"Big wins in West Virginia and Nebraska. Get ready for November - Crooked Hillary, who is looking very bad against Crazy Bernie, will lose!...Meanwhile: "Nate Silver rips Trump-Clinton polls in 8-part Twitter rant." (In other words, Silver got so exercised, he slammed helplessly into the 140-character limit 7 times.)
“I don't want to hit Crazy Bernie Sanders too hard yet because I love watching what he is doing to Crooked Hillary,” Trump wrote. “His time will come!"
May 11, 2016
Bernie Sanders finally gets a Trump nickname.
"Crazy Bernie."
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I like Nate Silver but I'm starting to see he's truly a Trump hater. The polls he's ranting against matter greatly because they destroy the narrative NeverTrumpers have been reciting ... that Trump can't win the general. Fact is, he can win the general and may with ease.
I still am of the opinion that Trump can win the general much more easily against Hillary! than Bernie.
"Crazy" might get traction against Biden - everybody's "crazy Uncle Joe" - but I'm not too sure it will play with Bernie. Those millenials will defend their "revered grandfather" and the "younger older" boomers will protect him like they would their aging parents - who may very well be afflicted with what at first appears to be "crazy" but as many these days know is often something much more insidious and awful (dementia/Alzheimer's). It won't go over well if it looks like Trump is making fun/making light of what is a horrible, ghastly, unbelievably sad situation. (I speak from experience.)
As I see it as of today Silver appears to be right that either Trump will win massively or lose massively. Right now it looks like Clinton is slowly sinking and Trump slowly rising. It's still too early to tell but if things continue as they are Trump just might pull it off.
@M Jordan - Silver has been fighting this battle against early polls for years. Maybe his patience is frayed. Maybe he's a Trump hater. But his frustration is targeted not toward Trump supporters, but toward the gormless poll-repeaters in the media.
It's also worth noting that only one of his tweets (the first) is really rant-astic. The rest are just his basic list of what the polls tell us now (not much), how to test their validity (likely voters) and what needs to happen before the numbers get serious.
I think you're right that the polls are important as politics. It's no wonder that Trump supporters are blowing them like vuvuzelas. But they're garbage as numbers.
Crazy Bernie is not such a bad nickname. If you want someone to blow up the system -- the basic cry of the Trump supporter -- Crazy is a good thing.
I call him "Crazy Uncle Bernie".
His prices are insaaaaaaane!
Agree with Karen - he should've saved "Crazy" for Biden when he gets in the race once it's clear that Hillary can't win.
Dopey is still available.
@Henry
Yeah, good point about Silver's target being poll-reciters. I hate them myself. I really appreciated Silver when he left the NY Tines and got into a pissing war with Paul Krugman.
Blogger Henry said...
His prices are insaaaaaaane ...
Ah, yes, that old Dan Akroyd sketch. Next Trump'll be like, "If I just had a shovel or something to stun him with."
I think one of the seminal moments of this election cycle was when Trump stood on stage in West Virginia with a miner's hat on and did a shovelling gesture as the crowd -- including the real miners who stood behind him on stage -- roared. Trump the billionaire able to create a bond of identity that Hillary could never, ever, ever do. Nor Cruz, for that matter. Further, it summed up the damage Obama has done in his quixotic quest to stop the made-up boogieman of global warming, a quest that cost these miners a career and will cost Hillary a whole bunch of Democratic votes, far more than just these West Virginian democrats.
To put it in perspective, think Michael Dukakis sticking his helmeted head out of that tank.
Biden's not really crazy, though. Maybe he'll get Dumb Joe.
"Crazy Bernie! His policies are insane! Yes indeed, that will work.
As for Biden, "Slow Joe" works fine. Them there is "Plugs the plagiarist" as well.
The Dan Aykroyd Crazy Ernie sketch is a direct mock of New York City retailer Crazy Eddie.
Aykroyd really can't improve on the original.
In early April, when a rep from Trump's campaign said their plan was for Trump to be "the presumptive nominee" by the middle of May, Silver called it "delusional" and said "the math doesn't work."
Now here we are.
Silver's good at what he does, but I think he's got a blind spot regarding Trump.
The election is still close to six months away. The only conclusion I can take from the post is that Twitter is fucking worthless for communicating!
Blogger Karen of Texas said
"Crazy" might get traction against Biden - everybody's "crazy Uncle Joe" - but I'm not too sure it will play with Bernie.
