Results Skewed Towards Republicans, A Response to Nate Silver

[mother earth]

The Results Were Skewed Toward Republicans: A Response to Nate Silver
By BRAD FRIEDMAN on 11/7/2014, 6:02am PT
For full article:
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=10929

How much impact did all of those factors --- and more we haven't mentioned and more still rolling in --- have on the results? We don't yet know. But to simply presume the independent pre-election polls by dozens of different pollsters, each using their own unique methodology, were all simply wrong (skewed towards Democrats) seems presumptuous at best, at this hour, and recklessly misleading from someone like Silver (whose work, I should add, I generally admire).

Perhaps a question that he might better be able to help us all answer is: "What are the statistical odds of so many races all skewing towards the GOP?"

Am I suggesting that elections were stolen by the Republicans? There is no doubt it was a good year for Republicans. But there is also no doubt that it was GOP voter suppression laws that affected turnout and the ability of many voters to be able to cast their votes at all, so that could certainly have swung a number of contests. On the other hand, stealing that many elections wholesale in that many states via electronic voting systems, without leaving evidence behind --- particularly on our nation's hodge-podge of different types of systems --- would be a very difficult feat, most likely requiring a very large conspiracy. In such cases, it's usually difficult to keep such a large conspiracy quiet. There are a few ways it could be done with a somewhat smaller conspiracy of insiders, but we'll leave that discussion for another day.
Whether races would have had a different winner is ultimately unknown, but all of the items mentioned above could have had an effect on the polling averages versus the reported election results.
While Silver's focus on polling and reported results is understandable, the analysis he offered is itself a skewed picture of what actually happened on Tuesday. It presumes that election results reported on our terrible electronic voting and tabulation systems, amidst voter suppression efforts unprecedented since the Jim Crow era, are accurate, while it was the pollsters who must have got it all wrong --- and wrong, by a remarkable coincidence, in a way that supposedly overestimated Democratic turnout in almost every case.
While an analysis of such numbers is interesting media bait --- particularly for those to whom elections are little more than a horse race, rather than an exercise of the fundamental right which supposedly protects all others in this nation --- it offers Americans a skewed and misleading story. It suggests, without any evidence to support such a broad assumption, that the results were "right" and the pollsters were "wrong."
That may be an easy to story to tell, but it just isn't an accurate or helpful one. It serves only to skew our nation and our media even further from a once-great representative democracy to little more than a biennial ESPN Sports Center extravaganza.

[hack89]

1. Silver also showed that some elections polls skewed Republican

Does that imply that Dems stole those elections? Or does it imply that the author didn't actually read Silver 's article where he explained why polls get skewed?

[mother earth]

2. Have you read the entire article? nt

[hack89]

3. Both of them

I will go with Nate Silver on this issue.