Daily Meme: Nate Silver's Fickle Friends

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  • Yesterday, former New York Times numbers nerd Nate Silver-who just launched his own site, FiveThirtyEight.com-set off panic among Democratic leaders by changing his projection about the makeup of the Senate after the midterms from "tossup" to "slight GOP advantage."
  • Cue the denounciations. In an unusual move, today the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) issued a statement discrediting Silver's analysis (while at the same time calling FiveThirtyEight "groundbreaking"). "In August of 2012 Silver forecast a 61 percent likelihood that Republicans would pick up enough seats to claim the majority," wrote Guy Cecil, the Committee's executive director. "Three months later, Democrats went on to win 55 seats."
  • Over at his blog, P.M. Carpenter takes the DSCC to task: "There's nothing like happy-face propaganda in the sorryass face of facts. Should Silver's facts re-shift in favor of Democrats, he will again be hailed by the DSCC as America's one statistician who has never erred."
  • Showing he did really well in his college creative-writing class, Marty Kaplan envisions waking up the day after the 2014 midterms: "It felt like a trap door had opened beneath your feet, like a Munch scream, like a nightmare-a nauseating, slow-motion wreck you were powerless to prevent."
  • At the Plum Line, Greg Sargeant is nonplussed: "Certainly the fundamentals for are very bad for Dems, but there's a long, long way to go."
  • The Times's Paul Krugman weighs in to tell us that numbers don't always tell the full story.
  • Predictably, Republicans-who've consistently called Silver a shrill for the left-have suddenly had a change of heart.

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