How Nate Silver Missed Donald Trump

[#TheShadowyAbyss]

One of these days we'll tell our grandchildren that we saw Donald Trump perform in his prime in the same way people speak of seeing Michael Jordan or Barry Bonds or Lance Armstrong or...um...someone who didn't use performance enhancing drugs who dominated their field. Trump gets the demographic he's playing to on a level that's not even conscious: he isn't giving the GOP what they want. He's giving the GOP what they never knew they wanted. After he wins the primary, he'll do the same with the country at large.

Underestimate Trump at your peril. He is dead serious and is a man of vast talent and absolutely ruthless cutthroat instinct.

He is not going to beat Clinton

[Alcon]

Silver made two fundamental errors with regards to Trump.

1) He basically chose to ignore polls and go with his gut feeling, thereby repeating the mistake that he has often himself accused other political analysts of making and neglecting the qualities which made him a good number cruncher in the first place. Silvers forté was always in crunching numbers. As a political analyst he is no better than all the others who go by their gut and then interpret the facts to allign with their gut. This is the stuff that Dick Morris is made of.

2) He NEVER understood the appeal of Trump. The appeal of Trump is not that he is a celebrity. It is not that he is anti-establishment. It is not that he is a novelty. It is not that he gets 90% of the media attention. All of those facts contribute to his popularity, but the heart of his appeal is his alpha male persona. True alpha male politicians can be incredibly popular with the general public, as shown by the likes of Berlusconi in Italy, Putin in Russia or indeed, Hitler in Germany.

I agree with all of this.  Silver's Trump downplaying has always been weird to me because there are so many variables involved, and Silver has always been a guy who emphasizes the statistical value of uncertainty.  The guy's model still gives Carson and Rubio a 9% chance of winning in Iowa.

I don't object to the existence of Silver's polls-plus model, although it seems to me -- as someone who barely understands it -- that he's weighting the "plus" part too heavily, especially this close to the election.  It's totally fine to find a hypothesis supported by past data, and try to implement it in a model.  It certainly has a good shot of having more predictive power than polls do, especially months out.  However, you have to incorporate the uncertainty of such a multi-variable approach, plus the added risk of overfitting.

For a guy who's so conscious of uncertainty, I'm surprised he's fallen for such conventional traps of the statistically illiterate.  That said, I still appreciate him because, even when I think his methodology is messed up, at least I know he has a methodology.  I still appreciate the poll-based prediction he publishes and the modeling he does.  Even if I think he's fallen for the traps pundits do, he still contributes way more of value to the discourse than most pundits.  He's too much maligned here.

[IceSpear]

Silver made two fundamental errors with regards to Trump.

1) He basically chose to ignore polls and go with his gut feeling, thereby repeating the mistake that he has often himself accused other political analysts of making and neglecting the qualities which made him a good number cruncher in the first place. Silvers forté was always in crunching numbers. As a political analyst he is no better than all the others who go by their gut and then interpret the facts to allign with their gut. This is the stuff that Dick Morris is made of.

2) He NEVER understood the appeal of Trump. The appeal of Trump is not that he is a celebrity. It is not that he is anti-establishment. It is not that he is a novelty. It is not that he gets 90% of the media attention. All of those facts contribute to his popularity, but the heart of his appeal is his alpha male persona. True alpha male politicians can be incredibly popular with the general public, as shown by the likes of Berlusconi in Italy, Putin in Russia or indeed, Hitler in Germany.

I agree with all of this.  Silver's Trump downplaying has always been weird to me because there are so many variables involved, and Silver has always been a guy who emphasizes the statistical value of uncertainty.  The guy's model still gives Carson and Rubio a 9% chance of winning in Iowa.

I don't object to the existence of Silver's polls-plus model, although it seems to me -- as someone who barely understands it -- that he's weighting the "plus" part too heavily, especially this close to the election.  It's totally fine to find a hypothesis supported by past data, and try to implement it in a model.  It certainly has a good shot of having more predictive power than polls do, especially months out.  However, you have to incorporate the uncertainty of such a multi-variable approach, plus the added risk of overfitting.

For a guy who's so conscious of uncertainty, I'm surprised he's fallen for such conventional traps of the statistically illiterate.  That said, I still appreciate him because, even when I think his methodology is messed up, at least I know he has a methodology.  I still appreciate the poll-based prediction he publishes and the modeling he does.  Even if I think he's fallen for the traps pundits do, he still contributes way more of value to the discourse than most pundits.  He's too much maligned here.

