It’s the Democratic Party’s Turn to Hate Nate Silver

Good for Nate Silver, finally getting his own fiefdom for “data journalism” at the new FiveThirtyEight.com, under the auspices of the Walt Disney Corporation. He’s famous. He deserves it!

I, for one, don’t really care about a statistical breakdown of lines between romantic leads in Shakespeare’s plays, to choose the most easily mock-able avatar of this new experiment he’s launched. (Just tell me who’s going to win elections, Nate.)

But with his election odds in the last few cycles, Silver has done the world an invaluable service: showing that it’s always pretty clear—independent of pundits’ constant attempts to characterize everything as a tight race hinging on the hairpin turns of gaffe-making—who is probably going to win. There was never much doubt that Barack Obama would beat John McCain in 2008, or that Republicans would reclaim the House in 2010, or that Barack Obama would beat Mitt Romney in 2012. Explain the historical factors deciding elections, average the polls, and what you see are fairly constant races.

Silver was not the first person to discover this, but he was the first to gain widespread public traction as a counterweight to the typically-bullshit who’s-up-who’s-down, horserace journalism and campaign flackery. Which brings us to the best part about what Nate Silver’s been able to accomplish: the hilarious enmity he draws from those very typically-bullshit, who’s-up-who’s-down horserace journalists and campaign flacks.

There’s a fear among those journalists and flacks that the very popularity of Silver’s predictions makes them come true. Republicans in 2012, for example, worried that Silver’s calculation that Barack Obama had a 75 percent chance of winning reelection a week before Election Day would create the media narrative that he already had it in the bag.

Of course, it didn’t work that way: Barack Obama had it in the bag because state polls of voters showed that he had it in the bag, not because Nate Silver averaged those state polls and reported on them. But all of this led to one of the most amusing side stories of the late-2012 campaign season: the War on Nate Silver, fought by Republican operatives and journalists who bent over backwards to show that Silver was both wrong and corrupt, and that the presidential race was actually a toss-up. Silver won that war, by correctly predicting the outcomes of fifty out of fifty states in the presidential election, and of all but a few Senate races, too.

Now the 2014 election is looming, and the math fairly clearly shows at the moment that it will be difficult for Democrats to retain control of the Senate. Silver’s new Senate forecast predicts that Republicans will end up with fifty-one Senate seats, though he encourages us “to read this analysis with some caution.”

The factors contributing to into this are simple: the Democratic president is highly unpopular, Democrats will be defending the red-state seats they won in the blockbuster blue year of 2008, Democratic turnout in midterm elections is traditionally lower than it is in presidential elections, and Republicans appear to have drafted more credible candidates to win these competitive seats than they have in recent cycles. Not very complicated stuff.

It’s also not very difficult to guess who hates Nate Silver now: your beloved Democratic party, Silver’s greatest boosters in 2012! As The National Journal reports:

Democrats aren’t taking Nate Silver’s latest Senate prediction lying down.

In an unusual step, the executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee on Monday issued a rebuttal the famed statistician’s prediction—made a day earlier—that Republicans were a “slight favorite” to retake the Senate. Silver was wrong in 2012, the political committee’s Guy Cecil wrote in a memo, and he’ll be wrong again in 2014.

“In fact, in August of 2012 Silver forecast a 61 percent likelihood that Republicans would pick up enough seats to claim the majority,” Cecil said. “Three months later, Democrats went on to win 55 seats.” [. . . ]

[T]he comprehensive pushback from Cecil, the powerful committee’s key staffer, is a testament both to the influence Silver wields and the sensitivity of Senate Democrats to the perception they’re losing their grip on the upper chamber. Other outlets have suggested similar odds on the Senate, but none have earned this kind of rebuttal.

This is fantastic news for those of you who were worried that this might be a boring election season to follow. Now you can watch the hacks flip and flop on their praises and condemnations of Nate Silver, depending on what his models show. Say the Republicans do something catastrophic (like, shut down the government over gay peoples’ rights or whatever) and Silver’s model flips, showing Democrats retaining fifty-one seats. Then you’ll see official Democratic memos spreading the word about how Nate Silver can do no wrong, while Republican operatives grumble that Silver is skewing the polls to help Democrats. The extraordinary hypocrisy and idiocy displayed in the reactions to a poll-reader with an audience is perhaps the best encapsulation of contemporary American politics.