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Showing Original Post only (View all)Nate Silver faces backlash for pro-Trump model skewing [View all]
Last edited Sat Sep 7, 2024, 10:33 AM - Edit history (1)
Source: Salon
Published September 6, 2024 7:43PM (EDT)
Nate Silver, the celebrity statistician who gained notoriety for his FiveThirtyEight election models, is facing backlash over alleged skewing in his new model. Silver left the ABC-owned company and launched his own Substack, the Silver Bulletin, last year. Since then, hes become increasingly critical of the FiveThirtyEight projection and its behind-the-scenes assumptions and adjustments.
Theres a fine line between an objective statistical model and just some dudes opinion, Silver wrote in mid-July, a month after launching his own competing election model. But the 538 model falls somewhere on the wrong side of this line, in my view.
Some social media users have denounced his complaints as not based in math, especially as he makes similar adjustments to his data. Silver has adopted the FiveThirtyEight system of weighting polls differently, ostensibly based on reliability. He's facing criticism for allegedly favoring junk polls over respected pollsters.
Patriot Polling is literally run by two right wing high school students that is ranked 240th on FiveThirtyEight, former pollster Adam Carlson noted on X, asking why that poll was weighted more highly than a YouGov poll, which they called an internationally respected pollster that is ranked 4th on FiveThirtyEight. Some users believe that Silvers methods of weighting polls are dubious, especially as his swing state calculated polling averages move in the opposite direction as recently released swing state polls.
Read more: https://www.salon.com/2024/09/06/nate-silver-faces-backlash-for-pro-model-skewing/
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So over the past couple of days, Nate Silver has been tweeting multiple times a day insisting that things are looking worse and worse for the Harris campaign.
One state he claims has moved 1.2 pts to Trump since the convention is WI. Let's take a look at the recent polls there.
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4:56 PM · Sep 6, 2024