"I’m not sure that winning the shutdown is a thing that matters. And I’m not sure that polling tells us very much about it."

Says the poll analyst Nate Silver — in "'Democrats Fumbled This a Bit’: 3 Writers Assess Where We Are With the Shutdown" (NYT) — making me assume the Democrats are losing ground in the polls.

Let's see:

"What is Demthink? It’s what you’d end up with if you trained a large language model solely on the inner monologue of people who..."

"... either work in Democratic politics or watch MSNBC for eight hours a day.... The problem with Demthink is not merely that it tends toward cynical triangulation. No, it’s that it tends toward triangulation that isn’t even politically effective because it’s so finely tuned for the in-group that it comes across as uncannily out-of-tune to everyone else."

Writes Nate Silver, purporting to read the collective mind of Democrats, in "Is America ready for a gay president? Kamala Harris and a subscriber have questions about Mayor Pete, and I have annoyingly nuanced answers."

I've already blogged about what Harris said in her book about not picking Pete for VP — here, 10 days ago — and I don't want to redo that. I'm blogging Silver's piece because of the idea of "Demthink" and I liked these examples of how wrong it can go:

"Musk’s onetime biographer Seth Abramson wrote on X that he would 'peg his IQ as between 100 and 110'..."

"... and claimed that there was 'zero evidence in his biography for anything higher.' The economics commentator Noah Smith estimated Musk’s IQ at more than 130, a number gleaned from his reported SAT score. A circulating screenshot shows Fox News has pegged the number at 155, citing Sociosite, a junk website. The pollster Nate Silver guessed that Musk is 'probably even a "genius,"' and theorized that he may not always appear that way because... 'high IQs serve as a force multiplier for both positive and negative traits.'... To some of our most powerful people, IQ has come to stand in as the totalizing measure of a person — and a justification for the power that they claim. Trump has spent much of his second term sorting humans into 'low IQ individuals' (Kamala Harris, Representative Al Green) and 'high IQ individuals' (cryptocurrency boosters, Musk, Musk’s 4-year-old son)... Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is seeking 'super high-IQ' applicants.... This whole elite intelligence-measuring contest sets the stage for the 'high IQ' tech leader to seize ownership over the concept of intelligence itself — and to ultimately bring all people under its control. As Musk recently posted on X, the platform that he owns: 'It increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence.'"

Writes Amanda Hess, in "What Is Elon Musk’s IQ? The questionable measure of intelligence has now been uncoupled from any test and loosed into the discourse to justify Silicon Valley’s power" (NYT).

I hate to think I'm inclined to ask Grok: What did Elon Musk mean by "It increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence"? And: What does it say about my IQ that I had to ask?

I didn't know the term "bootloader." Reminds me of "bootlicker." And I'm distracted by the (irrelevant) image of a boot... but "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

"From the way I’ve set this up, you might assume there are two possibilities: either we are indeed at the start of a new conservative era — the Conservative Golden Age — or

"... we’re still within the New Liberal Era, and Trump’s win in 2024 won’t be enough to terminate it once we look back a few decades from now. It’s still an open question. If two consecutive Eisenhower terms weren’t enough to interrupt the Long Liberal Era, and likewise for Clinton and the Long Conservative Era, then in principle, liberalism could survive two non-consecutive terms for Trump.I actually think there are four possibilities.... Scenario 1 — Conservative Golden Age.... The easiest route to Scenario 2 — The New Liberal Era is Still Alive, Baby! — would be if Trump mismanages some sort of crisis.... Scenario 3 — Stalemate.... Finally, Scenario 4 — Off the Charts — means that the liberal/conservative axis, as I’ve depicted it in the chart, will cease to represent American politics well. Maybe it’s centrist oligarchs and technocrats against a horseshoe theory coalition of the populist left and right.... Then, there are some darker scenarios...."

I'm reading Nate Silver's "Are we entering a Conservative Golden Age? Or will the vibe soon shift back to the left?"

