It’s fair to say 538 has been bearish on Bernie Sanders.
I used to be an admirer of Nate Silver and his empirical approach to covering elections. Not that the horserace ought to be the center of campaign journalism, but since media are going to focus on predicting who’s going to win, it seemed like Silver was approaching it as public opinion research rather than tea-leaf reading. When he left his perch at the New York Times to launch 538 as a freestanding enterprise, I wished him well in his pursuit of journalism that was based on testable information rather than on the opinions of powerful people.
My first hint that all was not right in Silverland was when he confidently declared, despite Donald Trump’s high poll ratings in 2015, that he would not be the Republican nominee (538, 8/11/15): “Our emphatic prediction is simply that Trump will not win the nomination.” Polling more than a year before the election famously doesn’t mean much, but this is a reason to not make predictions, not to predict that the opposite of the polls will happen. But not making predictions is hard to do if you’re in the prediction business, and so in the absence of useful data Silver and his crew substituted their own punditry–with embarrassing results.
As this campaign has gone along, it seems to me that the 538 crew have at times gone beyond the realm of punditry into the realm of hackery—that is, not just treating their own opinions as though they were objective data, but spinning the data so that it conforms to their opinions.
Take a 538 piece the other day (5/25/16) by Silver lieutenant Harry Enten, headlined “Sanders Isn’t Doing Well With True Independents” and arguing that “there is no sign that true independents disproportionately like Sanders.” A “true independent,” in this usage, is one who doesn’t lean toward the Democrats or Republicans; the idea that Sanders does relatively well with such voters is part of the argument that Sanders would be more electable than Clinton in a general election. Citing a recent Gallup poll (but using numbers beyond those available at the link provided), Enten reported that while Sanders does better than Clinton among Democratic-leaning independents, the same is not true with the true neutrals:
In the Gallup poll, Sanders had a 35 percent favorable rating among independents who don’t lean toward either party. Clinton’s favorable rating with that group was 34 percent.
Well, that seems very similar, doesn’t it? Enten added a caveat:
One could argue that Sanders has greater potential with these true independents than Clinton: Just 63 percent of them had formed an opinion of him, according to the Gallup poll, while 83 percent had done so for Clinton. But it’s also possible that these true independents will turn against him in greater numbers as they learn more about him.
Wait a second—comparing the percentage of independents who expressed a favorable opinion about the candidates with the percentage who expressed any opinion, you can calculate what Enten doesn’t give you, which is the percentage of unfavorable opinion for Clinton and Sanders among non-leaning independents. For Sanders, it’s 28 percent; for Clinton, it’s 49 percent. This is what pollsters would refer to as a “sign that true independents disproportionately like Sanders.”
I put it to you that if your headline is “Sanders Isn’t Doing Well With True Independents,” then concealing the fact that he has a net favorable rating among those voters of +7 percentage points, compared to his opponent’s -15 percentage points, is an attempt to deceive your readers.
Another example: a 538 piece headlined “The System Isn’t ‘Rigged’ Against Sanders” (5/26/16), in which Enten and Silver crunch some numbers and claim that Sanders would be doing worse if all states had primaries open to independent voters, compared to the actual mix of caucuses and closed and open primaries. The implication is that this is all Sanders supporters are talking about when they talk of the system being “rigged.” But take a look at how 538 was talking about Sanders before anyone got a chance to vote. Here’s Enten again (6/17/15):
Let’s imagine a case where Sanders wins Iowa and New Hampshire. In that world, you’d likely see the Democratic establishment rush in to try to squash Sanders, much as Republicans did to Newt Gingrich in 2012 after he won South Carolina….
Sanders has very little establishment backing: Of the 111 governors, senators and members of the House to have endorsed a Democratic candidate, 100 percent have endorsed Clinton….
Not only are early endorsements well correlated with the eventual outcome of the primary; in many cases, early state endorsers played a key role in helping faltering campaigns by providing strategic advice and organizational strength.
So from the beginning, 538 argued, Sanders had very little chance of getting the Democratic nomination, because if he showed any signs of winning, a Democratic establishment united against him would step in to “squash” him. If that’s not the definition of a “rigged” system, what is it?
Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org. He can be followed on Twitter: @JNaureckas.
You can send a message to 538 at contact@fivethirtyeight.com (Twitter:@fivethirtyeight). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
Silver’s previous work earned him some cachet – in other words, a “brand”.
What do you do with a brand?
