* It’s really very simple! Best forecasting is able to remove most personal biases. Nate knows it very well. Alas, it is very hard to do in practice. There is no defending him on this: he totally blew it. Whether Trump will ultimately be nominated or not, last fall forecast of Trump’s nomination probability at about 2% was very wrong. The true probability, even back in the fall, was always in double digits. For anyone not personally invested in massive media Trumpophobia, that was obvious then, and very certain now.
The particularly damning thing for Nate is that he had such a hard time facing reality and admitting his mistake. Shit happens, everyone makes mistakes but being in active denial for so long is a bad sign for someone who makes a living as a forecaster.
* The prediction models are probably fine, the problem is Nate Silver personally, and the rest of his sycophants at 538.
He desperately loathes Trump and has been talking himself into ever more elaborate rationalizations of why Trump can’t win. He’ll do this for the general election, as well.
Seriously, Trump has been leading since he announced his candidacy, for 7 months now. Any reasonable prediction model would assume his victory a mere formality.
And if it were a pro-immigration candidate, Silver would have already coronated him.
* Every supposed expert was wrong about Trump. Right now the betting odds are not what i would suspect. At 5 Dimes as of January 25th the odds are Trump -125 Rubio +205 and Cruz a distant third at +500. It changes radically week to week. Why the betting books think Rubio is far more likely to win than Cruz is beyond me, but they do. The bookmakers in Vegas are no dummies, I trust their odds far more than I do any “expert.” I think Trump surprised himself.
* It would be tremendously interesting to force Nate Silver to publicly commit to Tetlockian bets on all of his pronouncements, and not just some of them.
I recall that Nate Silver publicly bet hard money on Obama winning in 2012, against Joe Scarborough. But Nate just happened to not repeat that honest, accountable practice with Trump. He happened to make predictions about Trump which didn’t happen to come true. But this time, he didn’t put money on the table. He even sought to crowd source a bet from his readers, so that he wouldn’t have to bet anything himself!
Maybe this isn’t pure coincidence. I’ll just insinuate that there’s a reason why he didn’t bet his own money against Trump this time: like any other pundit, he was using his soapbox dishonestly, to craft a narrative, and cause events to happen. Not to give his Spocky, honest evaluation of the truth.
Next time: be honest, and put money on the table, Nate.
* This Presidential election is the USA’s last chance to resist massive illegal immigration. If Trump turns out to be the only candidate who might resist it, then we should ignore all his faults.
I was supporting Walker, but when Trump posted his position paper about immigration — saying they he opposed even birth-right citizenship! — then I switched from Walker to Trump immediately.
I was appalled by Trump’s rambling rhetoric, his incoherent political philosophy and his gratuitous insults, but I had become a one-issue voter.
Since then, however, Cruz has adopted enough of a hard line on immigration that I have switched from Trump to Cruz.
However, I have come to understand that — whereas Trump intends to build a barrier along the entire USA-Mexico border — Cruz intends to complete merely the 700 miles that Congress has funded. Since 620 miles of the 700 funded miles have been constructed, only 80 funded miles remain. Some interviewer should challenge Cruz publicly about this point. Cruz has created a false impression that he will extend the barrier along the entire border.
Although Trump is much better than Cruz about building a border barrier, Cruz is good enough on immigration for me — considering Trump’s many faults.
Trump is much better than Cruz also about promising to bargain more effectively about international-trade agreements. Trump’s promises might cause all the Rust Belt states to switch from Democrat to Republican in the Presidential election. However, I believe that free trade is more advantageous to the US economy in the long run. If such promises help Trump to win the Presidential election, though, then I will be happy to reconsider my position on that issue as I watch a President Trump bargain.
I think that a huge portion of the electorate has — like me — become single-issue voters on immigration, and that is the reason why this election is so unusual and difficult to predict.
* Silver is at best a second rater promoted as some guru. I was less than impressed by his Excel spreadsheet models — using Excel for things it is not good at — handling lots of complex data — is the mark of a second rater. Had the man used a MySQL database and R, well I would have at least respected his technical ability.
