How Nate Silver Missed Donald Trump

[RI]

Basically, the criticisms I've seen of him lately seem to based on the idea that Silver is failing to sufficiently emphasize the positives that made him valuable (focus on methodology, empiricism, contingency-based thinking).

It's not simply that. It's also that he's using dubious statistical methods in the pursuit of a political agenda, namely Silver's personal antipathy toward Trump and bias toward Rubio that he's expressed on multiple occasions, when he had previously been more or less "objective" in his application. It's not that he's diluted, it's that he's violating the "Do No Evil" principle in applied statistics.

[RI]

The reaction to Silver this year reminds me of how gleeful people tend to be when they find out, like, that a priest shacked up with a woman.  The response sometimes seems less about how bad the offense was, and more about people laying scorn on someone who had the audacity to be put on a pedestal by others.

That's fair. I used to have very high expectations of him; he's the only pundit-of-sorts I follow on Twitter. Now whenever he tweets I wonder why I'm still following him. It's harder to take someone you admired showing that they're ultimately more typical than not over someone you never had any expectations about doing the same.

[RI]

Isn't the granddaddy of all Trump parallels George McGovern in 1972, the first year of the modern primary/caucus system? The establishment backed Muskie and many Democratic politicians came out against him in the primaries. It was a Democratic senator who conjured up the "abortion, amnesty, and acid" refrain. McGovern might have even lost had Wallace not been shot.