You sell.
Is there any correlation between providing “data” that bolsters the party poobahs’ arguments, and the desire to “grow” one’s business?
Thank you for confirming what I’ve suspected for some time now.
Bernie Sanders applied for conscientious objector status during the Vietnam War; his application was eventually turned down, by which point he was too old to be drafted. Those of us who actually served in the US Military regard the C.O.’s as cowards.
That’s nice? What’s the relevancy here?
None whatsoever. I’ve seen the exact same words posted several other places, with just as much relevance. Somehow I picture a good ol’ boy with “The South Will Rise Again” on the back of his pickup truck driving around town, going into every store, and…
“Hello, Mr. Wilson! What brings you into Barnes & Noble today?”
“Bernie Sanders applied for conscientious objector status!”
“…that’s interesting, I didn’t know that. Is there something I can help you find?”
“The Vietnam War!”
“Okay, we have a wide selection over here in-”
“His application was eventually turned down!”
“I’m sorry, did you want to apply for a job? We have applications right over-”
“He was too old to be drafted!”
“…I’m sorry?”
“Cowards!”
*glares, then shuffles out of store*
*one of the cashiers walks over timidly*
“Are you okay, manager?”
“Yeah, but it beats the heck out of me what that was about.”
Love it.
Then I wonder for whom you’re voting because the other two major candidates also didn’t serve.
That’s a totally convincing argument, Wilson David.
Many of us who are voting in the elections regard the Vietnam War as one long war crime. And the same goes for our regime-changes in Iraq and Libya.
~
I served in the military (Sgt. E-5, Americal Division, Infantry, Vietnam 1969-70. I have great respect for the CO’s who had the courage and good sense to resist that godawful war. I did the easy thing, which was to salute and do what the government ordered. I’ve regretted it ever since.
Ooh, manly man went to war for… what? My pop was in the Iron Triangle in ’66. He saw what was the ultimate abuse of this country’s proud military, WHICH HAS NEVER CEASED SINCE. He came home a pacifist. Deal with it, Mr. Macho.
Speak for yourself, Jack@SS. I’m a veteran also. I volunteer at the VA 5 days a week. I speak to all kinds of veterans. THEY do not agree with you as a whole. Only veterans I’ve ever met with your attitude are fidiots that believe that just because we as a country is involved, we should be blind.
Luckily the MAJORITY of veterans are not that ignorant. So stuff it in your pocket and stop speaking for veterans. Most would smack you in your mouth for doing so.
My brother and I joined the Vietnam War in 1960, he considers it to be his gravest mistake, but as it turned me into a pacifist I consider it to be my greatest life experience.
Actually, Sanders’ support among veterans and active duty military is extremely high. This probably has something to do with his time on the Veterans Affairs Committee, where he was able to hash out a deal with John McCain to overhaul the V.A. in a desperately needed reform. This won him awards from both the V.F.W. and the American Legion.
That, and his demonstrable understanding that the best way to care for veterans is to create fewer of them by keeping us out of stupid wars.
Thanks, this is exceptionally well said .
It was an unjustified war anyway, and the US lost.
Those of us who actually served in the US Military mistakenly regard the C.O.’s as cowards.
There I fixed that for you.
Here’s a website that looks at numbers without the Horse Race. http://csiwodeadbodies.blogspot.com/2016/05/clinton-7-times-more-likely-to-win-in.html
Here’s a website that looks at numbers without the Horse race
nate ’30 pieces’ silver needs to grow a spine and stand up to this crap.
Great article, the bias can’t be any more obvious.
Good work, Jim. That “system isn’t ‘rigged'” piece is particularly egregious:
“Sanders fans have claimed that because caucuses have lower turnout the current national caucus and primary vote underrates how well Sanders is doing. In fact, the opposite is true. When we switch all caucuses over to primaries, Sanders actually does worse.”
The math Enten uses to determine this is, like the premise of his article, strictly Uranian. There’s no way–and the “no” there is absolute–to make a caucus equivalent to a primary in that way and Harry J. Enten knows it. He begins his case with Hillary Clinton’s “win” in the Washington state primary, which was, as even he describes it, purely a beauty-contest “primary.” All of the state’s delegates had already been awarded by a caucus; no candidate campaigned there after that. I haven’t been able to find any participation figures for Washington but how many people are going to participate in a “primary” in which there’s nothing at stake and no one competing for votes? Enten sort of acknowledges this, so why mention this faux “primary” at all?