When people use Excel for things beyond simple business analysis, for database replacements or complex statistical modeling for large data sets — its a mark they are not smart and adaptable enough to teach themselves MySQL and R. Its not that hard to learn them, either. O’Reilly has a plethora of how-to books.
Basically Silver with no statistical evidence felt party bosses could squash Trump. Often Party bosses do squash insurgents, but often they don’t: Reagan, Ike, Nixon, and Goldwater all are evidence of failures to do so on the Republican side, and Carter, Obama, and Clinton arguably started as insurgents not blessed by Party bosses there.
Silver wanted Trump to be a non-factor, to keep his comfortable universe of donor class domination and the Managerial Elite in charge of everything. Not grasping that globally in First World Countries, mass Third World immigration meant bringing the Third World in massive quantities including violence, poverty, and awful cultural mores straight into conflict with ordinary First World peoples; like rubbing their noses in dog poop every day. Guaranteed to raise a revolt.
Silver particularly objects to Trumps idea of banning Muslim immigration until we can figure out how to avoid more Tafshin Maliks, Syed Farooks, and Tsarnaev family bombers. He seems to believe as an article of faith that everyone in the world has a right to come to the US and receive preferential treatment to those descended from the people who fought for it over generations.
And that was essentially his analysis.
Silver is evidence sufficient in itself to prove the elites are a bunch of incompetent people who rely on connections and cronyism not ability, courage, and shared sacrifice to lead the West. No wonder they are witnessing a revolt by their people.
* The website Hillary Is 44 has a very good suggestion for Trump.
Trump should use Megyn Kelly is an excuse to refuse to participate in the next Republican debate.
Instead, Trump should debate Sanders on another television channel at the same time as the Republican debate.
Such a competing debate between Trump and Sanders would attract an enormous number of viewers — dwarfing the Republican debate.
* The big story of the week is the National Review Pharisees condemnation of Donald Trump as a heretic. American nationalism lacks the institutions to challenge the rot in the Republican and Democratic parties.
* Anybody who is familiar with the stock market knows full well that the record books are full of guys who are one-hit wonders. They have a marvelous year, and everyone, including themselves, think they are the next coming of Warren Buffett. There aren’t a whole of people like Stanley Druckenmiller who had a winning record with marvelous returns for a 30-year period. Silver got lucky in 2012 and started believing his own press clippings. He is no Stanley Druckenmiller. (I have mentioned several times on this site the remarkable record of Gerald Strine, a sports writer for the Washington Post who covered horse racing. Strine had a weekly column in the Washington Post back in the 70′s in which he picked a handful of winning bets in NFL games against the spread and wound up with a winning record for 10 straight years, thereby winning an undisclosed bet of $1 million from some unidentified person who said he couldn’t do it. Now, if he had done that for just one season, it would have been a nice accomplishment, but to do it for 10 straight years is a memorable achievement.) I was always a bit skeptical about Silver’s pronouncements in 2012 since he was largely aggregating poll results. He wasn’t doing independent polling of his own.
Secondly, there is the indisputable matter than the MSM have clearly attempted to demonize Trump on every occasion and that has to be affecting the poll results, by understating Trump’s actual numbers. Byron York alluded to this unintentionally in his piece yesterday in the Washington Examiner (carried by RCP) describing his visit to New Hampshire and not finding any Republicans who are Trump supporters or “know of any Republicans who are Trump supporters.” Trump has been made so toxic by the MSM people are embarrassed to admit they are voting for Trump:
“An exception: I talked to two party officials, one county and one regional, who said they knew a lot of Trump supporters. “They’re not Republicans,” one told me, explaining at length that the Trump fans she knows are inexplicably devoted to him — unfazed by Trump’s lack of policy specifics or any of his controversial statements. The two officials described having conversations and asking which candidate a voter supports, whereupon the voter quickly glanced left and right, to see if it was OK to talk, and then said, “Trump.” That happens a lot, they told me.”
The dishonest MSM attempted to do the same thing with Romney in 2012 and succeeded. Obviously, Romney does not have the outrageous personality of Donald Trump, and he allowed himself to get steamrolled by the Obama forces and the MSM. (Witness the totally outrageous performance by Candy Crowley at the second Obama-Romney debate where she blatantly injected herself into the debate and pulled Obama’s chestnuts out of the fire on the Benghazi matter.)