Someone contributing more valuable discourse than the pundits isn't saying very much though.

[Alcon]

Silver made two fundamental errors with regards to Trump.

1) He basically chose to ignore polls and go with his gut feeling, thereby repeating the mistake that he has often himself accused other political analysts of making and neglecting the qualities which made him a good number cruncher in the first place. Silvers forté was always in crunching numbers. As a political analyst he is no better than all the others who go by their gut and then interpret the facts to allign with their gut. This is the stuff that Dick Morris is made of.

2) He NEVER understood the appeal of Trump. The appeal of Trump is not that he is a celebrity. It is not that he is anti-establishment. It is not that he is a novelty. It is not that he gets 90% of the media attention. All of those facts contribute to his popularity, but the heart of his appeal is his alpha male persona. True alpha male politicians can be incredibly popular with the general public, as shown by the likes of Berlusconi in Italy, Putin in Russia or indeed, Hitler in Germany.

I agree with all of this.  Silver's Trump downplaying has always been weird to me because there are so many variables involved, and Silver has always been a guy who emphasizes the statistical value of uncertainty.  The guy's model still gives Carson and Rubio a 9% chance of winning in Iowa.

I don't object to the existence of Silver's polls-plus model, although it seems to me -- as someone who barely understands it -- that he's weighting the "plus" part too heavily, especially this close to the election.  It's totally fine to find a hypothesis supported by past data, and try to implement it in a model.  It certainly has a good shot of having more predictive power than polls do, especially months out.  However, you have to incorporate the uncertainty of such a multi-variable approach, plus the added risk of overfitting.

For a guy who's so conscious of uncertainty, I'm surprised he's fallen for such conventional traps of the statistically illiterate.  That said, I still appreciate him because, even when I think his methodology is messed up, at least I know he has a methodology.  I still appreciate the poll-based prediction he publishes and the modeling he does.  Even if I think he's fallen for the traps pundits do, he still contributes way more of value to the discourse than most pundits.  He's too much maligned here.

Someone contributing more valuable discourse than the pundits isn't saying very much though.

To each their own, but I think conversations like this are much more useful than 99% of punditing.  I'd rather be in a room of five Nate Silver types of varying methodologies and arguments than someone whose entire methodology and argument is gut instinct.  Silver is at least someone who cares about having a methodology, and is willing to explore the contingencies if his approach is wrong.  Politics has plenty of people whose every word comes straight from the spleen, and these people are the worst.

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).  Basically, Silver has turned into diluted Silver.  I might agree -- but I'll still take diluted Silver over the gut-rotting punditry that prevails out there (which is often presented much more arrogantly).  He's getting way too much crap.

[IceSpear]

Silver made two fundamental errors with regards to Trump.

1) He basically chose to ignore polls and go with his gut feeling, thereby repeating the mistake that he has often himself accused other political analysts of making and neglecting the qualities which made him a good number cruncher in the first place. Silvers forté was always in crunching numbers. As a political analyst he is no better than all the others who go by their gut and then interpret the facts to allign with their gut. This is the stuff that Dick Morris is made of.

2) He NEVER understood the appeal of Trump. The appeal of Trump is not that he is a celebrity. It is not that he is anti-establishment. It is not that he is a novelty. It is not that he gets 90% of the media attention. All of those facts contribute to his popularity, but the heart of his appeal is his alpha male persona. True alpha male politicians can be incredibly popular with the general public, as shown by the likes of Berlusconi in Italy, Putin in Russia or indeed, Hitler in Germany.

I agree with all of this.  Silver's Trump downplaying has always been weird to me because there are so many variables involved, and Silver has always been a guy who emphasizes the statistical value of uncertainty.  The guy's model still gives Carson and Rubio a 9% chance of winning in Iowa.

I don't object to the existence of Silver's polls-plus model, although it seems to me -- as someone who barely understands it -- that he's weighting the "plus" part too heavily, especially this close to the election.  It's totally fine to find a hypothesis supported by past data, and try to implement it in a model.  It certainly has a good shot of having more predictive power than polls do, especially months out.  However, you have to incorporate the uncertainty of such a multi-variable approach, plus the added risk of overfitting.

For a guy who's so conscious of uncertainty, I'm surprised he's fallen for such conventional traps of the statistically illiterate.  That said, I still appreciate him because, even when I think his methodology is messed up, at least I know he has a methodology.  I still appreciate the poll-based prediction he publishes and the modeling he does.  Even if I think he's fallen for the traps pundits do, he still contributes way more of value to the discourse than most pundits.  He's too much maligned here.