Enten has to know the “estimates” he’s using are pure fantasy. Iowa was a virtual tie. Given to Clinton, it was most likely a victory for Sanders (that’s the only reason the Democrats have persisted in refusing to release the raw totals). The polling leading up to the caucus tells the same tale as polling in most of the rest of the U.S.; Sanders started out as an unknown with massive 30- and 40-point gaps with Clinton, sometimes even more, and as the race proceeded Clinton’s lead progressively vanished. By the end, it was a low-single-digit race, with every new poll declaring a change in the frontrunner. Polls in caucus states are typically of likely caucus participants, a much smaller group than would participate in a primary, but Enten asserts that if Iowa had held a primary instead of a caucus, Clinton would have won by a massive 24 points–a one-sided massacre of epic proportions. If Clinton supporters so decisively outnumbered Sanders supporters in the state–nearly 3 1/2 Clinton supporters for every 2 Bernie supporters–how did we get the caucus results we did? To find Enten’s conclusion at all plausible one must believe there was some sort of catastrophic breakdown in getting Clinton people to the caucus. Enten says he’s using a “demographic model” but as the press loves to point out, Sanders’ strongest demographic is white Democrats and Enten has Clinton utterly rolling over Sanders in one of the whitest states in the U.S.. Sounds more like his “demographic model” has sprung a leak. Many of his results are like that. Clinton won the Nevada caucus by 5 points; Enten has her winning a theoretical primary there by 29%. And so on.
Enten even pretends to provide numbers on what would happen if states with closed primaries had held open ones. It’s just a baseless exercise and Enten also appears to have committed a pretty basic fallacy in putting together his “demographic model.” He asserts that voting in the process this cycle has largely broken down along demographic lines, therefore he can employ this sort of demographic model but that, of course, assumes his own conclusion within the question. Voting has broken down along those demographic lines in the election as it’s being held but this is the very process Sanders’ supporters have asserted is rigged–the proposition Enten is trying to refute. He’s also ignoring things like the debate scheduling nonsense, which was not only changed but radically so and specifically to help Clinton, the fact that the head of the DNC, who is supposed to be neutral in the contest, is a former Clinton hand who has been doing everything she can to try to destroy his candidacy from the beginning, the funneling of funds raised for downballot races into Clinton’s coffers and so on.
It isn’t really correct to say the system is rigged against Sanders personally (though in some cases, such as the fiasco with the debate schedule, that’s proven true). It’s more accurate to say it’s rigged against anyone like Sanders. And that’s an empirical fact, not something subject to being waved away by this sort of silliness. In February, “Dirty Debbie” Wasserman Schultz, the head of the DNC has flat-out said the superdelegate system, only one aspect of this rigged process:
“Unpledged delegates [superdelegates] exist really to make sure that party leaders and elected officials don’t have to be in a position where they are running against grassroots activists.”
There were over 700,000 votes in Washington’s primary. Hillary took 52% of them, which is reflective of her overall performance in this primary season.
http://results.vote.wa.gov/results/current/President-Democratic-Party.html
Gee, I wonder what would happen to Bernie’s campaign if he was under investigation by the State Department and FBI?
Hillary’s performance is a reflection of the rigged system. Thanks for playing.
So all the millions of Americans who have voted for Hillary aren’t actually supporting her, they’re just “reflections of the rigged system”?
Whine Snivel Cry Wahhhhhhh. This gets very old.
It’s all so unfair to Bernie. I don’t know how he survived this long, given that everything is out to get him.
Is he going to cry or have surrogates cry because Putin is mean to him?
It’s not about whining. It’s not about Bernie, and it’s not about this election. It’s about the DNC. Whether Bernie wins or Bernie loses, there’s a problem that needs to be fixed.
It’s not just the DNC, it’s their mindless sycophants (like the idiot Wilby stoned) that need to be “fixed”. Validating their own ego choices trumps everything else to the point they behave like viscious trained attack dogs at even the slightest hint that “Her Highness” has huge negatives and too many shady dealings and will do terribly in November.
Yeah! Why won’t Bernie drop out? Hillary has been whining that for three months now and claiming that she has already been nominated. The Hillbots cry, “It’s not fair that Bernie plays to the end of the game, because he might catch up and win!”
It’s unfortunate that 538 does not appear to be doing even basic tallying of the numerous polls that match up Sanders and Clinton, respectively, against Trump.
