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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31011 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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Nate Silver left FiveThirtyEight amid layoffs and Elliott Morris, ABC's new hire immediately set about ruining it. A threat he sent to conservative polling company Rasmussen Reports:

Rasmussen must explain the nature of its relationship with several right-leaning blogs and online media outlets, which have given us reason to doubt the ethical operation of the polling firm... Failure to reply, or failure to notify us of an intent to speedily reply, by the end of the day on Friday, June 30th, 2023 will be taken as a final concession of our grounds for a ban. The ban would take effect imminently thereafter.

As Nate Silver puts it, Why, unless you’re a dyed-in-the-wool left-leaning partisan, would having a “relationship with several right-leaning blogs and online media outlets” lead one to “doubt the ethical operation of the polling firm”?. I agree with Silver's overall attitude on the new direction of his company: hope ABC will stop use of 538 brand so it isn't associated with me.

Some people are probably mad at ABC for being partisan hacks but frankly that's business as usual. I'm mad because FiveThirtyEight was one of the only good analysis sites out there and these vandals are going to turn it into another factory pumping out generic progressive sludge. God damnit! 538 was the best in the business, where am I supposed to go for election forecasts now?

Crikey, my existing view of 538 commentary (outside of their polls) is that they possibly could be more progressive if they tried, but that they would have to try very hard.

If the new regime is "You are conservative? To the gulag!" then wow. Nate got out at the right time (I think he's a lefty himself, but at least he can produce good data even if he then has to write a post about why it's terrible the Bad People are slightly getting an advantage in Woollybully, ND).

"You are conservative? To the gulag!"

What are you havering on about. The controversy here is not that Elliot Morris is threatening to exclude Rasmussen because conservatism is bad, rather the exclusion is being considered on the grounds that Rasmussen is a partisan agency that produces Republican-friendly polling deliberately. This is still a silly thing to do for the reasons Nate points out, but the reason their close affiliation with conservative organisations is somewhat incriminating, or at least suspicious, in the eyes of Morris, is that it calls into question the motivation behind their polling.

Upthread, people are saying that Rasmussen is as partisan as the average polling company, but it's the only one that's partisan for Republicans.

If you accept that claim, then you'd expect to see a story like:

The controversy here is not that Elliot Morris is threatening to exclude Nessumsar because progressivism is bad, rather the exclusion is being considered on the grounds that Nessumsar is a partisan agency that produces Democrat-friendly polling deliberately. This is still a silly thing to do for the reasons Nate points out, but the reason their close affiliation with progressive organisations is somewhat incriminating, or at least suspicious, in the eyes of Morris, is that it calls into question the motivation behind their polling.

several times over, for the companies with the same amount (but opposite valence) of partisanship.

The partisan lean per se was not the cause of the letter. After all, there are other R-biased pollsters he didn't go after. Harris for instance has a similar average overestimate of Rs to Rasmussen. The crucial point was their close relationship to explicitly Republican/conservative outlets and institution.

The crucial point was their close relationship to explicitly Republican/conservative outlets and institution.

I'll repeat myself: would a close relationship to explicitly Democrat/progressive outlets and institutions trigger the same response? I don't think so, and neither does Nate Silver:

If you wanted to argue that pollsters and other people working in public opinion should be more austere about disclosing their political opinions, I could maybe get on board with that. But if that were the basis for banning pollsters, you’d have to wipe out dozens of pollsters from the FiveThirtyEight ledger. (And frankly, it’s not the sort of philosophy that Morris tends to espouse.) I guess I can’t know for sure, but I strongly doubt that Morris would view being friendly with left-wing political figures as something that might “cloud their judgement in the operation of a public poll”.

https://natesilver.substack.com/p/polling-averages-shouldnt-be-political

I think this is a quite different claim. What I suspect is the case here is that the undoubtedly Democratic views of the 538 team lead them, consciously or perhaps more likely not, to be more suspicious of right-leaning pollsters. Which is to say that they genuinely do think Rasmussen is guilty of uniquely bad practice, but perhaps yes, their ideological dispositions brought them to that conclusion. So I don't think Morris considers it targeting of Conservatives per se, he just sincerely thinks that Rasmussen are unusually unscrupulous pollsters.

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