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I think concerns/sensitivities over the use of "crazy" are pretty unwarrantedand unlikely given the decent vigor displayed by Berno. I think people will "get" that it's about his view, not age..especially (maybe ironically) coming from Trump.
The only candidate who seems to suffer the vagaries of aging is Hil.
I thought Rush was already calling him Crazy Bernie.
Silver called it "delusional" and said "the math doesn't work."
I don't think he expected Cruz and Kasich to drop out.
Correct, PB&J
Those are called Homeric epithets. I'd have gone with strong-ankled Hillary.
T: "How bout that Crazy Bernie? Let's call him Berno. That's what his friends used call his version of Sterno..get this..lighting toilet paper soaked in lighter fluid! How about that for an energy policy? But Hillary's no better. She hates coal. We need coal..so does West Virginia. See how she got schlonged there?
https://berniesanders.com/why-the-poor-pay-more-for-toilet-paper-and-just-about-everything-else/
I love Trump, but his name-calling is a huge reason why his negatives are the biggest and why he's trailing HITlery by 13 points in the latest CNN poll.
Trump has to be a bit more mature if he wants to attract the humorless "swing voter" crowd. You know the type - they instruct their kids to never EVER call anyone a name because that would hurt their feelings.
Alliterative sobriquets. Not bad. Cruel Hillary is coming next.
Silver's not wrong--the polls will be swinging quite a bit for a while, with outliers and bad polls and good polls and everyone disagreeing over which are which. Trends usually start to solidify after the conventions when people gravitate towards their parties and the focus becomes one on one.
Silver did get the GOP primary wrong, but that wasn't because his data was wrong but because he made an assumption that voters would solidify behind a non-Trump candidate as the others dropped out. He probably made that assumption because he couldn't imagine them not doing so rather than any data based reason.
Barking mad Hillary
Silver is wrong about baseball and was wrong about Trump. The unknown unknowns confound him
Ohh no..tradguy. Recently redeemed Rushbo playing and dissecting Trump's glowing statements about the Clintons 4 yrs ago on Greta (I like her, he's a great guy). How dare he? I bet you've got a nasty nickname for Rush now.
Silver is wrong about baseball? The only really valid critique I've read about PECOTA was that it was really hard to maintain once Silver moved on.
"I don't think he expected Cruz and Kasich to drop out."
This is hilarious- in other words, Silver didn't expect to be wrong.
I think Silver has probably built a reputation on political forecasting based on being very right in two instances 2008 and 2012- instances that increasingly look like they were simple accidents. His forecasting outside those two elections are a lot less impressive, and his work this year has been horrid.
However, it really isn't his fault this year for the most part- polling in politics is likely getting harder to do- it is hard to get representative samples, it is hard to get the truth out of people, and it might well be harder to even determine who is actually going to vote (in other words, nearly half the population eligible doesn't vote, but that might be changing due to two of the candidates). When you add to that Silver's pretty obvious political bias, getting Trump very wrong makes a lot of sense. I have actually been using Silver's predictions on Trump as a contrary indicator.
Yancey,
"I think Silver has probably built a reputation on political forecasting based on being very right in two instances 2008 and 2012- instances that increasingly look like they were simple accidents. His forecasting outside those two elections are a lot less impressive, and his work this year has been horrid."
Could you please share how you reached the conclusion that FiveThirtyEight's elections forecasting has been "horrid"?? Just a few weeks back, one of Nate Silver's guys (I believe it was Harry Enten) bragged that of all the primaries and caucuses they had reviewed, only 1 on the Republican side and 3 on the Democratic side had been outside their Polls-Plus Model's margin of error. Assuming 4 misses in ~60-ish swings is not your definition of "horrid," it would be interesting to compare your assessment against theirs, and see how they missed their own performance self-assessment.
This is hilarious- in other words, Silver didn't expect to be wrong.
Yeah. Looks really dump in hindsight. Givens aren't.
Crooked Hillary. Crazy Bernie. Goofy Elizabeth. He seems to definitely have all of their numbers.
And Crazy Bernie is probably better than Wicked Uncle Bernie, especially given how much he wants to "fiddle about" with the economy, regulations, taxes, etc. (For those too young to remember, that's a "Tommy" reference. And yes, I know it was Uncle Ernie, but close enough.)
