Nate Silver

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

It's complicated! Some progressive ideas (e.g. minimum wage increases) ARE popular. But the idea that nearly every facet of the agenda is usually reflects some combination of i) selective memory and ii) reliance on *partisan* polling that employs manipulative question wording. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Democrats' COVID policy is also a mixed bag. Vaccine mandates started out as being modestly popular but have since become modestly unpopular, for example. https://t.co/nFer1LHOvQ https://t.co/OuHgxDGcJB — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Biden's signature policy priority, Build Back Better, is in the "mixed bag" category. Its popularity is lukewarm, both for the package as a whole and for the child tax credit in particular. https://t.co/FTUaGSVIT5 https://t.co/rHLKSxvSdE — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

This is basically wrong, as a blanket statement. Some ideas championed by progressives are fairly popular in nonpartisan polling (voting rights is one example). Some ideas (such as on educational policy) are fairly unpopular. Some are a mixed bag. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@bendreyfuss The generous view is that people mistake the question of "Is the Democratic Party a left-wing party?" for "Has the Democratic Party moved left?". The former question is fairly subjective and harder to answer. The latter has an empirically attainable answer ("Yes, obv"). — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@yeselson This is a little esoteric since not that many people have looked the raw data, but Bonica's work on the ideology of campaign donors suggests a substantial move to the left. https://t.co/ta805YxL4d — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Another thing that has changed is that *influential* Democrats (loosely defined as people who have big platforms and/or who donate a lot of money and/or who work in politics) were once more centrist than rank-and-file Democratic voters but are now more liberal than them. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Now, if you squint, you might notice that there *hasn't* been much change among rank-and-file Democrats *since* 2016. A lot of candidates overestimated how liberal the electorate was in 2020 following Bernie's success in 2016. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Since we're talking about shifts within the Democratic party and this data came out today, notable that 50% of Democratic voters now identify as liberal, as compared to just 25% in 1994. https://t.co/QDv0kfOu7S https://t.co/o0XuUEuMnl — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@jonmladd Yeah. Or, say, John McCain, who wasn't a centrist in quite the same way that Clinton was but was fairly heterodox by the standards of a presidential nominee. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Compare the 2020 and 2008 platforms (never mind, say, 1992) and that's an *exceptionally* hard argument to defend. https://t.co/lmYCNmSJP5 https://t.co/Sx0ctRxWHg — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

The best way to understand Biden is not as a moderate or a liberal but as someone who, with a good deal of success, has always tried to position himself at the center of the Democratic Party. So as the Democratic Party has moved left, so has Biden. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

The best way to understand Biden is not as a moderate or a liberal but as someone who, with a good deal of success, has always tried to position himself at the center of the Democratic Party. So as the Democratic Party has moved left, so had Biden. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@SeanTrende @jbarro To me the big question is what you do with your 2nd guess. There are various ways such as ALIEN/SHORT to play the 10 most common letters in your first two guesses, which produces a high success rate in getting it within 4 guesses but concedes that you'll never get it in 2. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@SeanTrende Also I think consonants tend to provide more information about the position of other letters, e.g. an 'N' in the first position is almost always followed by a vowel, a 'T' is generally followed by an 'H', an 'R' or a vowel, etc. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@SeanTrende Yeah, I'm the same way. Maybe a computer algorithm would do better with vowels. But, for a human like me it's a lot easier to start with the consonants and "fill in" the vowels rather than the other way around. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@joshtpm @whignewtons They did find a shift with 'hard' identifiers, too, although yeah a lot of the change is because of leaners. And I do think the party ID questions is more valuable *without* leaners; otherwise it starts to become redundant with e.g. the generic ballot. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

It's sort of like saying "Sure, the National Weather Service can tell you the probably that it will rain tomorrow or what the high temperature might be. But hurricanes and tornadoes? Forget it." — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

I'm sympathetic to the CDC, but making "rapid decisions based on scant evidence" isn't some esoteric function... it's how life works in any crisis! And even if you're only in a crisis 5% of the time, what you do in that 5% is probably more important than the other 95%. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@conorsen It's really hard to know without panel data. It did seem clear in Virginia that there are a fair number of people who dislike Trump but will vote for a Youngkin-style Republican under certain conditions. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@robbysoave @SeanTrende One nerdy protip is that set of Wordle solutions generally doesn't include plurals (e.g. DUCKS will never be the solution) so you probably don't want an 'S' in the 5th slot. STARE is probably better than RATES, for example. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

So, pick your hypothesis: 1) Party ID is very stable, so big shifts reflect nonresponse bias 2) Party ID is usually fairly stable, so a big shift like this is really bad for Ds 3) Party ID isn't that stable, so this doesn't tell us any more than e.g. shifts in Biden approval — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@SeanTrende Can we talk about how ADIEU is a terrible first guess? — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

RT @fawfulfan: Okay, here's exactly how that would play out: Manchin immediately goes to the press revealing Biden is illegally using the D… — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@owasow From as best as I can tell from survey data, people probably overestimate their risk of severe outcomes from COVID rather than underestimate it, see e.g.: https://t.co/9cgSrU18n3 — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

They're coming down in the Northeast. The positive test rate in NYC, which is less subject to test availability than the overall # of cases, was 13% yesterday vs. 20% a week earlier. It's real and a pretty sharp shift. Not sure about the rest of the country. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

People are frustrated about COVID and inflation, it's tough to get stuff done with just 50 votes in the Senate, it's a polarized country, etc. I'm not a strict determinist about this stuff, but I think political commentators tend to overstate the importance of the WH's messaging. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

I don't think much of these "focus" arguments, particularly given that there are few issues that people say Biden is focusing *too much* upon. For example, only 25% say he's focusing too much on voting rights as compared to 41% who say too little. https://t.co/FUcDNRNNFn — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Having exactly 50 senators, one of whom is from a state Trump won by 39 points, is far from the worst possible outcome for Democrats, but it probably leads to the largest gap between expectations and reality. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@TheStalwart I think what happened is there are some Brooklyn neighborhoods that are actually cool, but there are also some *nice*-but-not-*cool* Brooklyn neighborhoods that people tried to launder as cool based on Brooklyn's general reputation for coolness, and now the market has wised up. — PolitiTweet.org