Thank you very much to all who read Part 1 (why elite pundits were motivated to call this race so wrong from the get go), and Part 2 (the garbage polls, and garbage poll aggregators).
Before we get to Part 3, which concerns a group of people called the Fundamentalists, I wanted to talk about some ominous developments that have transpired since I wrote Part 2.
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Since I last wrote, election folks confronted the elite aggregators (e.g., RCP, 538, et al.) hat right wing pollsters deliberately flooded the zone with garbage polls with the intent to skew the averages. More importantly, this had been plainly apparent for months. Steve Bannon all but said this was the strategy a year prior!
Why Washington? Because it will silently pull Nate Silver’s model to the right without openly calling a race wrong. If Democrats are only winning Washington by 4.7, something that could happen in a red wave, then it will (falsely) put a whole bunch of House seats elsewhere in play, that Democrats must then dedicate resources to defend. That’s just what Democrats did, and it cost them the house. Here’s how that worked:
Nate Silver had Republicans with a 98% chance of winning that seat. But again, nonpartisan polls were not wrong. Right wing pollsters were wrong. And aggregators were wrong for including them in their averages despite warnings from very smart people.
So how have the elite aggregators responded to the charge that, despite warnings, they included faulty polls? By attacking leftists.
This is an astonishingly bad (and neo-reactionary) take. Nate cannot brook criticism from other (non-millionaire) election modelers. I know Nate was a member of this community. But going forward, this community really has to be careful about who they trust. Dave Wasserman of the supposedly non-partisan Cook Political report responded to criticism with the ad hominem of (leftist) ‘partisan’, the worst insult that can be leveled in elite punditry.
Dave Wasserman is attacking Christopher Bouzy.
Thank you for allowing me this update on the aggregators. I wish a single aggregator had said that they were misled by republican pollsters, and would strive to include only nonpartisan polls from reputable pollsters next time, but instead, they have spent their time attacking their progressive critics.
