Yes, after 2012 Nate stopped being just the guy at the New York Times who had all the really good models and became "Nate Silver, the world's greatest statistician." For some reason, instead of doing what I would have done which is pick some entirely new thing to model (fantasy football?
) he hired a bunch of snarky Brooklynites in their 20s who were nowhere near as good at statistics as him but could certainly pump out articles, and built a site based around just shoveling content. At first all the content was stuff like "our expectations for each of the MLB teams this year" which was ok although there was a lot of filler and bullsh**t along with the real numbers, but then it started to devolve more and more into things like "how many carrots does America eat each year? I write 1500 words about carrots and shove a half-baked model in at the end to answer the question." They started following the BuzzFeed model of using clickbait titles and focusing on millenials with sex, drugs, feminism, vulgarity and celebrity/pop culture instead of things that were actually interesting to model.
Then the election coverage happened. But dozens of other sites had polling aggregators as well. They adjusted the model to weight by "how good we think the poll is", but nobody really cared. Then they said, we have to do something really novel that the other sites aren't offering. So they came up with their "endorsement primary" model. Every damn article they wrote about the election linked to that model, and they claimed that it would be more accurate than a polling aggregator. Of course, it wasn't at all, but they embarrassed themselves by sticking by it to the end, eventually claiming "lol it was only an experiment anyway." In the meantime they just filled the void with a daily slew of 3-4 articles with barely any actual statistics but a lot of #analysis about how Trump had no chance and Cruz couldn't compete because his disfavorables were too high and Bernie was the oldest candidate to ever run before "based on our statistics of looking on wikipedia at the ages of previous candidates" and junk like that. They basically made fools of themselves because they were completely wrong and they were writing based on their own opinions and feelings, which were the opinions and feelings of a bunch of Brooklyn millenials, rather than reality and hard numbers, which is what people had come to the site for. It was a big turn-around from 2012 when everyone else was making stuff up and giving #analysis about how Romney could still win and Silver just said "nope, the numbers say Romney has no chance, that's reality."
Now we've moved on to the general election and they've repeated their mistake of adding some phony baloney "Polls Plus" model, for the sake of novelty and attention, that they claim is going to be better than a standard poll aggregator and that they link to and talk about in every single article. They're still writing opinion pieces with the bare minimum of statistics, but now instead of repeatedly claiming that so-and-so has no shot or other such bold claims, most of their articles are basically "Trump still has a chance", "Hillary shouldn't be too confident", things like that. And as usual they have some articles like "I looked at some polls and saw that Trump was down with young voters. Here's 1500 words of #analysis and a chart about it."
It's boring, you can't trust it, 90% of what's written on there is only barely based on hard numbers if at all, Nate himself hardly ever writes anything, and it's strayed really far from what Nate had in 2012. Their election forecast, without the Polls-Plus nonsense, is actually good, if Nate just made that the site and fired all the millenials and wrote an article every week about how the model has changed and what might change in the future, that would be so much better.
