This is Nate Silver. Now funded by Peter Thiel, no longer associated with FiveThirtyEight. I would grain of salt anything he writes now.
I used to love the FiveThirtyEight politics coverage. I think it worked best when Nate had people like Claire to call him on his shit. Then she got laid off by abc.
That was a super depressing day
Nate Silver is kind of full of shit, but the new data isn’t. It was 1.1% difference between Harris and Trump, and 1.3% for independent votes total.
There were lots of spoiler campaigns, lots of lies, and lots of absolutely insane court cases that allowed a simple 1.1% difference. That’s about it.
Fuck all his idiotic pontificating. If he wants to dig down at the state level, then go for it.
A lot of things could have cost Harris the election. If you have 4 people of varying strengths try to lift (with varying effort) a couch and fail to move it, do you blame the strongest person? The person that contributed the least lift? The person whose effort is much smaller that what they could lift? All four equally? The person who picked the people to move the couch?
Depending on how you parse the data, you could come to opposite conclusions (Harris lost because she wasn’t pro-Israel enough! Harris lost because she was to much pro-genocide!)
What people who want to win next time need to do is look at their part of the failure (how do we get more youth to vote; how do we bring out the base; how do we secure the center; how do we strike back against lies; how do we stop the flow of foreign money…) and fix it for next time so that there are many ways the liberal candidate can win. THEN we can debate about WHICH candidate that should be.
Yep, people have no idea that most data filled reports aren’t really truths, but interpretations to fit the story the originator wants to tell
Data tells you what happened. Not why
As Democrats know all too well, national trends don’t decide elections. For reasons that increasingly strain credulity, that simply is not how US elections work. Any analysis that doesn’t spend the bulk of its time on what happened in Pennsylvania and Michigan specifically is probably not worth reading. People in these states know that their votes have massive impact compared to states like California and Wyoming and so they behave differently.
Except this time Trump actually won the popular vote too.
Which is even more discouraging.No he didn’t. He won a plurality of votes, not the majority. “He won the popular vote” and “he has the people’s mandate” are popular right-wing talking points.
I can see from the graph in the thumbnail that it very obviously did.