Someone contributing more valuable discourse than the pundits isn't saying very much though.

To each their own, but I think conversations like this are much more useful than 99% of punditing.  I'd rather be in a room of five Nate Silver types of varying methodologies and arguments than someone whose entire methodology and argument is gut instinct.  Silver is at least someone who cares about having a methodology, and is willing to explore the contingencies if his approach is wrong.  Politics has plenty of people whose every word comes straight from the spleen, and these people are the worst.

Oh yeah, I totally agree. I'm just saying complimenting someone as "more useful than the pundits" is kind of like complimenting someone for being smarter than Sarah Palin.

[Alcon]

Heh, can't argue with that

[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.

[Alcon]

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.

I was being unfair -- I should have said "most of the criticisms," not "the criticisms."  You're presenting a totally legitimate criticism, and hell, I agree with it.  I also disapprove of his "editorial hand" this year.  However, at the end of the day, at least he tells me what his editorial hand is and why (even if he's done a fairly weak job of applying scrutiny to it), which means he's still a valuable input.  I'd rather deal with someone who operates in hypotheses and models than people who don't understand how that thinking works.

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.

[Mr. Morden]

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.

I don't know that "personal antipathy toward Trump" is quite right, though maybe there are a bunch of anti-Trump quotes from Silver out there that I'm unaware of.  I'm not sure that he doesn't like Trump personally or doesn't like him as a potential president, so much as he views him as a terrible general election candidate, and thus has been assuming that the GOP will be rational enough to not pick him.

[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.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

Remember folks, Trump is just going to be the flavor of the month, Jindal still has a chance at winning Iowa, and Jim Webb will be the anti-Hillary. 538 can't be wrong when they talk out of their ass with no evidence since they managed to average polls a couple of days before a general election and not be totally wrong.

[Alcon]

Remember folks, Trump is just going to be the flavor of the month, Jindal still has a chance at winning Iowa, and Jim Webb will be the anti-Hillary. 538 can't be wrong when they talk out of their ass with no evidence since they managed to average polls a couple of days before a general election and not be totally wrong.

Thank you for completely wasting your intelligence in this thread.

[pbrower2a]

Silver made two fundamental errors with regards to Trump.

1) He basically chose to ignore polls and go with his gut feeling, thereby repeating the mistake that he has often himself accused other political analysts of making and neglecting the qualities which made him a good number cruncher in the first place. Silvers forté was always in crunching numbers. As a political analyst he is no better than all the others who go by their gut and then interpret the facts to allign with their gut. This is the stuff that Dick Morris is made of.

2) He NEVER understood the appeal of Trump. The appeal of Trump is not that he is a celebrity. It is not that he is anti-establishment. It is not that he is a novelty. It is not that he gets 90% of the media attention. All of those facts contribute to his popularity, but the heart of his appeal is his alpha male persona. True alpha male politicians can be incredibly popular with the general public, as shown by the likes of Berlusconi in Italy, Putin in Russia or indeed, Hitler in Germany.

I agree with all of this.  Silver's Trump downplaying has always been weird to me because there are so many variables involved, and Silver has always been a guy who emphasizes the statistical value of uncertainty.  The guy's model still gives Carson and Rubio a 9% chance of winning in Iowa.

I don't object to the existence of Silver's polls-plus model, although it seems to me -- as someone who barely understands it -- that he's weighting the "plus" part too heavily, especially this close to the election.  It's totally fine to find a hypothesis supported by past data, and try to implement it in a model.  It certainly has a good shot of having more predictive power than polls do, especially months out.  However, you have to incorporate the uncertainty of such a multi-variable approach, plus the added risk of overfitting.

For a guy who's so conscious of uncertainty, I'm surprised he's fallen for such conventional traps of the statistically illiterate.  That said, I still appreciate him because, even when I think his methodology is messed up, at least I know he has a methodology.  I still appreciate the poll-based prediction he publishes and the modeling he does.  Even if I think he's fallen for the traps pundits do, he still contributes way more of value to the discourse than most pundits.  He's too much maligned here.

Someone contributing more valuable discourse than the pundits isn't saying very much though.

To each their own, but I think conversations like this are much more useful than 99% of punditing.  I'd rather be in a room of five Nate Silver types of varying methodologies and arguments than someone whose entire methodology and argument is gut instinct.  Silver is at least someone who cares about having a methodology, and is willing to explore the contingencies if his approach is wrong.  Politics has plenty of people whose every word comes straight from the spleen, and these people are the worst.

