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Politico's Dylan Byers made a mistake last October. His critique of Nate Silver, suggesting that The Times's data guru might be a "one-term celebrity" if his predictive model wasn't borne out on election day, woke the beast. Byers's column, a benchmark in the history of ill-advised, unclear, erroneous attacks, has led Silver to take every single available opportunity to humiliate and mock Politico, particularly when it engages in data analysis. It's like Silver's echoing that line from No Country For Old Men, in which Josh Brolin's character tells Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh that he plans to make him "a special project of mine." But Silver fits better as the Chigurh character, a man set on ruthlessly obliterating his opponents, far past the point at which any further destruction is necessary. "You don't have to do this," Politico pleads. Silver smiles — "People always say the same thing" — and pulls the trigger.
Last night, Politico posted new analysis of the way in which providing a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants might affect electoral politics. The story's point, in short: There will be more Latino voters, which likely benefits Democrats. This isn't a complex argument, of course; one of the reasons that the Republican Party is putting a new emphasis on working out a deal on immigration is that it wants to bolster its support among Latino voters. Those who might follow a new path to citizenship are only a small percentage of that entire population, but every vote counts.