Nate Silver Tells Us What He Thinks of Politico: Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? Weblogging
NATE SILVER: What's remarkable for me is that you had some journalist for Politico who tweeted out "All Nate's doing is averaging polls and counting electoral votes? That's the secret sauce?." Well, yeah, and the fact that you can't comprehend that very basic thing, that says more about you than it does about me, right?
BILL SIMMONS: It was like passive aggressive--coming after you but they couldn't find a good way to do it.
NATE SILVER: Politico is a "who won the day" kind of thing, right? They're trying to cover it like it's sports but not in an intelligent way at all. They want to create noise, basically. Their whole thing is you have to have a lead story about some gaffe that somebody made on the campaign trail…. In politics, you can have a month where nothing of any import whatsoever happens. But you still have to have Politico produce a paper seven times a week, and that's when they're trying to start trouble.
Nate Silver is, of course, correct: he is a wizard.
And bonus Charles Pierce:
Things In Politico That Make Me Want To Guzzle Antifreeze, Part the Infinity: I've become a connoisseur of Charlie Mahtesian's "On Politics" column in Tiger Beat On The Potomac…. Between belaboring the obvious… and assuring us that Willard Romney had vast reservoirs of support abroad in the land that the rest of us were sadly overlooking, Mahtesian was the go-to source for all things fact-averse…. Today… he returns to the fray…
"Neither of the candidates inspired rural voters to go vote," James Gimpel, a University of Maryland political scientist, told the Daily Yonder, "although there was even less enthusiasm for Obama than there was for Romney." Romney did, however, manage to win the rural vote by a higher percentage than John McCain. In 2008, McCain won 53.3 percent to Barack Obama's 45.6 percent, but Romney won 58.9 percent among rural voters. That figure tracked almost exactly with George W. Bush's rural performance in 2004.
Call me cynical, but I suspect there was another factor that might have held turnout down among "rural" voters as regards the current president of the United States, a factor that does not, ah, apply to any previous Democratic presidential nominee.
My goal in life now is to live long enough to see the last of the "Mitt Would Have Won If Nobody But White Folks Voted" stories.