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).  Basically, Silver has turned into diluted Silver.  I might agree -- but I'll still take diluted Silver over the gut-rotting punditry that prevails out there (which is often presented much more arrogantly).  He's getting way too much crap.

One strange thing after another has happened in this Presidential election, and no political model could ever predict any of them. we have had three Republican candidates with practically no experience in elective politics. We have heard some of the harshest rhetoric by a political front-runner since George Wallace in 1968.

Heck, 2012 was downright boring. There was no contest on one side, and in view of the polarization of the states, there were few real swing states. I'm not saying that this Presidential year won't end up with the model that I had in 2008 and 2012 with the election hinging upon four or five states scattered around the country with the rest obvious...

The right approach depends upon probability and historical precedent. Much of the political discourse now comes from the basest parts of the psyche, and it is horrible. So is any discussion of the prospects of any pol that begins "He is so horrible I can't imagine how anyone could vote for him". I heard that of Ronald Reagan many times -- and of Barack Obama.

So what really matters this time?

1. Is one Party successfully poaching voters from constituencies long  taken-for-granted by the other side? this could be ethnic, religious, or occupational groups.

2. Are core constituencies of one Party dying off? Are the newest voters heavily going one way? Democrats were excited about participation of Generation X voters whom they expected to rescue Jimmy Carter and Democrats in general in 1980.  Oh, were they wrong! Those new voters went heavily toward conservatives of any kind.

3. Will the economy melt down  before November? Will there be some military or diplomatic catastrophe? Will there be a major scandal to wreck someone?

4. Will someone make a discreditable gaffe after being nominated?

5. Is statewide polarization likely to remain as severe as it has been in the last two Presidential elections?

6. How competent will the campaign strategies be?

7. Will huge infusions of cash from well-heeled donors buy effective ad time? Will the ads work? Will the money be spent effectively?

8. Will someone's health fail?  

Anyone who thinks that he has an answer to any of these questions is a fool.    

[Fmr President & Senator Polnut]

I think it's pretty simple... there hasn't been a major party candidate like Trump in the modern era, his presence, his utter shamelessness (even for a political candidate), his policy priorities, how those policies connect with the GOP base... he's pretty much an anomaly.

All of us in this game of prognostication (real or feigned) are too driven by history, stats and patterns. These things change. Trump is a game-changer, a real one... That doesn't mean the guy is going to win the nomination, but it means you need to readjust your expectations and realise your models are going to be useless for a little while.

I say this as someone who thinks Trump is one of the worst things to happen to American politics in decades.

[emailking]

It's not that he's not just looking at polling data, it's that his non-polls data this year is garbage. "Endorsement points" is an absurd premise worse than most pbrower stuff.

I think you might be looking at that the wrong way. If a candidate gets a whole bunch of endorsements, that tells you who the establishment is willing throw their weight behind,  which probably does tend to affect the result I hope we can agree? He's not saying necessarily that endorsements make voters to change their minds. Correlations can (emphasis can) be predictive even if there are not causal links.

And look at all the good that establishment support did for Jeb!...

The point is that having endorsements makes your chances more likely that you will win. It does not have to guarantee that you will win for it to be a logical addition to a statistical analysis on this matter. It does not even have to make a lot more likely that you will win, just that it makes it significantly more likely. It's not an absurd premise because you have an example where somebody got endorsements and didn't win. To show that it's an absurd premise, you would actually have to crunch the numbers to show that there isn't correlation or that the correlation is negative. Now yeah, if it's really clear that every single year it doesn't hold then you can skip that step and just call it absurd. But just offhand I can think of several years where it did, e.g. 2012 on the Republican side. You can't just trivially dismiss it like that.

[Gustaf]

Putting up hypotheses based on data and testing them isn't "wrong".

Since polls are generally very unreliable in primaries compared to general elections, trying to put in more data makes sense.

But I guess joining the latest lynch mob to shout in unison is more fun for some people.

Well, he has seemed awfully certain about this, showing little indications of considering arguments that ran counter to his conclusions (and making a lot of dubious arguments himself, such as the idea that Trump as a candidate was more or less equivalent to earlier "anti-establishment candidate" (none of whom shared Trump's level of support over time, his celebrity status, and probably lots of other factors). Now that Silver is starting to backtrack, at the very last moment, I hardly think he should be considered the victim of a "lynch mob".

And on the flipside, when he's right he is largely lauded as a genius, even when his statistical modeling barely differs from a simple polling average.

