility and, most controversially, “the volume of major news, as measured by the number of full-width New York Times headlines in the past 500 days”).
The uncertainty index was part of the “national drift,” or “how much the overall national forecast could change between now and Election Day,” which represented, according to Silver, “the biggest reason Biden might not win despite currently enjoying a fairly large lead in the polls.” But as we get closer to Election Day, the national drift in Silver’s model decays, with the polls experiencing a “sharp increase in accuracy toward the end of an election.”
Jackson described the use of things like large Times headlines as “a little data-miney” and evidence that “they were looking for something that inserts uncertainty.” Progressive pollster Sean McElwee said that Silver’s search for uncertainty was “clearly an overreaction to 2016” but that he had “earned the right to experiment” with new factors like the New York Times headlines.
It certainly seems that the shadow of 2016-but for Silver not the general where he’d actually been right though the mainstream press never understood this but the primary-loomed large for Silver’s considerable caution in betting too confidently against Trump.
Again, his relative pessimism on the electoral college doesn’t seem indefensible:
One data analyst I spoke to, Jonathan Robinson of Catalist, the Democratic data firm, thought that much of the difference between the two forecasters might not be due to deep philosophical divides about how to predict an electoral-vote total in August of an election year. Instead, they just seem to have different reads on how well Biden is doing relative to Trump.
Robinson looked at Silver’s figures for how big a margin Biden would need in the popular vote to have an even chance of winning the election given Trump’s advantage in the Electoral College. A two-to-three-point win in the popular vote gave Biden a 46 percent chance of winning the election, while a three-to-four-point margin gave him 74 percent, and a four-to-five-point win put him at 89 percent to get the necessary electoral votes. These big jumps mean that Biden doing half a percentage point better than expected (and Trump half a percentage point worse) could lead to big differences in the likelihood of a Biden win. If The Economist had Trump at roughly one point better than Silver had him, either because of how the polls were averaged, different economic projections, or any number of choices made in their models, this could account for the divergence in odds.
And indeed, while the polls had Biden up by the high single digits just short of 10% the entire election cycle, the final polling average the day of the election was 8.8%-Biden would win by 4.65% for an over 4% polling error and would win the electoral college by a pretty narrow margin-by just a 45,000 vote margin in the three former Blue Wall states.
But if a 71% chance of Biden winning in August 2020 might be defensible, what is harder to square is that he gave Trump a higher chance of winning in 2024 on June 28-the day after The Debate. Indeed, Silver had rightly panned Sam Wang for 98% confidence Clinton would win in 2016 but at times his confidence in 2024 of a Biden defeat sounded at nearly 98%. While his 2020 cautiousness doesn’t seem wholly implausible with the benefit of hindsight, it seems pretty hard to square with his higher level of confidence of certain Biden defeat 2024.
Going back to his “Democrats Make the Rational Choice” gloating, spiking the ball post:
So nothing was for sure — but Biden was probably going to lose, and there was an increasing chance he’d lose badly. In what will be the final run of the Trump vs. Biden version of our model, Biden had a 27 percent chance of winning the Electoral College. But that was probably overstating his chances:
- Biden’s fundraising was drying up;
- Every other public appearances was a disaster; FN: Fact check not true-his Nato press conference was widely lauded even by some of his NYT critics though they then moved the goalposts arguing that while he clearly showed a high level of mastery in terms of knowledge regarding the Nato alliance and the assistance of Ukraine against Putin’s invasion they came up with new hoops for him to jump through
- Many prominent Democrats had called on him to exit the race or shared damaging stories about him;
- A majority of Democratic voters also wanted Biden to leave — which wasn’t true for Trump in 2016 and could have produced epic problems in terms of voter enthusiasm;FN: That is at least debatable. Yes there were all these polls claiming to show that but I also know for a fact that many of us in the Democratic base were deadset against this and at his rally in Detroit a few weeks ago, Joe Biden had literally brought the house down with the crowd chanting “Don’t you quit.”Find tweetsBut of course Siler doesn’t care about actual voters what his whole raison d’etre is the absolute authority of polls. This touches on the friction between Silver and Simon Rosenberg going back to 2022 when Rosenberg would argue for putting early day voting in a model
For Silver’s poll centric approach-actual voting is a mere anecdote, any argument against the wisdom of the polls amounting to ‘unskewing”-the moral equivalent to when a mainstream Beltway journalist accuses someone of “speculating” or calling some one a pedophile among normies-Interesting too how little he has used the little 5 word Dobbs in his analysis-either in 2022 or this year beyond handwaving away the fact that Dobbs has been an absolute force multiplier for the Dems.
