I love Nate Silver and I think his analysis isn’t just the best in the business…he’s got the business to himself. But there is one problem, and that is that he’s relying on polls. He’ll tell you all the limitations of his analysis because he’s totally honest and has complete integrity, but there are still limitations. If you have bad or meaningless input, the output won’t be much better. That’s why this insight from Josh Kraushaar is important:
This should be a golden age of political prognostication. Any armchair strategist with an Internet connection can get loads of insider information and blog or tweet their viewpoints. Congressional polling, once a true commodity because few media firms commissioned it regularly, has proliferated, with numerous start-up pollsters releasing data that’s eaten up on a daily basis by junkies.
But amid all the information, I’m finding that we’ve lost a lot of old-fashioned common sense in evaluating and understanding races. We’ve become beholden to numbers, any numbers, at the expense of states’ and districts’ fundamental characteristics and candidates’ and campaigns’ own unique qualities.
Do you remember how one advertisement from Joe Sestak crashed Arlen Specter’s poll numbers and effectively ended his career? That was somewhat predictable. Maybe we couldn’t anticipate the exact ad, or that it would be so devastating, but we knew that Specter had glaring weaknesses that could and would be exploited by any halfway competent campaign. But you couldn’t predict that Specter would lose based on polls that came out before the campaign was truly engaged.
We know that the recent Republican nominees have real weaknesses. They’ve said and done things that are embarrassing, or hard to justify, or that they will now disavow (effectively flip-flopping). Their positions are out of the mainstream, and their personal histories are often checkered. They’ve lied on tape and in print. They’ve embellished their resumes. One of them has even sent around links to images of bestiality by email. Most of the impact of these weaknesses is not being seen in current polling data because the public has not yet been exposed to media that discusses it.
I believe that this election is going to be another YouTube election. And private citizens using their creative powers to make viral videos are going to be an extremely important part of our success. George Allen called someone ‘macaca.’ We have dozens of macaca moments to choose from in this election cycle. We need to get to work.
Polls right now show important warning signs, but they mean little when you consider what that campaign is actually going to look like. If you are fair-minded, there aren’t more than two or three Senate races that can be called even. Our candidates totally outclass their candidates. That’s going to show. But we need to do our part in this. So, I hope Jed Lewison is getting ready. I hope there are dozens of unknown Jed Lewisons waiting to emerge with new creative video.