Those are different points. I agree Silver has seemed reluctant to admit Trump is doing well.

What I take issue with is the constant ridicule of him not just looking at polling data. I find that line of attack pretty silly.

I also think it's generally petty to hate on people because other people laud them as geniuses. I guess the saintly users on Atlas Forum would have refused lucrative contracts with the media out of principle but I harbour no such self-illusions. If people proclaimed me the Messiah for pointing out obvious things I'd cash that check.

It's not that he's not just looking at polling data, it's that his non-polls data this year is garbage. "Endorsement points" is an absurd premise worse than most pbrower stuff.

No, from what I recall all his non-polls data is based on historical correlations. The endorsement points are weighed in based on how similar endorsements have correlated with vote share in the past.

And that just seems like basic sound methodology to me. Maybe the historical record was wrong or maybe this is just an outlier. Doesn't really make him an idiot or a fraud though.

[Mr. Morden]

Putting up hypotheses based on data and testing them isn't "wrong".

Since polls are generally very unreliable in primaries compared to general elections, trying to put in more data makes sense.

But I guess joining the latest lynch mob to shout in unison is more fun for some people.

Well, he has seemed awfully certain about this, showing little indications of considering arguments that ran counter to his conclusions (and making a lot of dubious arguments himself, such as the idea that Trump as a candidate was more or less equivalent to earlier "anti-establishment candidate" (none of whom shared Trump's level of support over time, his celebrity status, and probably lots of other factors). Now that Silver is starting to backtrack, at the very last moment, I hardly think he should be considered the victim of a "lynch mob".

And on the flipside, when he's right he is largely lauded as a genius, even when his statistical modeling barely differs from a simple polling average.

Those are different points. I agree Silver has seemed reluctant to admit Trump is doing well.

What I take issue with is the constant ridicule of him not just looking at polling data. I find that line of attack pretty silly.

I also think it's generally petty to hate on people because other people laud them as geniuses. I guess the saintly users on Atlas Forum would have refused lucrative contracts with the media out of principle but I harbour no such self-illusions. If people proclaimed me the Messiah for pointing out obvious things I'd cash that check.

It's not that he's not just looking at polling data, it's that his non-polls data this year is garbage. "Endorsement points" is an absurd premise worse than most pbrower stuff.

No, from what I recall all his non-polls data is based on historical correlations. The endorsement points are weighed in based on how similar endorsements have correlated with vote share in the past.

And that just seems like basic sound methodology to me. Maybe the historical record was wrong or maybe this is just an outlier. Doesn't really make him an idiot or a fraud though.

Yeah, the short version is that, even when you control for polling, candidates with more endorsements X number of days before primary season starts are more likely to do well once the voting starts.  The exact causal mechanism isn't necessarily clear, but I guess the idea is that endorsements are a proxy for "support from the party elites".

[Slander and/or Libel]

I would be interested in seeing how well the "endorsement points" correlated with polling in the runup to the primaries, historically. It strikes me that Silver may be overweighting endorsements when in the past, they've tended to track which candidates were doing well in the polls anyway.

[Alcon]

@Gustaf: Exactly. Although the actual mechanics of endorsement points are pretty rough (notice how each is worth 1, 5, or 10 points -- obviously not an advanced algorithm), there is an historical association between endorsements and increasing support which suggests they can be a leading indicator, not just two things that generally go hand-in-hand.  You could reasonably argue that this linkage only applies to conventional candidates, and conventional candidates rarely lose primaries, but...that's Silver's point.  And it's well-documented here.  This is historically how things work.

The truth is that any model of such a complicated phenomenon is going to fail to accurately gauge someone whose electoral appeal is incredibly anomalous.  And that's fine, because good models shouldn't necessarily predict anomalies, especially if it models something super-complex like a primary.  Sometimes adding variables meant to predict, say, a Donald Trump, will throw the model off in the 90%+ of other cases would have functioned quite well.  That's unreasonable, and it's usually especially unreasonable to include it in the model if it's never happened in the data set.

I think Silver's 'mistake' this year was in arguing that the lack of previous anomalies meant it was unreasonable to assume Donald Trump was an anomaly.  Think about that for a minute, though: how often do claims that a candidate is "the exception" to a longstanding pattern turn out to be true?  Almost never.  Even an "anomalous" candidate like Obama fits into the model fine.

