malchior wrote: Thu Apr 14, 2022 3:16 pm
Nate Silver's journey into incoherence and irrelevance is pretty much complete. Political handicapping was his touchstone and this idea he has been pushing lately is patently laughable. We have reams of evidence that people are voting in line with all sorts of fake issues. His belief that somehow there is some overarching alignment between the state of the economy and (edit: party affiliation) is also...baffling. What's the theory here? Who knows because he doesn't actually explain any of this in any sort of coherent rigorous way.
https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/statu ... 2977014804
To me I think there's a pretty big distinction between like the Russian hack and release of e-mails (which I think would be hard to dispute that that had a big impact) and Russian troll farm-esque activity ("Comes to rally today to support on Trump against Clinton!!!"), which *could* have had a material impact but that's a tougher / less clear argument to make.
I think the point is essentially that none of the past few elections have been out of line with fundamentals in a way that calls out for some unusual explicatory factor. E.g.:
2016 = unpopular incumbent party candidate + unpopular challenger + incumbent party seeking a third consecutive term + ok but not great economy = incredibly close but narrow incumbent defeat.
2018 = wildly unpopular incumbent party + incumbent control of all government branches + midterm election = big opposition party win
2020 = unpopular incumbent + ok economy but with covid disruptions = narrow opposition victory
I think it's just that the headline results and margins of victory aren't all that different from what might well have been predicted in 2015 before we knew who the candidates were and the key issues. Which doesn't mean that 'misinformation' is irrelevant just that the fact that these results weren't out of line with what you would have expected means that there is probably a higher burden of proof on showing that it matters.
It also depends on how you define "misinformation". To me in understanding the 2016 results for example I'm incline to think that misinformation / troll farm type activity had a MUCH lower impact than mainstream media outlets treating Trump effectively as a regular candidate when he obviously wasn't, and treating Clinton as more radioactive / controversial than she should have been. Is that 'misinformation'? I would be inclined to regard it as such but I don't think that most people would define that as misinformation.
Black Lives Matter.