"But is Zuckerberg’s claim that 'fact-checkers have just been too politically biased' correct?"

Asks Nate Silver, at Silver Bulletin:

In my view, it’s at least pointing in the right direction, in line with my Indigo Blob theory about how the lines between nonpartisan institutions and partisan actors have become blurred. In the B.T. days — Before Trump — journalists who were appointed (or who appointed themselves) as fact-checkers tended to be experienced generalists with a scrupulous reputation for nonpartisanship — a sharp contrast to edgier and less experienced journalists in the Trump era who would later claim to own the disinformation beat. Perhaps because demand for fact-checking was coming overwhelmingly from the left... the journalists who selected into the subfield tended to be especially left of center.... 

"Mr. Trump beat his polling numbers by about 2.5 points nationally... and 2.1 points in the average swing state."

"Our final forecast had it so close to 50-50 that the outcome was literally more random than a coin flip. (Empirically, heads win 50.5 percent of the time.) But a Trump sweep of the swing states was our single most likely outcome, because polling errors tend to be correlated. It’s not great that the polls missed low on Mr. Trump for the third and final time, even in a year when survey companies adopted all sorts of novel strategies to avoid this exact outcome."

Writes Nate Silver, in "Don’t Blame Polling" (NYT).

I'm blaming polling. What's Silver's reason not to blame polling? First, Republicans are (supposedly) more suspicious and less likely to respond to polls. Pollsters using "weighting" to try to compensate. There's also "herding," which is massaging the numbers to make them more like other pollsters' numbers, but herding isn't a basis for not blaming polling, and Silver is certain that herding occurred in 2024. So what justifies that headline? I see this:

Should we trust polls less? I’ll offer a brave and qualified no, but only because the shift in public sentiment about polls — from viewing them as oracular to seeing them as fake news — has probably overcorrected relative to reality....

Blaming and not trusting are 2 different things! But that's an issue with the headline writer. Silver is talking about trust, and he's only saying don't trust polls any less that you already do. I guess it's like the way I feel about reading the mainstream news, which I do every day. I don't consider it a complete waste of time. I regard it as biased and manipulative, but the alternatives are even worse. (And this blog is not an alternative to MSM. It feeds off MSM.)

"So OK," Nathan Silver will "tell you. My gut says Donald Trump. And my guess is that it is true for many anxious Democrats."

Quoted in "Nate Silver: Here’s What My Gut Says About the Election. But Don’t Trust Anyone’s Gut, Even Mine" (NYT).

Silver intuits that the polls reflect a "nonresponse bias": "It’s not that Trump voters are lying to pollsters; it’s that in 2016 and 2020, pollsters weren’t reaching enough of them."

"Well, it happened. It was almost inevitably going to happen at some point, given how close the forecast has been to 50/50.... But for the fourth time... the streams have crossed..."

"... and the nominal favorite in the race has changed. Thanks in part to one of the first high-quality national polls in weeks to show him ahead — yes, it’s from Fox News, but Fox News polling has no history of GOP bias — Donald Trump now has a 50.2 percent chance of winning the Electoral College. That’s not much different from Trump’s 49.4 percent chances yesterday: the difference is that he wins the Electoral College an additional 1 time out of 125. But Trump is past the 50-yard line — and above Harris’s chances, which are 49.5 percent — for the first time since Sept. 19. (Harris remains a clear but not overwhelming favorite in the popular vote, but that’s not how American elections are decided.)"

Wrote Nate Silver yesterday (at Silver Bulletin).

"And I think the Biden people may have been in somewhat bad faith — maybe not consciously, but I’m not sure they weren’t trying to undermine her."

"Because the obvious thing to do would be to have this qualified — if not always that politically adept — much younger vice president take over for you when you’re about to be 82. But they gave her the border, they gave her voting rights, which is kind of the one major domestic policy area where they got very little done. So I don’t think they gave her a very good hand to play. But meanwhile she’s getting a lot of reps and giving speeches and building connections and played the game really well. I have a lot of respect for that."