I would have called him "Bolshevik Bernie" or "Bolshie Bernie - which sounds awfully like "Bullshit Bernie". All work, really and I like alliteration. Of course, the Bolshie reference is probably too complicated for the historically illiterate drones who make up the core of Bernie's support (and of Trump's too).
The ignorant Berntards are much better credentialed than the Trumpkins, but they're all really ignorant idiots.
Yes, Rush Limbaugh has been calling Sanders "Crazy Bernie" for a long time.
Wild eyed, crazy Bernie.
Biden should be Gropin' Joe.
Why is it always about "hitting" with Trump? He's always talking about "hitting" other candidates. And hitting back, when they hit him. It is like listening to a 4th grader. Except that compared to Donald Trump, a fictional 4th grader like Bart Simpson is a sophisticate.
Some companies in the business of polling conduct some polls and Silver's reaction is, "For f--k's sake, America."?!?
Nate Silver may be a great analyst, but otherwise he's a halfwitted jackass.
On Biden, I the best name would be "Lifetime Joe." Like the others, it is true that Biden is a lifetime politician and it personifies that theme that the system is broke by lifetime politicians.
I think Bernie is more stupid than crazy, although at this point in modern history, still believing in socialism--despite all of the evidence of history, economics and logic-- has to be either crazy or stupid.
I' think he'd do better if his nick names were rhyiming, or alliterative, or had the same first initials as the names. his assigning of nicknames seems positively random.
He could do batty Bernie, or Bat shit Bernie instead.
Bobby, the very fact that that he gave Trump little chance to win the nomination sums up to horrid. Even just a couple of weeks ago, he was seemingly ignoring the late Indiana polls showing Trump would win the state, and only moved his prediction on the last day even though the polls had moved the week before. My impression of his performance in this instance is a bit more cynical- I think he was trying to shape the outcome rather than predicting it, and failed spectacularly. I will go further- I think he got 2008 and 2012 "right" because that is what he wanted to see happen all along. He clearly performs much worse when Republican candidates beat Democrats (see 2010 and 2014), and when hated Republican candidates beat less-hated Republican candidates (Trump)- and it isn't like the polls didn't predict those outcomes, too- it is just that the outcomes aren't what Silver wanted to see. Trying to cover yourself by claiming late, unseen surges really doesn't wash with me.
I consider this a problem a lot of poll-takers have, too- they want an outcome to set a narrative. Silver, though he doesn't take the polls, suffers similarly, and it shows up in the weighting factors. He gets lucky when Democrats have a good year and looks like a statistical genius, but then looks like just another pollster when Republicans do well.
It may be that Trump used the work "Crazy" as he understands that our public schools leave most without understanding the term "Delusional".
rhhardin, 'Strong-ankled Hillary', ha; now I'm going to be compelled to spend an hour reading in the Iliad just to refresh my memory of the epithets. δυσαης, δυσαεος, stormy, ill-blowing, ill-smelling ("of seals")... not sure which candidate gets that one.
Yancey,
Actually, if you look at Nate Silver's 2010 predictions, I don't think his predictions were quite as you seem to remember them:
In the Senate races, Silver's model had the Democrats coming out with 51.6 seats and the Republicans with 48.3 seats; actual numbers turned out to be 53 Senators caucusing with the Democrats, and 47 with the Republicans. Nate missed it slightly in favor of the Republicans.
In the House, Silver's model had the Republicans winning 232.2 seats and the Democrats winning 202.8 seats. Actual results turned out to be Republicans winning 242 seats and Democrats finishing with 193. Nate missed in favor of the Democrats (and, interestingly enough, by almost the exact same percentage- albeit in the other direction- that he missed in the Senate).
In the gubernatorial races, Silver's model had the Republicans holding 29.9 governorships versus 19.3 governorships for the Democrats and 0.8 for the independents. Actual results turned out to be 29 for the Republicans, 20 for the Democrats and 1 independent (Lincoln Chafee), so he missed slightly in favor of the Republicans.
Near as I know, those were the only 2010 races that he called- like, he didn't get into state legislatures or other statewide offices, so I don't know what other 2010 races to which you might be referring.
Now in reality, all of these were well within the forecast's established margin of error, so statistically insignificant. But you should go back and look up his 2014 forecast, as well. I don't think it's going to be quite how you remember it.
Needs to call Bernie, Crazy Uncle. Or just Nutjob Bernie.
"2%" Silver still has some credibility left. Give him a chance.
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