The Dobbs Backlash is Real – by Charlie Sykes – The Bulwark
Not to Nate Silver it isn’t-the fact that in many parts of the country a 13 year old rape victim has less rights than her rapist is in his mind a triviality compared to the fact that Biden is 81-or at least he assumes it is in the mind of voters despite abortion rights has won almost everywhere since Dobbs even in many very red states. I suggested above that Silver perhaps took the wrong lesson from being so wrong about Trump in the 2016 primary-rather than questioning his assumptions about what “normal elections” look like, he has basically treated Trump like a normal politician ever since. Silver has been dismissive about the Dobbs backlash and even more dismissive about the Democratic argument that “democracy is on the ballot”-though in the argument for dropping Biden had sort of concern trolled the idea-if Democrats really believed it’s on the ballot shouldn’t they be willing to do “anything”-sure anything that seemed like it could be a good idea but it is questionable how good some of Silver’s ideas were. Apparently whether or not you believe democracy is on the ballot, he didn’t think this was an issue voters care about-his understanding of what voters care about certainly doesn’t suggest a very high opinion of voters-who in Nate Silver’s world care about small bore things like gaffes or someone looking old but the clear and present threat to democracy itself or forcing rape victims to bear their rapists rape baby-are, like, yawnsville for actual voters.
- Many White House staff and prominent Biden supporters had begun to lie to people and lie to themselves about the polling and how feasible it was to prop up Biden’s candidacy; To accuse anyone of “lying” about polls doesn’t even pass the laugh test and shows the problem with putting as much weight on them as Silver does. As we will look at below in a little more detail there was no reason to “lie” the polling post debate had hardly been anywhere near as dispositive as Silver claims to believe. This is the whole problem with treating polling analysis-something with considerable art along with however much science it is alleged to have-as some kind of exact science-like the ludicrous articles by people like David Axelrod claiming if Biden stayed in Trump would win by 20 points and the Democrats would lose almost every seat in Congress. You can argue how strong the case for dropping Biden was but the problem was that many of the proponents just wildly overstated their case.
Link Axelrod piece.
- And voters weren’t buying any of this, so Democrats risked damaging their credibility — and further downballot losses — by pretending it was a good idea for Biden to run for another term until he was 86.
This is why I was literally willing to put my money where my mouth was when it came to Biden. A 27 percent isn’t high to begin with, but I figured his real chances were about half that — perhaps 10 to 15 percent — if he remained in the race.”
That’s a stunning level of confidence contrasted with his relative lack of optimism for Biden 2020 in a race he led wire to wire by close to double digits throughout. Comparatively while Silver kept repeating that “Biden has never led” he at no point trailed by a margin-in the averages-of more than the margin of error.
So, the issue isn’t so much Silver’s relative lack of optimism about Biden winning in August 2020, but his total certainty he couldn’t win 2024-as we saw above, he literally claimed Biden’s odds were 10-15% at best. Ie he was at least as confident of a Biden defeat in July 2024 as Elliot Morris was of Biden victory in late August 2020-whom he at the time chided for being too certain.
Again Silver’s gloss that the Biden people were “lying” by claiming Biden still had a real chance of beating Trump shows nothing if not someone being far too certain and subscribing to a kind of poll fundamentalism that ignores all contrary data points or evidence. After all to claim they were lying-or that Biden during his interview with Lester Holt was somehow delusional-is showing an absurd level of over confidence in polls-particularly as the polls really didn’t show anything close to the kinds of doomsday narratives of folks like Silver-Ugyur-Ezra Klein to say nothing of David Axelrod.
Again wether or not the argument for Biden to step aside was right-at this point it’s not a slam dunk either way though I’m increasingly coming to think we as Democrats are no worse off-but because arguably in Kamala Harris we have kind of the best of all worlds-retaining many of the advantages of incumbency while trading for a younger more energetic candidate, more below…-many of the proponents completely overstated the case.
The kind of apocalyptic doomsday scenarios that folks like Axelrod were telling simply beggared belief or at a minimum there was no evidence of it in the actual polls.
Opinion: Don’t bet on those Trump ‘landslide’ predictions just yet (msn.com)
FN: This too has the inconvenience of being patently false.
UPDATE: Silver is sitll spinking the ball
It touched on Silver’s a notable comment Silver made in 2020 during his “model wars” with G. Elliot Morris in 2020.
FN: Just recently after stating he was going to avoid any model wars, he couldn’t resist.
To put it another way, the easy part of forecasting is fitting a model and the hard part is knowing when the best fit on past data will yield a worse forecast on unknown data,” Silver tweeted.
Silver’s argument has been that Morris and the Economist have been far too certain far too early in the race due to overconfidence in their ability to discern from past elections what was likely to happen in this one. And Silver has earned some right to talk about what’s come before; he is virtually the only forecaster left standing after the Pollingdämmerung that was 2016, an election that occurred when Morris was still a junior at the University of Texas.”
This led me to wonder if Silver
FN: Silver himself is no mean giver of bad takes himself
The Fall of Nate Silver | The New Republic
Nate Silver and G. Elliott Morris Are Fighting on Twitter (nymag.com)
FN: In 2020 The New Republic had a very good piece that asked the question to paraphrase: What happened to Nate Silver OR was he always this way?