Said Nate Silver, quoted in "Nate Silver on How Kamala Harris Changed the Odds" (NYT). This is the Ezra Klein podcast, so you might want to listen to it. I'm seeing a lot of interesting material.

Silver has a new book, "On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything" (commission earned).

"As of this afternoon’s model run, Harris’s odds had improved to 44.6 percent, as compared to 54.9 percent for Trump and a 0.5 percent chance of an Electoral College deadlock."

"It’s not exactly 50/50, but close enough that a poker player would call it a 'flip': Democrats have ace-king suited, and Republicans have pocket jacks.... Harris has a 54 percent chance of winning Michigan, a 50 percent chance of winning Wisconsin and 47 percent chance of winning Pennsylvania, states that would suffice to net her 270 electoral votes, one more than she needs to win (assuming she also holds lean-blue states like New Hampshire). She also has a 40 percent chance of winning Nevada, where her polling has been much better than Biden’s so far, and roughly a one-in-three chance in Georgia and North Carolina, which gives her some backup options that Biden lacked."

Writes Nate Silver, in "The presidential election is a toss-up/Kamala Harris is giving Democrats the race that Joe Biden couldn’t."

Silver's definition of "toss-up" is "where each candidate had at least a 40 percent chance of winning."

"So far, indeed, polls of the matchup since Biden announced he wouldn’t seek a second term have been all over the place, showing everything from an 8-point Trump lead to a 4-point Harris edge."

Nate Silver writes, displaying a list of 9 polls, only one of which shows Harris ahead of Trump. One has the 2 candidates tied, and 7 show Trump leading. Trump is up by 8 in one, as Silver notes. He's up by 6 in two, by 4 in one, and by 2 in three.

"My baseline view of politics... is that political parties engage in something roughly resembling game-theory optimal behavior..."

"... and undertake reasonably rational strategies in an effort to win elections and fulfill their other objectives.... As compared to Republicans’ decision about what to do about Trump, I thought Democrats had more agency about Biden following his disastrous debate. Unlike Republicans in 2016, Democrats hadn’t even bothered to hold a competitive primary — if they had, Biden’s flaws might have been even evident earlier — so the will-of-the-voters argument was weak. And unlike Trump in October 2016 following the release of the 'Access Hollywood' tape — after which some Republicans called on him to drop out — Biden wasn’t even the Democratic nominee yet since the party convention hadn’t been held. And Biden has always been a loyal Democrat who got a huge boost from the party establishment in wrapping up the nomination in 2020 — not someone who gave his party the middle finger...."

Writes Nate Silver, noting his failure to predict that Trump would win in 2016 and his early prediction that Biden would withdraw, in "Biden and Democrats make the rational choice/They're probably still underdogs against Trump, but Biden dropping out improves their odds."

Nate Silver's ladder.

You could debate the exact order, but right now we're about half way up this ladder. pic.twitter.com/k4wo9rDIB7

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) July 6, 2024

Nate Silver poses "A simple challenge to the White House" to prove Biden's fitness as a candidate.

At Substack:

Over the course of the next several weeks, Biden should do four lengthy sitdown interviews with “non-friendly” sources....

For instance, Biden could pick... • A lengthy sitdown interview with the Washington bureaus of the New York Times or Washington Post. • An interview with 60 Minutes.... • An interview with some sort of center-right print or digital outlet... say the Wall Street Journal op-ed page.... • Wild card.... Go on Ezra Klein's podcast? Go on Rogan? Just kidding, I think. But Bernie Sanders did it....

This really isn't too much to ask.

Yeah, of course, it's not too much to ask, but I think we all know in our heart it is too much for him to do. It's hard to picture him even doing 2 of these things. Or one. 

And the timing is urgent because he and his inner circle have to make sure that he's really up for a second term and that this is the best option for Democrats.

