Who did those suburban people vote for in 2016? Yes he is not normal but all that stuff he does now was known about him when he ran and he won anyway. A good chunk of the GOP would vote for Charles Manson for president if Charlie was against abortion and agreed to put anti abortion people on the Supreme court. I know people like that , they protest at the abortion clinic every single week rain or shine.
I just saw David Brooks talking about this on PBS (at minute 10). He says that he’s worried that given the large number of candidates, the media will act as gatekeepers on who is worthy of attention because there’s not enough time to focus on each one.
It’s already pretty evident that the candidates with the most media attention can make others fade. Buttigieg’s rise in media attention came at Beto’s expense.
Mark Shields points out that the idea of the media as gatekeepers is a “sobering and unreassuring prospect given the great job we did in 2016.”
Right after that, David Brooks gives his opinion that the winner should be someone who has experience in government. . . . playing the gatekeeper role again.
The role of media in democracy is becoming more evident. When there were 3 major channels, no one questioned it. Today, I have to wonder about the fairness.
The media didn’t drive Buttigieg’s rise in popularity; they chased it.
Media is not obligated to give every person who says they are running the same attention. If you are listening to someone in the media offering their analysis and opinions of course you are going to hear opinions. Insisting on all having the same soapbox in the name of fairness would serve us poorly.
The answer to the cereal aisle effect is not to discuss every possible choice of puffs or crunch or flake equally. Flake being the most on point one for some of the 0 to 3% ones running!
As happened with Buttigieg, if a candidate earns on the ground interest the media will cover, following the interest. That is as it should be.
A “normal” incumbent would be almost assured of victory with a good eonomy, but Trump is not normal — many people realize he is a criminal doing long-term damage to the country. He will be a strong favorite to be re-elected if the economy is good, but he can be beaten.
The election will be decided by the disillusioned workers of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Biden should do well with those voters. Also, perhaps Booker? Maybe Sanders??
“Joe Biden” is Democrat for “Jeb Bush”.
(Harry Turtledove)
What’s interesting in retrospect with regard to Bush is that the economy had already started growing again during the latter part of the election cycle (1992). It was the rise in unemployment that hurt Bush, but more than that, it was the perception that he was more interested in foreign policy and foreign trade than dealing with people’s economic anxieties.
History gives us a pretty good indication that incumbents are hard to beat - even incumbents that people don’t necessarily like or relate to. The other thing to remember is that, it’s not just Trump that voters will look at; they’ll look at Trump relative to another candidate, just like they did with Hillary Clinton. That’s one reason why Biden is a potentially risky candidate in a general election, just because there’s some material to work with, and I’m sure he’ll provide more during the campaign if he can survive it. Trump would beat Bernie pretty badly as well, IMO.
I could be wrong but something tells me that Trump really fears some of the younger, more energetic candidates. As much as I hate to say it, I don’t think America’s quite ready to vote for an openly gay candidate yet, so I don’t think Buttigige (sp?) would make a good general candidate. I get the feeling that Harris, Booker, and O’Rourke are the potential dark horses here. The question I have in my mind is whether or not they have what it takes to run a national campaign in terms of staff and building an organization.
don’t see any way a fossil like Biden or Sanders beats Trump.
I don’t see how a guy like Biden who spent his entire career as a politician and never worked a “regular job” is supposed to get the votes of blue collar people who are out of work.
Actually, in some ways, a decentralized media can work to the advantage of campaigns that are savvy enough to use the new technologies. I don’t anticipate Andrew Yang having much of an impact on the race, but even a few years ago, nobody would have even breathed his name. But he’s actually done a pretty good job of using podcasts, YouTube, and other media to at least get noticed. The challenge early on for most of the field will be the same challenge that Bernie Sanders, Tom O’Malley, and Jim Webb had in 2016, which is getting noticed. Bernie was able to do it because he had a radically different posture and he occupied a unique space, and he built a following with the help of some pretty media-savvy people.
In any case, if the 2016 GOP primaries are any indication, probably 1/3 of the candidates will run out of money well before the first primary and effectively be removed from the debates and further discussion. Another 30-45% of the contenders will be out within the first few weeks of primary season, though in reality they will have been long since considered finished before that point. By January, we’ll mostly be talking about the top 3 to 5 candidates, which is how it usually works.
I agree that we ideally need a younger and more dynamic candidate.
