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"They’re [Politico] trying to cover [politics] like sports, but not in an intelligent way at all," math genie/political wizard Nate Silver said a new interview released today. "In politics, you can have a month where nothing of import whatsoever happens. But you still have to have Politico produce a paper seven times a week and that's when they're trying to start trouble." Doing the simple math, seven times, carry the — Nate Silver is not fond of Politico. And that's news because Silver is such a big player in the political field and so is Politico, and well, for political wonks, this little catfight is delicious.
Silver was saying all of this in a podcast with with ESPN's Bill Simmons's "The BS Report," but it wasn't like Silver was actually saying all these things out of the blue. There's a point in the podcast where Simmons asks Silver about Politico's Dylan Byers quasi-hitpiece which asked in its headline: "Nate Silver: One-term celebrity?" In that piece, Byers included lines like this one: "For all the confidence Silver puts in his predictions, he often gives the impression of hedging. But this was the the sledgehammer:
What matters for Silver is that the president wins and that he ends up with a total number of electoral votes somewhere in the ballpark of whatever Silver predicts on the afternoon of Nov. 6. And even then, you won't know if he actually had a 50.1 percent chance or a 74.6 percent chance of getting there.
Well, Silver called all 50 states correctly for the second presidential election in a row, which means he gets to have an exchange like this complete with Silver's funny Dylan Byers voice (the exchange happens around 48 minutes into the hour-plus podcast):