It was around 2020 when Silver became this pedantic know it all on all things Covid-according to him-that it started to dawn on many people-that, wow, Silver’s like not such a likable guy these days. NR rightly asks the question-did he change or was he always this way? At the time it had seemed something about his tone had changed:
The Fall of Nate Silver | The New Republic
Did he change, or did we? For weeks now, Nate Silver has been morphing before our eyes into exactly the kind of bloviator he made his name mocking. Tired perhaps of the slow and predictable business of prognostication—the elections so far apart from each other, the long months of waiting and lousy web traffic in between—the founder of data journalism outlet FiveThirtyEight has transformed his Twitter account into a font of provocatively bad opinions.
Clearly NR noticed this as I and many others on Twitter had noticed at the time. But NR also makes an interesting assertion that at bottom Silver was never quite what some fans had thought: His data journalism blog, FiveThirtyEight, is a political website with no politics—or rather, no politics beyond a mute approval of the status quo.
A MUTE APPROVAL OF THE STATUS QUO. We will consider this provocative take more below.
End FN
UPDATE:
MIchael Steele on Medias Touch makes an important point you have heard nowhere in the mainstream press much less from Silver-while polls might show 75% saying Biden should withdraw the actual race showed 45-45 and that the drive to drop Biden did NOT come from voters but from the elected Dems. That’s just a fact-as a member of the Dem base I know that many of us were deadset against dropping Joe.
(335) GOP Suddenly IN SHAMBLES after Kamala SOARS (with Michael Steele) | PoliticsGirl – YouTube
Steven Phillips vs Nate Cohn’s conventional wisdom on elections
UPDATE:
Regarding the point this worked contra Silver the timing is perfect
As I said above, I found today bittersweet at best even though Kamala was my choice in 2020 and have hoped she will be President one day since 2017. That’s because I’m still not at all convinced the Dems made the right choice. While I definitely think they CAN win with Harris I hadnt thought this was the optimal time for her-but 2028.
Cenk offers some consolation.
UPDATE: As does Shadi Hamid
Kornacki points out that public polling since the debate showed Trump leading by 47-45-ie totally within the margin of error and belying the apocalyptic headlines and the freakout within the party.
There had been some worrisome polls in places like VA, NM, NH, and Maine though as Kornacki points out not enough to be definitive and some of those polls weren’t necessarily high quality polls
FN: And, of course, the age thing made it quite possible she’d have become acting President in the next few years-maybe-2026 or 2027.
But the fact that this makes Nate Silver-one of the most smug, condescending hacks out there-feel even more smug and vindicated certainly increases the bitter in bittersweet. Again, as I mentioned above I had this dream scenario where Biden won by doing a Harry Truman 2.0 finishing with a perfect Dewey Beats Truman moment-as the conventional wisdom, not just the NY Times and the rest of the mainstream press but even many members on his own party-there was a Draft Eisenhour episode close to the Democratic convention in the Summer of 1948-leaving the “Very Serious People” with egg on their faces, and the most satisfying egg would have been what was dripping down Silver’s face.
It would have been a beautiful thing but it was not to be. In any case I’ve long wondered if Silver really learned the right lessons from being totally wrong in the GOP primary that year. That Biden stepping down in some way makes him feel more reassured that the world is “rational” in the sense he imagines is kind of adding insult to injury.
DonkConnects ♻️™ ➐ on X: “@ProChoiceMike https://t.co/5XvdWcW7ML” / X
What has been striking through the last three weeks-which have been an absolute disaster for the Democratic party.
Finish with this line?
FN: The good news tonight is that a lot of Dem elites have already endorsed Kamala Harris.
DNC poised to move forward with virtual roll call after Biden dropout – Live Updates – POLITICO
Shut up man!! (@ShutUpMan_420) / X
Kamala Harris, History and Russia. | by Nadin Brzezinski | Jul, 2024 | Medium
What do the polls say about a Harris vs. Trump matchup? – ABC News (go.com)
Riding With Biden 2024 on X: “The unity is wonderful specially after such a toxic three weeks” / X
Cenk is the genius level political strategist who claimed to be seriously considering endorsing RFK Jr whose on son felt compelled to reveal to the public that his old man’s campaign was literally an op of the Trump campaign
FN: On a phone call the Monday after Trump got shot-or hit by debris as the case may be-Trump said “We will win” to which RFJ Jr responded “Yes we will.”:
Silver, of course, was insufferably smug today. I mean he is every day but today especially so as he gets to feel that he won something. Of course, we won’t know if democracy itself wins-if this was the right choice-until Nov 5.
I disagree-if you were going to drop Biden-and they were as it turned out!-this is the optimal way to do it-quikcly unifying behind their new nominee.
(15) Polling averages shouldn’t be political litmus tests (natesilver.net)
Nate Silver and G. Elliott Morris Are Fighting on Twitter (nymag.com)
FiveThirtyEight Hires G. Elliott Morris, Loses Nate Silver (nymag.com)
(15) Of course Biden’s age is a legitimate voter concern (natesilver.net)
Joe Biden should drop out – by Nate Silver
Why I don’t buy 538’s new election model – by Nate Silver
Riding With Biden 2024 on X: “Which why it was never obvious to me this was the right move” / X
Why Biden finally dropped out – POLITICO
An Abandoned Biden Learns Friends Are More Dangerous Than Enemies – POLITICO
At least Cenk showed a little class at the end unlike Nate