Nate Silver and Stuart Stevens from 2023

[Gelman addresses some similar points here.]

I've been meaning to talk about this exchange since it happened, but it's just as well that I waited. Difficult to beat the timing on this one.

Fair question. Here's the answer:

-@VP defeated an incumbent Democratic DA in SF. Started out third in three person race. Made runoff but trailed 33% to 37% against incumbent. Won with 56%.

-Ran for AG in Ca. against LA DA Steve Cooley, strongest Republican not named… https://t.co/2YqpP3JNig

— Stuart Stevens (@stuartpstevens) September 15, 2023

Cooley was fairly popular & had a bigger base of support as LA Dist Atty. LA Times endorsed him. Harris got through a bloody primary. She was outspent pretty heavily. Cooley should have won with relative ease, blew the race late.https://t.co/GkUk55bm4R

— David Dayen (@ddayen) September 15, 2023

 

Gene Maddaus writing for the LA Weekly, November 24, 2010 [Emphasis added.]

Whatever the outcome of the attorney general's race, it's clear that Steve Cooley led most of the way and then blew it in the final days.

That's because Cooley ran a tentative and complacent campaign. If he loses, and trends suggest he will, it will be thanks to several tactical mistakes, an indifference to stumping for votes, and a gaffe on pensions.

Cooley can also blame Meg Whitman, whose 12-point loss probably sealed his defeat. But the fact remains that he could have won with a more aggressive campaign. Herewith, a post-mortem analysis.

Kamala Harris declared her intention to run for attorney general in the afterglow of the 2008 presidential race. She was a rising star, a member in good standing of Generation Obama. Like the president, she was a biracial candidate who had proven she could attract white votes.

But the glow wore off as Obama's approval ratings dipped, and by the time Steve Cooley entered the race early this year, Harris was all but written off.

She was a San Franisco liberal. She opposed the death penalty. In an anti-Obama year, she was an Obama clone.

Polls consistently showed her trailing Cooley by about five points, though a large chunk of the electorate remained undecided. Conventional wisdom held that he would do well in L.A. County, his home turf, because he was seen as a competent prosecutor, not a partisan Republican.

 

In 2010, Ca. Republican party realized by July their only hope for state wide victory was in the AG race with the very popular LA DA.

Jerry Brown was going to crush Meg Whitman. Newsom was never in doubt for Lt. Gov. No R. was going to beat Boxer. No other races were in play.… https://t.co/9kccnAn2Ui

— Stuart Stevens (@stuartpstevens) September 15, 2023

 

The tweet is yet another reminder of how lazy Nate Silver has gotten. He ignores two of the three races cited by Stevens, runs one metric, doesn't bother to look at other equally relevant numbers such as initial position in the polls, completely leaves out important context like campaign spending, the endorsement of the LA Times and the fact that Cooley went into the race as the popular district attorney of LA representing about one in four Californians, as compared with less than one tenth of that represented by Harris as the district attorney of San Francisco. Silver then goes on to draw a sweeping conclusion and adds an LOL just to push the dickishness level over the top.

There is a bit of an analogy here with Harvard's Avi Loeb. Both he and Silver are experts in their fields. Silver knows a great deal about certain aspects of political science while Loeb has done seminal work in astrophysics, but those are both big subjects and it is possible to be highly knowledgeable in parts of those disciplines and completely ignorant of others. Both men have been opining outside of their areas of expertise, and they have been doing so with an entirely inappropriate level of confidence.

This is also a prime example of one of the driving narratives of recent political coverage, hapless Kamala. Along with Trump's followers will abandon him after he loses an election, DeSantis has a lock on the nomination, and Dobbs won't matter, this is one of the stories that has guided journalists over the last four years. By now, two of these have been completely discredited and the other two are looking highly questionable. If you are new to this game, you probably think that being proven this wrong this often would humble Silver and Barro and all the other pundits and big-name reporters who have staked so much of their reputations on these claims, but what we've seen instead is defensiveness, denial, and evermore tortured logic trying to prop up failed arguments.