Hey, remember Nate Silver? He was the statistician/political fortune teller who caused a firestorm by saying that Mitt Romney was going to get slaughtered at the polls back in 2012. Republicans called him a hack, doubted his numbers, and - when Silver correctly predicted the race in all 50 states + DC - they ended up eating their words.
Back in July he predicted that, while Democrats were vulnerable, the midterm battle for the Senate was basically a toss-up. Dems had taken some comfort in this, admitting that it was a going to be a difficult year but promising a win nonetheless.
Yesterday on ABC's This Week, Democrat jaws hit the floor when Silver predicted there was a 60% chance that the GOP would win the necessary 6 seats to take the Senate. He also said there was a 30% probability of a “big win” – winning up to 11 seats.
Now, it's still awfully early for this. Obviously anything can happen in 7 months and there’s always the caveat that Republicans have a way of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. So, it's not time to put too much stock in Silver's numbers. Not yet, anyway.
The interesting thing about his prediction is that it's driving Democrats straight up the wall. After all, Silver was their golden boy back in 2012. They loved -loved - to gloat over the sheer brilliance of his "genius prediction model." Now, they’re not so thrilled with it.
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is pushing back against Silver today, in a 1,000 word memo designed to trash the prediction. They complain that his numbers are off, that his methods are flawed, and that he's "been wrong in the past." While they claim his work is "groundbreaking," they seem tosimultaneously argue that he's not much better than a carnival weight-guesser.
In other words, they're saying pretty much all the same stuff that Republicans were saying just before Romney got clobbered. That's so odd, because for the last six months - while Senate control appeared to be slowly slipping through their fingers - they had no problem leaning on Silver's July "toss up" forecast.
I don't know what could have changed....