Finally, as a number of commenters have touched on, Silver allowed his own biases to affect his pronouncements this campaign season (which have been consistently dreadful). He clearly doesn’t like Trump’s message on immigration and possibly foreign policy. This favorite of the MSM, who was lionized by the MSM in 2012, apparently swallowed the BS of the MSM that was lauding him as a genius because it accorded with his views. By consistently downplaying Trump’s chances, Silver obviously was hoping to affect the outcome, just like the MSM.
* Scott Adams called it way back in August: “Trump brought a flame thrower to a stick fight. Since the beginning of time, every winner of every stick fight was a guy with a stick. So you’d expect that trend to continue. Until someone shows up to the fight with a flame thrower. I’m betting on the guy with the flame thrower.”
* Walker has a reputation as a warrior for the conservative cause, but to me it always seemed pretty clear that the only conservative causes he was willing to go to war on were those – like fighting public sector unions – that the oligarchs were willing to back him on. So far as I’ve seen, he never has gone to battle over illegal immigration, affirmative action, or any other “cultural” issues, and he never planned to.
* The caucus format encourages the most intense and persistent supporters. This ends up being an Achilles heel for insurgent candidates. In 2012, Ron Paul had intense supporters and finished 3rd in Iowa, but his campaigns hope’s for victory were dependent upon getting Democrats to cross over and vote in the R caucus for him.
Since a portion of Trump’s support is from crossover Ds, they are unlikely to vote in a caucus format. They will be more likely to show up in NH, a primary state.
I doubt that Cruz will win Iowa, because of the presence of three socon candidates, Huckabee, Santorum and Carson. But also note that Iowa is a late breaking state, Santorum rose rapidly in the last week.
The narrative will be interesting. A Trump victory ends the hopes of Ted Cruz. A narrow Cruz victory may boost Cruz in NH and torpedo Rubio. Trump would win NH but by a smaller margin. Trump wins SC in any case, unless there is a massive Cruz victory in Iowa. But it would be dismissed as “racists”.
IMO, Trump sweeps the first four contests, and everyone drops out. The D contests become a crazy train of crossover voters, and Sanders is robbed by the superdelegates.
* I know that most Americans here will support Trump on domestic issues of immigration. But for me as a non America there is an even bigger issue that makes Trump appealing compared to everyone else – his foreign policy views. The rest (both Republican and Democrat) are outright warmongers, they openly propose having no fly zones against Russians in Syria, arms races in the South China sea, escalating things in Ukraine, having army bases in every corner of the world, spying on everyone person on the planet etc. Trump is not perfect, but at least he would be more practical regarding dealing with the world, he seems to be more of a “don’t invite the world, don’t invade the world” type.
* As an election pollster, I predict that the polling industry is headed for a crack-up, and that this is the year. The whole industry has been crossing its fingers for 10 years that plummeting response rates, the switch to cell phones, and the further switch to Internet, which destroyed the validity of all its theoretical models, would not introduce systematic biases. The way that polls are all over the map this year is very telling.
Nate Silver did a great job in previous years, but his screwup over Trump is a monumental case of hubris. Even if Trump doesn’t win, he can’t justify his probability estimates. The only possible defense is that until people start actually voting, predictive models can’t be recalibrated to deal with changing factors and trends, but that only excuses erroneous predictions, it does not excuse overconfidence in one’s predictions.
Silver’s insistence on providing probability estimates and not just predicted vote margins was a brilliant advance (I had wanted to do that 10 years ago after completing my own historical meta-analysis of American election polls, but there was no market for it; he went ahead anyway and did it so well that he forced everyone else to accept the validity of his methods). However, he fell into traps he should have seen coming a long way off: he lost his objectivity.
It’s a shame, but the work of modern thinkers like Kahneman, Taleb, Tetlock, Yudkowsky, Chabris, and others on improving human rationality by overcoming cognitive biases and extending Bayesian techniques is a scientific revolution that will survive tragedies like Silver’s.
