28 Comments

Oh Nate, please just...go away. Just leave. I only ever tolerated listening to him or reading him because I liked how Clare Malone and Micah Cohen wrote. Once they were gone, I stopped paying attention to him.

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Since a potential government shutdown is in the news and that hinges on Republicans abiding by the agreement on the debt limit that Kevin McCarthy and Joe Biden hammered out months ago, it's worth asking, "How did bumbling, senile old Joe Biden do in his negotiations with a much younger Kevin McCarthy?" Oh, now I remember, he cleaned McCarthy's clock. McCarthy walked out of those negotiations lucky to still be wearing his pants. Ah, but that was WAAAAY back in May, when Biden was MUCH younger.

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founding

But, you see, Biden whispers coherently, while Trump yells incoherently. Clearly Trump is less addled by age.

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When Nate Silver started becoming more of a pundit than a data guy, he completely lost me. I haven't read FiveThirtyEight in a long time, but I'm not sad he was shitcanned from his creation.

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Yeah- I think he's good at statistics, but his takes on literally everything that aren't pure stats are _so bad_.

(Honestly starting to reevaluate his stat skills, too- I feel like his reputation was, in retrospect, largely derived from the abnormally stable Obama/Romney race)

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Nate Silver has overstayed his welcome on the public stage and he needs to go sit in the corner for a while and remember who he is and who he REALLY is not.

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I'd be fine if he never left the corner.

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Look, I know it's too much to ask, but I'ma ask it anyway: Can any of these "Biden is too old!" people point to a single policy or job-performance issue that's caused by Biden's age? Like, for example the withdrawal from Afghanistan was a disaster, was that because Biden was too old? Or, to tie it to the only metric than anyone in this Godforsaken country seems to give a fuck about: What's it got to do with the price of gas?

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Counterpoint: Biden was dealt a shitty hand on Afghanistan by Trump, and he did the best he could, and he ended a 20 year war that we were never going to win. The narrative is "the Afghanistan withdrawal was a disaster," but was it, really?

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Absolutely, if you want to blame a President for how quickly things collapsed, how about the President of Afghanistan, who was on a plane out of the country as soon as a few provincial capitals fell to the Taliban? I'm just using it as an example of something lots of people see as a failure, and even giving them that, they can't explain what Biden's age has to do with it.

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Our friends in the media did a stellar job of screaming about how bad the withdrawal was and how it was all Biden's fault, after basically ignoring the war for the past 10 years, and that had a lot to do with people's perceptions about it, just as all the "Is Biden Senile?" stories for the past few months are skewing how people look at him. As Hatlo said, they'll do it every time.

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His lack of ability on the WH basketball court.

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Nate is just an attention-whore trying to stay relevant, he doesn't care if he helps trash democracy here. He foundered so badly on the last two elections, because as Parker says, he was merely predicting what he wished to see, not reality. I still hate that it was even close.

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This is Nate we're talking about, after all. He's following MattY down the path of Xtreme Navel-Gazing to the Land Of My Farts Smell Like Lilacs

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Nate has made the mistake of believing his opinion matters as his core product becomes weak. Famous because of attention is not competency

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Is Nate Silver still wasting perfectly good oxygen? 🤦🏼‍♀️

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RE: conservative Dems: there used to be a lot more "competitive" or "competitive-ish" districts and states where a conservative Dem could outperform Dems enough to win an election (same with moderate Republicans). Gerrymandering and polarization basically wiped most of those places off the map.

In Indiana, Dems complained about Joe Donnelly all the time being too conservative, etc, etc. He outperformed every Dem in the state in 2018, and outperformed Hillary's 2016 results by 7 (and every other Dem's 2016 results), and still lost by 6%. The math simply isn't there anymore.

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Good point, look at Tim Ryan's run for the Senate seat in Ohio in 2022. Did everything he could to separate himself from liberal Democrats and polish up his "conservative Democrat" credentials, and still lost to J.D. Vance.

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founding

It's almost as though voters, when given a choice between a Republican-lite Democrat and an actual Republican, will vote for the Republican every time. I know that's a hoary cliche, but every time I see Claire McCaskill on TV I'm reminded of it, for some reason.

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There are a few percentage points of people who will pick the conservative Dem, just as there are those who will pick a moderate Republican like Baker in MD.

There aren’t enough to matter in gerrymandered House races or in polarized states like Ohio.

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founding

I'd just love to see Dems go full progressive - Medicare for all, abortion access a la Roe, increased minimum wage, you name it - even in gerrymandered districts, just on the off chance that some of them actually win.

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We take our advice from Claire McCaskill because she's an expert at winning elections! That's why she has so much free time to be on TV giving advice on how to win elections.

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Yeah, Nate is either lying or delusional here. There have been umpteen stories about Biden's age. Probably because the media doesn't have much in the way of substantive policy notes to make, esp. when Trump gets added to the mix.

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The media wants Trump back so bad.

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Silver does the thing a lot of prominent journalists and pundits do, where they say their own personal vote is going to the liberal candidate---so obviously they must be liberals who want the liberal candidate to win---but then they use their massive national platform to put forward coverage that downplays the liberal's achievements and magnifies her flaws while playing up the conservative's achievements and downplaying his flaws. I'm not sure what sorry mess of psychological issues leads a person to such a state, but if you vote for liberals while using your substantial power and influence to actively distort the views of others in favor of conservatives, then you're a conservative! If you're uncomfortable with that then stop warping people's perception of reality in favor of conservatives!

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I don’t even read this BS topic

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He's such a hack.

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Like freezing in front of a camera for 30 seconds is something that just happens to ALL old people, so it's just a matter of time before it happens to Biden. I wonder, since this is supposedly such a common phenomenon, why is it named after Mitch McConnell?

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