So, I think Silver's mistake was more in being dismissive (understandably) and not being willing enough to discuss the possibility of Trump being a candidate that presents unknown unknowns, probably because he's allergic to people invoking that kind of argument to justify magical thinking all the time, and almost always ending up wrong.  Even if I think he dug his heels in for a little too long (and even if I think his model should be producing more uncertainty on the endorsement factor when it hasn't apparently kicked in this close to the first vote), I understand where Silver is coming from.

@Figs: Here ya go.

[Gustaf]

I think it's telling that in this thread the people who understand what he did are a lot more sympathetic to the model while those who ridicule it seem to have not understood it.

Now that I've read page 2 I largely agree with Alcon's points.

[Slander and/or Libel]

@Figs: Here ya go.

That's interesting and goes part of the way toward what I was wondering, but it also doesn't necessarily give me an indication of whether endorsements as a variable is separable from polling support. He sketches a very, very rough idea of how endorsements might translate to votes, but I still don't have a good handle on exactly how much that effect might be captured by, or duplicating, other data.

I'm struck in particular by the Democratic charts for 2004. Kerry's endorsements spiked after he started succeeding in primaries, before which point they were lagging Dean and even Gephardt.

[Alcon]

@Figs: Here ya go.

That's interesting and goes part of the way toward what I was wondering, but it also doesn't necessarily give me an indication of whether endorsements as a variable is separable from polling support. He sketches a very, very rough idea of how endorsements might translate to votes, but I still don't have a good handle on exactly how much that effect might be captured by, or duplicating, other data.

I'm struck in particular by the Democratic charts for 2004. Kerry's endorsements spiked after he started succeeding in primaries, before which point they were lagging Dean and even Gephardt.

You're right that he doesn't show it's an independent variable that's discretely influencing outcomes -- but if it's a leading indicator, it seems like it's reasonable to model.  If you look at 2004, it strikes me that several candidates had comparable establishment support and the establishment started coalescing around Kerry, and then he continued to grow momentum.  It's true that elite endorsements weren't as much as a leading indicator there, since the establishment appears to have stayed out early on, but once they started to get behind Kerry, his momentum did continue and accelerate.  And he was never really disfavored the way Trump (and Cruz, for that matter) is.  Kerry isn't much of a knock on the model, IMO.

That scenario is a lot different than having continued, escalating momentum for someone with consistent zero establishment support (Trump).  That has literally never happened before in the data set, even in a more limited way.  Consider also that some people managed to gain apparent momentum, were then ignored by the establishment, and then flopped.  Santorum in 2012 (after his Iowa win) is one of several good counterpoints.

Looking at all of this, I really think it's hard to convict Silver of much more than misdemeanor analytic stubbornness.

[Slander and/or Libel]

I don't disagree, and I think he was in a tough place. If he admitted flexibility, then it would cut against the perception that he was trying to cultivate that the numbers tell us way more about the race than anything else (and that his specific interpretation of the numbers was as close to correct as anything). But if he stayed rigid, he ran the risk of a hard-to-predict event biting him on the butt, which is what appears to have happened. I don't envy the position he's found himself in, and I don't think it's all his fault, though he probably could have handled it better.

[Lurker]

@Figs: Here ya go.

That's interesting and goes part of the way toward what I was wondering, but it also doesn't necessarily give me an indication of whether endorsements as a variable is separable from polling support. He sketches a very, very rough idea of how endorsements might translate to votes, but I still don't have a good handle on exactly how much that effect might be captured by, or duplicating, other data.

I'm struck in particular by the Democratic charts for 2004. Kerry's endorsements spiked after he started succeeding in primaries, before which point they were lagging Dean and even Gephardt.

You're right that he doesn't show it's an independent variable that's discretely influencing outcomes -- but if it's a leading indicator, it seems like it's reasonable to model.  If you look at 2004, it strikes me that several candidates had comparable establishment support and the establishment started coalescing around Kerry, and then he continued to grow momentum.  It's true that elite endorsements weren't as much as a leading indicator there, since the establishment appears to have stayed out early on, but once they started to get behind Kerry, his momentum did continue and accelerate. And he was never really disfavored the way Trump (and Cruz, for that matter) is.  Kerry isn't much of a knock on the model, IMO.

But isn't this (similarly to Obama's increasing number of endorsements in '08) more a case of "the establishment" backing Kerry since he had gained momentum and appearing increasingly likely to win, rather than the endorsements causing him to win the nomination?  The same seemingly applies to 1988 as well (in which both Gephardt and Gore had more endorsement points than Dukakis shortly before Iowa).  

That's arguably at least three cases where the endorsements doesn't seem to have been such a significant factor, out of a total of six contested Democratic nominations.

[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.