* Trump has won over a lot over people because of his sane, if not very constructive, foreign policy. But his foreign policy didn’t come from lots of study and thinking. Trump has an unbelievable ability to size up a situation hyper-quickly, make a decision, and hold an almost metaphysical confidence in his correctness. When Trump is up against politicians, you get a glimpse into how much more of a high-level game business is compared to politics. While they say politics ain’t beanbag, you are left thinking that business at Trump’s level is like MMA without taps outs and timed rounds.
* Okay, but what if Trump is that self-confident when he’s wrong?
The one real estate project of Trump’s that I know much about is his oceanside golf course in SoCal. I had lunch with the guy who went broke building it and sold it to Trump, and I wrote a long article about the intersection of environmental regulations and the golf course. I don’t know anything about how it has worked out financially for Trump, but I suspect that it hasn’t been the gold mine he expected for a variety of reasons. The golf downturn went on and on, but also the course didn’t turn out to be very good for tournaments. Trump hosted an LPGA event there once, but it turned out to be a bust because the course is bad for spectators because the EPA made them keep sagebrush between each fairway for the endangered California gnatcatcher. Also, there’s not much room for all the corporate tents that accompany a US Open. And now LA Country Club is inviting back the Open, so it’s unlikely that Trump Los Angeles will ever get the Open. My guess is that if Trump took off his Always Be Closing hat for once, he’d admit that if he knew then what he knows now, he wouldn’t have bought this golf course.
This is not to say that Trump is bad at owning golf courses — he seems to be getting steadily better at it over the last ten years, but that he has a learning curve.
* “The surest way to get rich is to enable white people to feel more intelligent than other white people without making any real effort.”
Once your know this you see it everywhere. Richard Dawkins (before he fell out of grace for being consistent), Daily Show, Neil Degrasse Tyson, TED. TED especially.
Silver fills this niche a little too perfectly. He gives moderately intelligent young white people with a chip on their shoulder about Christianity, Fox News, etc a way to feel superior to unfashionable white people because Science (not to mention History) Is On Their Side. He writes simple enough for anybody to get the gist, and anyway it’s enough to read the headline.
Anybody wiling to think about it for a second could have come up with questions like how “people will just tire of Trump in to months” could ever be based on statistics of any kind, but it’s best not to question Science.
* It’s a little mystifying. Why is Silver — a fairly typical SWPL Democrat — so hostile to Trump in particular? Trump is very close to Hillary in all but a very few issues and probably the most Democrat-friendly Republican candidate with serious chances at nomination since Nixon. On foreign policy Trump is the most Democratic candidate in the field, even recognizing the folly of Iraq and the lunacy of destabilizing Libya and Syria far before Clinton.
And yet Silver is clearly unhinged writing constantly about how Trump is a ‘disaster’ for the Republican Party, for downballot candidates, and for the country.
I understand hating Dubya Bush. I’m a little confused about Obama-hate but I can see why some Republicans don’t like him. But candidates like Trump and competent centrist presidents like Bush pere and Clinton should appeal to every part of the spectrum reasonably well. Reagan went on an anti-Clinton speaking tour in 1993 and accused Clinton of ‘grand larceny’ stealing his ideas; that’s a good thing when the other side apes your ideas. Nevertheless some large group is fanatically angry about something Trump represents.
* Nate can evaluate polling data to predict election outcomes as well as anyone can predict election outcomes using polling data, but he doesn’t seem to have any insight into the underlying social processes that generate the data. Since the political atmosphere of the US in 2016 is fairly unique, without easy historical analogies, his poll-based predictions offer negative knowledge. His models don’t apply. You can’t really blame him.
* In his writings Silver clear that he would use endorsements as an indicator of future success as endorsements were from knowledgeable people and the establishment controls the rules by which delegates are awarded which could make a big difference if there was a dispute. He got that idea from a book he mentions in his article about how elections are won.
Winning is 50% but Trump is stuck at 40%. In France Le Pen had 40% while the 2 establishment candidates had 30% each. The establishment figured out a way to combine the 2 30%s, which is the advantage that the establishment has. I have noticed that after the close call France seems to be doing something about the giant migrant camp in Calais.
Silver also claims that while the establishment wants Hillary, Sanders is minimally acceptable.
