Nate Silver

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

I really appreciate that Gottlieb tends to treat us like adults. He give people information with a fair amount of nuance. But he says what he really believes and doesn't try to be overly prescriptive or play games with expectations or nudge people toward certain behaviors. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

I don't think they should be lifting mask mandates either but that Axios article is quite misleading since the spikes in Texas and Mississippi were weather related, i.e. they didn't report many cases 2 weeks ago when they had major power outages so there were rebounds last week. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

This seems like an important point. People are lumping a lot of things into the category of "hesitancy". But I suspect there are a ton of people don't have the luxury to read the web all day like me and don't know vaccines are available/that they're eligible when they are. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@conorsen @TheStalwart Late April is rather conservative! There's already a fair amount of slack in NYC's system. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@davejorgenson In A Crowded Place Without A Mask is permanently entering everybody's dream canon along with classics such as Naked At School. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

After a flattening out last week, positive test rates are starting to decline in NYC again. Now down to ~6% from ~9% three weeks ago per the city's data. https://t.co/FzTtPAVIGR https://t.co/UnkQrfj5u6 — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@jbarro @chrislhayes @davidshor @jbouie @jonathanchait And again, gay marriage is relatively unusual in having this steady, fairly linear and (after many years of linear gains) eventually fairly profound shift in public opinion. Most issues don't work like that. Abortion hasn't. Gun control hasn't, really. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@jbarro @chrislhayes @davidshor @jbouie @jonathanchait Right. It's an extremely rare public policy issue that's lacking in concrete trade-offs. It's hard to mount an argument for a compelling state interest against it, as even Justice Roberts eventually agreed. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@chrislhayes @davidshor @jbouie @jonathanchait I pretty strongly disagree on that and FWIW so does the polling data which shows abolish the police at just 15% approval as compared with (IIRC) low-mid 30s for gay marriage circa 2004. https://t.co/cXLM0Z1ulW — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@chrislhayes @davidshor @jbouie @jonathanchait The right analogy to "abolish the police" might also be to something like advocating for abolishing marriage as opposed to advocating for allowing same-sex marriage. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@chrislhayes @davidshor @jbouie @jonathanchait I don't know. A lot of the activist groups were pretty incrementalist, or at least there was a lot of debate within LGBT activist circles about how hard to push. Now there's more of a belief in supposedly Overton Window shifting maximalist positions. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@chrislhayes @davidshor @jbouie @jonathanchait FWIW I think there was more awareness back then that marriage equality was, for the moment, unpopular, hence there was an initial push for compromise solutions like civil unions. Gay marriage may be also more the exception than the rule in public opinion shifting so quickly. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

The broader implication in here is that Democrats should take it seriously when many nonwhite Dems identify themselves as moderate or conservative. And it's usually conservative on social/cultural issues more than on economics. If Dems lose those voters, they're kind of screwed. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

This seems important. "Defund the police" may really have hurt Democrats' standing with nonwhite voters. https://t.co/kxmqvDXO3V https://t.co/tdCAjq3STk — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

As Biden and Obama show, you can probably get away with being quite progressive on economic policies (many of which like the minimum wage are in fact popular) via some combination of moderation in tone/temperament and avoiding fighting too many "culture war" battles. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Of course, what constitutes a moderate is somewhat in the eyes of the beholder. In 538's models, we measure it by partisanship, i.e. how often a member of Congress dissents from her party, and we see robust effects. It's not surprising that Collins or Manchin won re-election. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

.@mattyglesias talked about this in his (paywalled, I think) newsletter today, but the most empirically robust electoral finding that most consistently gets ignored is that moderates DO in fact win elections more often, holding other factors constant. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

RT @notdred: Great thread on neutralizing sera of vaccinated folks vs. P.1 (Brazil) variant. Looks like from an immune standpoint it should… — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@MileHighBrendan Yeah, my prior at this point (well, mostly from looking at @youyanggu's numbers) that R increased from like 0.8-0.85 to 0.9-0.95. Which isn't fantastic by any means but could also be worse. It seems like both variants and vaccines could be near an inflection point so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@kwcollins @laurabronner Out of all of those, a presidential general cycle is probably the least informative since it's more correlated from race to race than a midterm or a primary. But even if you ignore that the Nov. 2020 cycle is like 5% of the overall data. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@kwcollins @laurabronner Well, we have a decent sample size! The pollster ratings now account for 6 presidential general cycles, 6 midterm cycles, 9 primary cycles (counting D and R primaries separately) plus myriad special elections and other one-offs. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@kwcollins @laurabronner Over the long run, yes, but one election isn't the long run. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@conorsen Plausible! But I also think the CDC is maybe not used to playing a "repeated game" (in a game theory sense) where the reputation for how you "bargain" matters. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@conorsen This sort of relates to what we were talking about earlier, where the CDC & WH (to the extent they're on the same page) are so into lowering expectations that it's not surprising that governors feel as though they need to adjust the guidance a bit in making policy decisions. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

What's kind of screwed up is that states like Texas and Florida that are eager to fully open up tend not to have made the vaccine available for essential workers yet, whereas the more "closed" states (though nowhere is truly closed) largely have. https://t.co/KzISbdaYKE https://t.co/jG0oKCxLQD — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@kwcollins @laurabronner It does mean accuracy; more specifically, predicted accuracy for the pollster going forward. We are evaluating all of this now and it's very possible we'll wind up changing the penalty/bonus based on mode. However, the 2020 general election is part of a larger body of evidence. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@kwcollins @laurabronner There are somewhat better metrics, we think (e.g. looking how a poll compares to others), but the bigger point is that one general election cycle is a really small sample size, especially in a presidential year where results up and down the ballot are highly correlated. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Looks like lots of good people involved with this for you sports analytics folks out there... — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@kwcollins @laurabronner Everything is super correlated so it's basically n=1? — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@MileHighBrendan Mask mandates are hard to enforce, so I don't know how much difference they ultimately make. Removing them because "FREEDOM!" and making a big political show of it sends exactly the wrong signal, though, and might reduce voluntary masking, too. — PolitiTweet.org