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   XPost: alt.society.liberalism, alt.sixtyplus, alt.politics.democrats   
   XPost: alt.gossip.celebrities   
   From: clitteigh@yahoo.com   
      
   Or a lot of media commentators and predictors -- famous and not so --   
   will call in sick Wednesday.   
      
   ======================   
      
      
   "Please, give us more pollsters and fewer pundits"   
      
   By Erik Wemple   
   November 2,  2012   
      
      
      
   On MSNBC’s “The Daily Rundown” on Wednesday, host Chuck Todd was   
   presenting a variety of electoral college outcomes for the Nov. 6   
   presidential election. With the aid of a clever interactive monitor,   
   Todd was shifting around various battleground states to explain Mitt   
   Romney’s most plausible route to a White House-clinching 270 electoral   
   votes.   
      
   In the middle of it all, his voice exasperated, he issued this caveat:   
   “When I’m doing this, I’m not saying this is where NBC says the race   
   is right now. I’m going through scenarios, so don’t overreact on   
   Twitter.”   
      
   Compounded by a treatable case of socialmediaphobia, Todd was   
   displaying a bit of old-fashioned caution, ducking behind the curtain   
   of “I’m just a reporter, folks.” How out of touch. Campaign 2012 has   
   seen news outlets go ever more deeply into making news, not merely   
   reporting on it. They don’t just conduct polls, as they have for   
   years. They have embraced the art of computer modeling, generating a   
   constantly revised picture of the national political scene.   
      
   More noise than illumination, you might suppose. Perhaps, but only if   
   you ignore all the noise that the media’s long-standing pundit-centric   
   product has churned out for decades.   
      
   Watch for it: Just as fact-checking operations have gone viral across   
   journalism in recent years, modeling and forecasting franchises are   
   poised for multiplication. These days, the New York Times, Real Clear   
   Politics and the Huffington Post run highly trafficked poll-   
   aggregation machines offering a look at toss-up states, who’s got the   
   lead and a lot of other stuff you didn’t realize you were curious   
   about. Other organizations that matter in political coverage — from   
   the major networks, including NBC, to cable outlets to newspapers and   
   universities — sponsor their own polling, offer their own number-   
   crunching services on polls or both.   
      
   Bruises attach as easily to the pollsters and forecasters as they do   
   to the fact-checkers and political reporters, all of whom sustain bias   
   allegations and general nastiness in the course of business. The   
   hazard of these occupations is that, at some point, you’ll have to   
   issue information that displeases one side or the other. When you do,   
   there are a bunch of people on Twitter ready to overreact.   
      
   Nate Silver, the brain behind the mile-deep polling analysis at the   
   New York Times’ FiveThirtyEight blog, has made news this election   
   cycle as both modeling guru and punching bag. Silver’s blog aggregates   
   and analyzes massive amounts of poll data and organizes them into   
   clean, snapshot impressions of who’s up and who’s down in the   
   presidential race and other contests. The FiveThirtyEight model has   
   consistently favored President Obama over Romney, creating an obvious   
   opening for critics. MSNBC morning host Joe Scarborough, in a remark   
   that reflects many conservatives’ reactions to Silver’s oeuvre,   
   recently suggested that the poll aggregator was an ideologue and a   
   joke.   
      
   The swell of Silver-centric commentary in the campaign’s home stretch   
   leaves search engines with a bit of sorting to do. When he’s not   
   getting slammed for putting out results that favor Obama, he’s being   
   applauded for his quantitative rigor or his understanding of his   
   craft. Politico, AtlanticWire, BuzzFeed, The Post and others have all   
   weighed in.   
      
   Knocking those who deal in polling data and voter demographics isn’t a   
   towering intellectual challenge. There’s always disparity in survey   
   numbers. In 2008, for example, pollsters whiffed on the New Hampshire   
   Democratic primary, showing then-newcomer Obama with the edge over   
   eventual winner Hillary Rodham Clinton.   
      
   Pollsters have never promised precision. That’s why their surveys come   
   equipped with margins of error. Paul J. Lavrakas, president of the   
   American Association for Public Opinion Research, cautions that   
   polling is “not pure science . . . it’s subject to a lot of threats,”   
   including imprecision and “biases.” For example, pollsters have yet to   
   lick the problem of accounting for the growing number of cellphone-   
   only citizens, which increases the inaccuracy of surveys that tend to   
   reach land-line users only.   
      
   To its eternal discredit, polling is never omniscient, especially in a   
   tight race such as this one. “The interesting dynamic in this race is   
   the number of toss-up states has expanded in the last three weeks,”   
   says John McIntyre, founder of Real Clear Politics. “It reflects the   
   uncertainty out there. We don’t know what’s going to happen. No one   
   knows what’s going to happen.”   
      
   The churn of polling results, too, feeds a fast-twitched Internet not   
   known for sowing a deep understanding of our country. State polls,   
   national polls and surveys of all kinds keep landing, multiple times   
   per day, giving Linkville just what it’s built for: a never-ending   
   string of revisions, corrections, annotations and amplifications, each   
   one worth more page views.   
      
   Yet whatever its drawbacks, a media world populated by more and more   
   Nate Silvers and their reams of data promises a brighter future than   
   the one to which Americans had resigned themselves: the world of the   
   pundit. As Silver himself says, “I think we represent a counterweight   
   to a lot of the BS, frankly, that you hear in the mainstream media.”   
      
   One example here: “momentum,” a poisonous word for Silver but one   
   frequently used by pundits to describe a campaign’s ups and downs.   
   “When the term ‘momentum’ is used, I think that’s a red flag that the   
   coverage you’re reading is suffering from bias,” Silver says, noting   
   that the bias could take any form, from a pundit’s political leanings   
   to simply a desire for a close contest that’s more fun to cover.   
      
   Everyone agrees that Romney secured “momentum” around the time of his   
   shellacking of the president in the first debate on Oct. 3. But how   
   long did it last? In an Oct. 25 post, Silver argued that if public   
   opinion mattered in computing momentum, Romney’s version would have   
   petered out a week or two after the debate. However, he said, pundits   
   kept referring to it as an active dynamic in the race for weeks.   
      
   On the “Today” show on Oct. 27, Scarborough minted this take on the   
   election: “So for Romney, I think he’s going to be hoping more for   
   this momentum that is sweeping from the first debate to continue   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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