Ignore Nate Silver. We make our own election forecast by voting and then counting votes

How are you living with the radical uncertainty of what Wednesday is going to look like? Even now through January of 2021 or 2025, how do you stay active during that uncertainty and not make it a limbo of mere anticipation or endurance? Again, appreciate the uh, the simplicity of your question, and the emotional lightness thereof. First step, I ignore Nate Silver. Ignore Nate Silver! I don’t know why we pay attention to this stuff. It’s not personal, it’s not personal. This is not a personal attack on the human being born into the name of Nate Silver. It is a general rejection of the idea of forecasting election results. Even using the language. Forecast says what’s gonna happen. Stop that, we don’t know what’s gonna happen. We don’t know.

00:56 - And at least the complacency, and it is a passive form of voter suppression for some side or the other. What, 89 of a 100 scenarios, Joe Biden wins. There’s only one scenario that counts, that’s this reality, not your computer model. So stop it. Especially when models are built on history, algorithms are based on data, which comes from history. How many times have we said we’re living in unprecedented times? So, there’s no precedent. So, there’s no history for this. So, your model doesn’t know anything. It doesn’t know. It’s a toss up. Treat this election like a toss up.

01:43 - Emotionally prepare for it to be a toss up. Know what you want, dream into that, live into that. Don’t live in panic and fear, but do not cede your common sense and the reality to Nate Silver’s model or anybody’s. This is what’s gonna happen. Well, Trump could still win, but it would take a. Stop adding the analogies to baseball and rolling a di. A waste of bits, and data, and bandwidth and psychological energy. It riles me up. Because it assumes normalcy. The same way our media assumed normalcy when they just live streamed Trump rallies for three years straight. The same media that assumed normalcy when they do the both side-ism on climate science or vaccine effectiveness, leads to more dead people. It hurts democracy. The same media that says, well, I guess we have to say that the president tweeted this, so we have to talk about it, because he’s the president. So, it’s newsworthy. The same society that said, well, one day he’ll become presidential because he’s president, so by definition, he’ll behave as all other presidents do and actually take the job seriously.

02:57 - So, we should assume that he’s a serious person. And that has led to kidnapping babies at the border and separating them from their families forever, by destroying the paperwork. Because we assumed precedent, that history would be the future. So, when you look at every tradition, that’s been broken from the Supreme Court with Mitch McConnell, to the kidnapping babies at the border, to the executive orders to purge lifetime bureaucrats, apolitical people, for their lack of political loyalty to this president. Oh, we ain’t get to talk about that. This is an administration and now a Republican party that spits at your precedent and your history.

03:43 - So, why knowing all of that, which is data, would you then trust your electoral model to predict the likely outcome? Okay, but you said, but no, but they talk to real people. They talk to real people and those people expressed these real sentiments, and there’s a sample size. I’m not doubting the statistical validity of the polls. What I am doubting is that someone’s expression of a political intent will ever be reflected in votes that are counted. That’s the only model that matters. And when you got courts up and down the land and a Republican party still suing to stop vote counts.

04:25 - When you’ve got a president who says anything he doesn’t like is a rigged and fraudulent election. When you’ve got him saying, I want the Supreme Court to resolve this, when you got him saying, I won’t commit to a peaceful transfer of power, then I don’t care what 538 says about 89 out of a 100 scenarios, because that assumes the votes are counted. What’s your model got to say now? Oh, well what happened was, we didn’t have a algorithmic patch to go for a undemocratic attempt to purge the votes after the fact. We didn’t, there was, we didn’t have a Mitch McConnell factor. We didn’t have an authoritarian coefficient in our algorithm. So, stop it.

05:09 - The only votes that count are the votes we count. So, let’s count them all. Am I done? I might be done. (laughing) Ah, I haven’t checked in with you in a very long time. And let’s see if you’re still here. Okay. Oh, good, people are talking to each other, that’s great. I love seeing that. Yeah, captions on Instagram. Do it, do it. Rev.com is a great captioning service, otter.ai, great captioning service, low costs, machines do it. And there’s a bunch of other tools, but those are the two that I use.

05:54 - Cindy Leave, hello! Social Fresh, I see you. And Jen Nickel with the zombie efficient, yes. Yeah. Did I just, I think I just coined a, an algorithmic turn of phrase. The authoritarian coefficient in your algorithm. If you don’t have one, your algorithm’s whack. Cause uh, to quote “In Living Color” from the nineties, homie don’t play that. We got a honey badger of a president who doesn’t give a fuck. So, he’ll stuff your precedent in your you know what. Why did I stop cursing then? I dunno. There’s still a child in me who thinks my mother’s watching all the time. (chuckling) .