Not a Good Use of My, or Your, Time, But: CHART OF THE DAY
Nearly all of us are cognitively-compromised readers of polls the day before an election. Nate Silver is the exception, and that’s exactly why you should listen to him today:
Do anchor your beliefs to this fact: Pollsters share the same problems with who answers the phone. If the polls are off, they'll likely be off in the same direction everywhere, so seven good Senate polls aren't seven separate pieces of evidence.
The natural next question, given this chart, is this: What does Nate Silver <https://www.natesilver.net/> think?
Nate Siler is very valuable today. He cares only about whether three out of every four 75% picks he makes actually come true or not. He does not really, save how it affects his personal finances, care much about governance. He does not really have enough of a “no man is an island” feeling to care much about what the ramifications of elections are for how the world does and how people suffer.
That personality quirk makes him the most valuable of us today.
He is the least likely to delude himself via motivated reasoning. So reward him by giving him your money:
Nate Silver: The NYT/Siena Polls Show a Blue Tsunami <https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-nytsiena-polls-show-a-blue-tsunami>: ‘They might be wrong again, but it’s getting hard to deny that polls point toward a really big year for Democrats…. They showed what can only be described as fantastic numbers for Democrats, putting them ahead — sometimes narrowly, sometimes not — in basically every Senate battleground and in the associated governor’s races, including in Texas. These polls weren’t quite in the territory of FLIPR’s officially “weird” scenarios, but they’re close….
The NYT shows a D +11 on the generic ballot and… in most cases… follow[s] the patterns FLIPR has previously detected…. [My] model… does adjust every survey firm’s numbers for house effects. In other words, it knows that NYT/Siena has tended to have good numbers for Democrats this cycle, and that’s priced into its forecasts, including to some extent even in races that the NYT hasn’t polled…. [Nevertheless, and] it was just barely — the NYT/Siena polls actually had less of an impact on our model than I expected — but for the first time tonight, Democrats’ Senate odds improved to a number that begins with an “8”….
The New York Times is notorious for notherding. They’ll publish weird results like Flanagan +14 in Minnesota or Ricketts +6 in Nebraska, knowing full well that polling averages are usually more accurate than individual polls and they’ll probably wind up… wrong…. There’s none of the hedging or fudging or herding or fiddling with likely voter numbers like we’ve seen from other highly-rated pollsters. Except that, according to The Times’s Nate Cohn, the NYT actually did tinker with its weighting scheme after its polls, like most others, overrated Democrats in 2024. If they hadn’t done that, their polls would have been even better for Democrats, Cohn wrote, by roughly three points across the board (the major exception being Maine)….
The trends here are quite consistent: Democrats are coming home in the blue states while Republicans aren’t in the red states. If both of those things are true — and those are two very, very big “ifs” — Republicans are in for a long night on Tuesday.
Republicans: Your lemming-like following of the Newt Gingrich principle that you have to work as hard as you can to make the president of your party appear a success (and the president of the other party appear a failure) no matter how much damage you do to the country in the process has not only damned you all to hell, it looks like it has done major, major damage to your political standing as well. Time to rethink your lives, and repent, if you still can.
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