Why is it suddenly "urgent"? It's a chronic problem and Democrats have been plodding slowly into it for over a year. I think at this point, the best path is to silently endure his collection of delegates. After that, Democrats have until the August convention to devise a nomination for the best candidate. Biden can gracefully withdraw at the best time. There's no reason to put him to the test and degrade or humiliate him. Treat him with respect and replace him at the optimal time. May I presume this is in the works? 

Pivoting to remote.

In most cases, "pivot[ing] to remote" just means de facto cancelling. If you want to cancel something that's cool, that's how life goes sometimes but it's been 4 years since COVID hit just own up to it! https://t.co/rsz7SZ6kkS

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) January 10, 2024

"Progressive belief isn’t purely an elite phenomenon, but the Great Awokening has largely wielded influence through what Nate Silver calls the 'indigo blob'..."

"... a center-left network of schools and foundations and media enterprises and human resources departments. It has not really sought power through elections — in part, I would argue, because its project is fundamentally therapeutic and educational, placing soulcraft before statecraft. But also because when it’s been tested at the ballot box, it’s been a loser.... On the right-wing populist side, you have a rather different phenomenon, a political revolution — the earthquake of Trumpism, the similar shocks in Europe — that far outruns any theory of what it’s about or what it’s doing and leaves the intelligentsia rushing to catch up...."

 
Writes Ross Douthat, in "Conservative Thinkers Didn’t Create Trumpism" (NYT).

Here's Nate Silver's piece from last July, "Twitter, Elon and the Indigo Blob/The line between expertise and politics has become increasingly blurry. The demise of 'Old Twitter' could help to reverse that." ("Left-progressives, liberals, centrists, and moderate or non-MAGA conservatives all share a common argumentative space. I call this space the Indigo Blob, because it’s somewhere between left-wing (blue) and centrist (purple). The space largely excludes MAGA/right-wing conservatives — around 30 percent of the country....")

"The minute someone is, like, 'Hey, we're going to take these nerdy white guys and hire them a staff of thirty people,' you’re no longer sympathetic."

Said Nate Silver, quoted in "What Was Nate Silver’s Data Revolution? Silver, a former professional poker player, was in the business of measuring probabilities. Many readers mistook him for an oracle" (The New Yorker).

The article is by Jay Caspian King, who writes:

"For all of his early promise, Nate Silver ended up swallowing, and even pushing what might be the single concept most destructive to the republic right now: bothsidesism."

"Silver long overstayed his usefulness, so if he does go? Good riddance."

Says the first commenter in a discussion at Metafilter, "The end of the road for FiveThirtyEight?" 

Second commenter:

The end of the road for FiveThirtyEight? 

With any luck! Because: Fuck that guy, and Christ, what an asshole and all that.

And someone else: 

won't disagree with anyone who says some variation of "fuck Nate Silver," but having journalistic outfits of even marginal merit get hollowed out and obliterated on a weekly basis by an increasingly thinner gamut of omnivorous corporations has been extremely grim the past few years 

"Nate Silver Out at ABC News... ABC News is expected to retain the FiveThirtyEight brand, with plans to streamline the data-driven site."

 Hollywood Reporter reports.

Silver founded FiveThirtyEight in 2008, eventually bringing it to The New York Times. Silver would go on to sell the site to Disney’s ESPN; it later was moved to the ABC News division. His departure will be the first time that Silver has not been involved in the site since it launched 15 years ago....

A lot of people getting fired these days.... 

"Profoundly embarrassed" is putting it outrageously lightly.

Welp. The behavior of a certain cadre of scientists who used every trick in the book to suppress discussion of this issue is something I'll never forget. A huge disservice to science and public health. They should be profoundly embarrassed.https://t.co/nZqzjrvo8F

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) February 26, 2023

ADDED: Here's the NYT article on the subject: "Lab Leak Most Likely Caused Pandemic, Energy Dept. Says, as Spy Agencies Remain Split/The conclusion, which was made with 'low confidence,' was based on new intelligence. The information didn’t lead other agencies to change their assessments on the origins of the coronavirus."