He is right when we agree with him. Nate Silver - Democrats run for cover.

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He is right when we agree with him. Nate Silver - Democrats run for cover.
Democrats look at Nate Silver’s mighty works and despair Silver.

FiveThirtyEight

FiveThirtyEight Senate Forecast: GOP Is Slight Favorite in Race for Senate Control | FiveThirtyEight

FiveThirtyEight now suggest Republicans will take Senate | National Post
FiveThirtyEight now suggest Republicans will take Senate

On Sunday morning the simmering Democratic fear that Republicans might take over the Senate became real. Nate Silver had rendered his judgment and colored his charts. Months before, while others still saw Democrats holding the Senate, Silver had predicted that the 2014 election was a tossup. Nothing he has seen since has changed his mind. Republicans had recruited strong candidates, Barack Obama had gotten intimate with a 43% approval rating, and FiveThirtyEight remained skeptical of Democrats’ chances. “Our forecast might be thought of as a Republican gain of six seats,” wrote Silver, “plus or minus five.”

The substance of Silver’s prediction surprised exactly no one who covers politics. Politico had been covering the shades of Democratic panic for half a year, every time a Republican paid his filing fee. Larry Sabato, the quote-machine political science professor, had speculated back in January that Republicans might “win it all.” Earlier this month the Atlantic had asked whether carpetbagging New Hampshire candidate Scott Brown would be “the face of the coming Republican wave.” (Silver rated the possibility of a Brown win at one in four.)

But none of those voices mattered like that of Silver, the savant who had predicted the Obama waves in 2008 and 2012, much to the satisfaction of liberal readers. Within minutes of Silver’s FiveThirtyEight post going live, DSCC Executive Director Guy Cecil was reminding followers (and reporters) of how wrong Silver had been about the senate (if not Obama) in 2012.

The DSCC took a gentler approach later, releasing a memorandum that noted that, bless their hearts, the “groundbreaking” FiveThirtyEight team was limited by a “scarce supply of public polls.” The numbers looked poor now, the memo implied, because “the Koch brothers and other Republican allies have spent months outspending Democrats, presenting only one (false) side of the story,” so no fair looking now.

The DSCC memo did change the story. It was no longer “Dems to Lose Senate.” It became “Dems vs. Silver.”

The Silver backlash was inevitable. Silver’s cachet on the left, which was high after 2008, became incomparable after 2012. That was the year FiveThirtyEight became a digital security blanket for liberals, a site they could refresh and refresh and refresh some more when their other news sources warned them that Mitt Romney might actually win.

In the days before the 2012 election, one-fifth of visitors to the New York Times’ website ended up at FiveThirtyEight. Conservatives and defenders of the horse race balked at this. A small conservative news site started publishing “Unskewed Polls,” correcting for media bias, and deriding Silver in personal terms. (The site is defunct, but its proprietor now says his “projection of the presidential race was closer than those of Michael Barone, **** Morris and Karl Rove.” This is not wrong.) BuzzFeed profiled some of the liberals “clinging” to Silver’s numbers. Politico’s media columnist wondered whether Silver might become a “one-term celebrity” after the election proved more dynamic than his polls.