As a bit of side question, has the Bernie camp developed a hate-on for 538/Silver? I was talking to a friend who is, I must admit, kind of a Bernie Bro. He talked about how Silver totally miscalled Sanders’ Michigan primary win and did some shameful apologetics for some recent NYT poll. Thus, Silver is written off as an establishment shill. Is this a common feeling?
Trump is 72 and Biden is 76. So Trump is also a “fossil”.
And what regular job did trump ever work? He inherited millions.
Yes. The only places I see any respect for Nate Silver is here and on MSM. The other day, someone asked Cenk Uygur from The Young Turks if Nate Silver had ever been on TYT. He said no, Nate didn’t want to defend himself. Some people feel that Silver pretends that his opinions are evidence based because it’s based on polls, but it’s still largely biased.
I looked up Nate Silver on Reddit and found some major hate in the r/chapotraphouse sub.
He gets mentions in other places if he says something favorable to that person, but I don’t see much talk about him anywhere else.
Nate Silver has the best track record in terms of election prediction models. I don’t think it’s even close when it comes to data driven election predictions. That doesn’t mean everything he says is golden - he’s made plenty of mistakes when going from data driven analysis to data free talking head punditry. But in terms of data driven election prediction models, he’s head and shoulders above everyone else.
Could I get a source for this? I went searching. I found that he was right about a lot of states in two general elections. He was wrong about Trump, but who wasn’t? I found that he signed an agreement with Obama for exclusive access to his internal polls in 2008. I found that he bases his predictions on a statistical model based on an aggregate of polls that he shares up to a point. That gives me the idea that if the polls aren’t right, he won’t be right either. For instance, the polling was way off for AOC’s primary election. It would have been interesting to see if he would have predicted that.
I found this on his wiki:
That just gave me the idea that aggregated polls worked better than individual polls, which would make sense. It didn’t give me the sense that everyone else was wrong, and he was right. From that quote, it reads to me like 3 academic analysts got it right as well.
I’m not doubting that some people got it way wrong. But a model is only as good as what you put in it.
I also found that he was twitter feuding with Ryan Grim who is now a reporter with TYT. That could explain at least a piece of the animosity.
You say that as if “aggregated polls” isn’t something that is crafted individually - like they are all the same. But each aggregator chooses weights to assign to different polls when making their scores.
He was the only major 2016 model-predictor, IIRC, who gave Trump a significant chance of victory (about a 33% chance, I believe). I don’t have a cite for his track record – I’ve just been following him for over a decade. There are many models that use aggregated polls, but based on the record of these various models, Nate’s is by far the best.
This is just my opinion from following him for years. You’re free to disagree.
But Nate Silver owns up to it, and he was careful in 2016 to point out that there was a lot of uncertainty in the polls when Sam Wang and his fanboys were making bold predictions. So besides having good data, Silver is also capable of saying “I can’t be completely sure, I am only 60-70% sure” which drives people nuts, but it’s the most credible approach. Silver is, IMO, the most reliable and credible forecaster.
Many of the major polls were actually correct in terms of polling the percentage of the overall popular vote that would go to Clinton. Where they erred, and where Silver was careful to be cautious in his predictions, was in trying to guess how individual states would go. A lot of states had only a handful of polls and it wasn’t clear how accurate they were, which made forecasting extremely difficult in terms of predicting an electoral college delegate total. He was saying pretty much right up until the end that Clinton would probably win, but that there was enough uncertainty in the polling data that made a Trump victory possible.
He uses polling data and voting history.
IIRC, Ryan Grim was working with the left-leaning Huffington Post and without any evidence whatsoever attacked Silver for, as he put it, “putting the thumb on the scales” for suggesting that Trump had a 1 in 3 chance of winning. He made an ass of himself and was forced to admit it.
That’s the part that many fail to understand, the probabilistic nature of the modeland what that means. If a probabilistic model says that there is a 60 to 70% chance of X occurring and X occurs 100% of the time then the model is not very good. The model is excellent if X occurs about 60 to 70% of the time and does not occur 30 to 40% of the time. That’s the “calibration” aspect. The link has a drop down to look at results by sorts of races if interested.
He was not wrong about Trump. He was among the few who was highlighting the uncertainty and giving Trump a good chance of winning, noting that the possibility of a Clinton popular vote win and electoral college loss was significant, even though the more probable outcome was a Clinton win.
And for those who want to geek out, here’s Silver critically discussing the model’s mid-terms performance, noting exactly the flaw that while it was accurate it was not calibrated so very well.
The thing is to keep the model (very good and which factors in that the polls could be wrong and when wrong may be correlated with each other in their errors) and his talking head punditry (not anything special) in different buckets.