But isn't this (similarly to Obama's increasing number of endorsements in '08) more a case of "the establishment" backing Kerry since he had gained momentum and appearing increasingly likely to win, rather than the endorsements causing him to win the nomination? The same seemingly applies to 1988 as well (in which both Gephardt and Gore had more endorsement points than Dukakis shortly before Iowa).
Yes, except the point of the model is that candidates who gained momentum and then received institutional endorsements tend to continue the momentum...those who don't, do not. Hence my reference to Santorum, among others. You're effectively arguing it's exclusively a trailing indicator, but the evidence doesn't really gel with that.
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1-He never did this in the past. He may have tracked endorsements in 2008 but only because it mattered for superdelegates. I don't recall him ever doing so in 2012. And in 2008 Silver was actually pretty skeptical of the media's whenever they did one of those "Hey Politician X from state that's coming up to vote just endorsed Hillary/Obama DOES THIS CHANGE EVERYTHING?" stories.
The first part is irrelevant. Debate the merits of the model, not the motivation. The second part is a strawman of how the model works.
2-Just look at it. You not only have Jeb! in first and Trump with zero, but Christie, Kasich and HUCKABEE are even beating Cruz. This has about zero relevance to the actual campaign. You're accusing him of adopting an unreasonable model based on the current campaign. No one is contesting the model has done a poor predictive job this year. We're discussing whether it was reasonable going into the campaign. No one in this thread is arguing that Silver shouldn't have been louder and more transparent about the "unknown unknowns" relating to the model, especially as it became increasingly obvious those were a big problem for it this year.
3-He's assigning objective numerical values to endorsements like that can be done. It reminds me of how teenage posters like to say things"If *candidate* picks *Governor/Senator* as their running mate, then they will gain X% in that home state and Y% in neighboring state." Yes VP picks matter but not like that. And similarly it's kind of silly to say that the Governor of Idaho or Wyoming's endorsement is worth 10x as much as some influential Tea Party House Republican's, or Charlie Baker and Larry Hogan's too for that matter. I'll note this is the only reason why Christie is so high, he has two Governors. Kasich and Huckabee too benefit from Gubernatorial endorsements. The Governors for Christie are...oh yeah actually Larry Hogan! And Paul LePage. Huckabee has his own Governor of Arkansas. Kasich has the Governor of Alabama. who care.
Of course, but how could you practically quantify that without introducing massive problems of subjectivity? The idea behind a model is to build the most reasonable predictive tool. Pointing out the flaws of the model doesn't mean it should be trashed, unless you can find a superior methodology.
Frankly, I think it's pretty clear that Silver weighted the model in a way where (even up until near the last minute) it still had a lot of influence on his polls-plus predictions. I think the polls-plus prediction model seems to fail to incorporate enough uncertainty about its own hypotheses, especially as its hypotheses failed to predict things this entire year. However, you're going way beyond that and arguing the model itself was consistently so fatally flawed that it was never a reasonable model. I disagree. You haven't really proven that case.
Pointing out that any individual portion of the model is rough is a little like pointing out that a Fermi estimate is made up of a bunch of approximate estimates. Yes, of course it is...that's what a Fermi estimate is, and likewise, most models of complicated multi-variable phenomena are pretty rough. And of course more precise estimates would be better. The point is that imprecise estimates are often
the best we have -- and Silver had historical data to support assuming that to be the case here. It doesn't quite justify his stubbornness in discussing this year, but that's better methodology than 95%+ of 'political analysts' bother with.
