By his own admission, Silver has been flummoxed by Trump all along.
He's quite often dead nuts on the screws, but right now it seems to me he's looking for explanations to fill the voids in his normally stats-driven analysis.
I don't read Silver, which I do, for that type of armchair nonsense. I come here for that shit....lol.
Silver's usually pretty on the nose when it comes to these things specifically because he approaches things in a fairly cold analytical way. He drives folks nuts when he's calling out nonsense among "their guys" but he's almost always right.
Where he got it wrong on Trump (which he goes into in that article) is that he underestimated how weak the GOP elites were and how weak the Media turned out to be. Trump got the equivalent of $2 billion dollars of free advertising from the media. I just don't see that continuing once it's Trump vs. Clinton. In addition, the GOP never really threw its weight behind any of the candidates nor took any efforts to guide or control the process. If the GOP's going to run their primaries like this, let's just do away with the national parties and primaries and just put everyone on the ballot in November and have a run off.
Yep, Silver is very often right. I guess for me I'm more on board with statistical analysis than theories not backed by that type of data when it comes to what I'm prone to accept as 'analysis' from Silver.
One can argue their points rationally and even draw parallels, or whatever, it's what 'pundits' do every day. He does do that, but at the end of the day, without that rigorous statistical analysis that he's known for, to me, his opinions holds no more water than anyone else's.
What happens with the media going forward is anyone's guess. I doubt Trump's mouth will stop spewing, so they'll keep covering him I imagine. To the extent that they have been? I dunno, but if it drives ratings I don't see them stopping doing what's in their own best interests, as that's what they've been doing all along.
