I came across an article in The Nation Magazine titled “Stats Bros” Are Sucking the Life Out of Politics by Leif Weatherby and had to comment. The “Stats Bros” he is talking about are media gurus like Steve Kornacki (pictured above) at MSNBC and Nate Silver at ABC’s 538. Mostly, they use poll data to predict who is going to win the next election. Kornacki and Silver are also used by their networks to predict the winners of sporting events. Weatherby’s criticism of them is that “Stats bros need to understand that politics isn’t data; it’s passion, stories, and rhetoric.” My take on “Stats Bros” is that voting and survey data are a reflection of the passion, stories, and rhetoric.
The Allure of Predictions
Weatherby goes on to discuss Bayesian statistics. Significantly, this is a school of thought in statistics arguing that prior assumptions about data can be updated with new information. In a sense, everyone is a Bayesian. The other school of thought in statistics is the frequentist school championed by R.A Fisher. Conversely, this states that you should clear your minds of previous assumptions. You should just observe the outcome of the next election and comment on that.
Silver and the other bros correctly predicted the outcome of the 2008 and 2012 elections. Subsequently, they missed Trump’s win in 2016 and a few senate races in 2022. Silver has left 538 after being laid off by Disney. He was only as good as his last prediction.
For this site, we do try to capture the stories as well as the stats. We conduct interviews as well as crunch the data. People tend to get hyper focused on the polls in politics. The horse race in politics is hypnotic and distracts from other meaningful patterns. While we cannot ignore the horse, race we must focus on the human side of numbers. In summary, what forces are driving the outcomes.