Republicans Desperate to Spin Romney as the Front-Runner Are Becoming 'Nate Silver Truthers'
What do you do when reality doesn't look good for your team? Republicans just create their own alternate reality.
October 24, 2012
We are looking at a very tight race right now, with a virtual tie in national polling. But we don't elect presidents by popular vote, and Obama has enjoyed a lead in the race to get 270 votes in the Electoral College every single day of this campaign – Romney has never led in any of the Electoral College projections.
But in recent days, the Romney-Ryan campaign has claimed that it's moving ahead. As Jonathan Chait noted, “This is a bluff. Romney is carefully attempting to project an atmosphere of momentum, in the hopes of winning positive media coverage and, thus, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.” Despite zero evidence that Romney has made any gains since receiving a healthy bounce from the first debate, reporters appear to be buying it, with a raft of lazy stories about Mitt Romney's supposed “momentum.”
A significant problem for conservatives bent on spinning this alternate reality is New York Times ' polling guru Nate Silver and his 538 forecast model, which called 49 out of 50 states accurately in 2008 and is considered the industry's gold standard (the model also pretty much nailed the 2010 mid-terms). As I write, Silver's model gives Barack Obama a 68 percent chance of winning reelection, with a projected 288 Electoral College votes.
As one might expect in such circumstances, Silver is now becoming a target of the Right. We've seen 'poll truthers' who think all the big pollsters are intentionally skewing their results in Obama's favor, and 'debate truthers” who insist that moderators are in the tank and the questions are rigged to make Romney look bad. Now we're seeing the emergence of 'Nate Silver truthers,' who attack the numbers-cruncher as if he's a pundit expressing a personal opinion rather than a statistics geek who developed a very robust computer model. And they're using the same tactics they deploy to deny climate change – launching ad hominem attacks on an expert -- calling him corrupt -- rather than offering a criticism of the methodology of his model, a criticism they don't have the technical knowledge to come up with.
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