For instance, tallies show us that in the past three months Sanders has outperformed Clinton in 60 of 72 polls pitting each of them against Trump. In March and April, Clinton beat Trump every time. So did Sanders, but with larger point spreads, outperforming her by nearly 5 points on average. (Source: BernieWorks.com.)
As these tallies reveal, things got interesting in May when Trump became the apparent GOP nominee and corporate media sought to make Sanders irrelevant by prematurely anointing Clinton as the presumptive Dem nominee.
To his credit, Sanders refused to be irrelevented. :-)
In the past two weeks Clinton has lost to the ascendant Trump 9 times in 22 polls (= 55% wins with 1 tie) while Sanders was undefeated against Trump in the 13 polls that included him (= 92% wins with 1 tie).
Clinton’s average point spread was an alarming 1.6 points, below the average margin of error and virtually a dead heat with Trump. By contrast, Sanders has shown Iron Man durability, trouncing Trump by an average 9.5 points.
What Nate Silver would make of this, I have no idea.
The reality appears so decisive, a massive twist of the space-time continuum might be required to make Clinton look strong against Trump and Sanders weak.
Barring an alternative reality, if Sanders and Clinton each continue their current arc then Democratic superdelegates will face a harsh dilemma: they can back Clinton, or beat Trump.
They won’t be able to do both.
At least not in this space-time continuum.
Enten is desperate to cover his ass. He confidently predicted a Hillary waltz last July. Every Bernie vote is an embarrassment to him. When your rep is built on data analytics and you boldly make a spectacularly wrong prediction, you can:
1. Say “I was wrong. How interesting. Let’s use data to examine what it means.”
2. Say “What are you talking about??? I was right all along, data be damned.”
Enten is a pure hack. HIllary/DNC shill to the max.
One additional detail you didn’t mention …
I have been following the 538 polls for the entire primary season. I noticed a while back that there was a decided lag on pro-Sanders polls and states. So, in a state where Sanders was expected to do well, the polling reports tended to take longer to appear. When something was a positive for Clinton, however, those results tended to go up faster.
I would really like to know if there were different planned stories, contingent upon who won a state-e.g. with Kansas and Oklahoma, was there an alternative story planning if Clinton were to win apart from liberals being super-extra whacky in red states that the folks at 538 came up with to try and explain away a Sanders win? If they did have different stories planned, what does that say about their objective analyses?
What utter nonsense this article truly is:
1) They based their Trump prediction on his lack of securing establishment endorsements, and his populism, both of which was out of sync with the majority of the party, and both of which in previous years were good indicators.
2) Sanders isn’t being attacked by the GOP and general electorate is ignorant of his polices. His numbers would fall if they were. So no, he doesn’t do very well with actual swing voters.
3) “strategic advice and organizational strength”
Yes, and that’s not what Sanders and his supporters mean by rigged as you well know.
To be clear, Nate & Company at 538 actually has the statistics they are quoting wrong as well, because they failed to look at/isolate other causes that could explain the data.
Here, take a look: https://joftius.wordpress.com/2016/05/29/fivethiryeight-is-wrong-the-system-is-rigged-against-sanders/
Silver has already noted some problems with his predictions. See http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-i-acted-like-a-pundit-and-screwed-up-on-donald-trump/
But the business about the system being rigged against Sanders is not very compelling. When 538 says that the establishment would try to “squash” Sanders, that needn’t be understood as the system being rigged against him. It could just be interpreted as most of the major figures in the party taking a more active role in campaigning for Clinton over Sanders.
If anything the system is in many places rigged against Clinton, as the primary vs. caucus results in Washington and Nebraska demonstrate. When we turn to the Sanders supporters to hear their response about that, all we hear are crickets.
That’s also why when you hear Sanders and his surrogates talk about reforming the nominating process for future elections, it’s always about getting rid of superdelegates and closed primaries. Never a peep about replacing caucuses with primaries.
538 has always been a thinly veiled establishment democrat cheerleader squad (and of course the New York Times has been publishing blatant hit pieces on Trump for being a potential threat to the annointed one).
If they want to write opinion pieces saying the guy is a jerk then by all means do so, but don’t try dressing up blind partisanship as ‘neutral observation’. They have both lost all credibility.
Y’know, Jim, if you had spent more time GOTV in places like the Deep South, the Rust Belt, New York, and CA instead of writing articles criticizing Nate Silver at 538 then maybe Bernie might be in a better spot right now.