‘You Are Lying!’ Nate Silver Accuses Pollsters of Putting Their ‘F*cking Finger On the Scale!’
Elections analyst Nate Silver accused pollsters of putting their “f*cking finger on the scale” and “lying” in an episode of his Risky Business podcast on Thursday, arguing that they are shaping their results in presidential election polls to look like other pollsters’.
Asked by co-host Maria Konnikova to sum up what his models are projecting and whether there’s movement in the polls, Silver submitted that “it’s basically 55-45, Trump” — meaning that former President Donald Trump has a 55% chance and Kamala Harris has a 45% chance of winning the presidential election — “or 54-45 with a small chance of a tie.”
“It’s been a little weird. I mean, look, it’s gradually drifted to Trump over actually a fairly long period now. I mean, you know, two out of every three days, Harris has lost ground in the forecast since since roughly early October. You know, it looks like it’s stabilized a bit, maybe. I don’t think we’re going to learn very much in this last week of the polling,” mused Silver. “In fact, I kind of trust pollsters less, they all, every time a pollster [says] ‘Oh, every state is is just +1, every single state’s a tie,’ No! You’re fucking herding! You’re cheating! You’re cheating!”
He continued:
Your numbers aren’t all going to come out at exactly 1-point leads when you’re sampling 800 people over dozens of surveys. You are lying! You’re putting your fucking finger on the scale! I will not name names, but some pollsters are really bad about this… Emerson College. Whoops! Was that recorded? Oops, sorry.
Insider advantage, all these GOP-leaning firms, it’s always, “Oh, we’re not going out too far on a limb, Trump, it’s just Trump +1 in Pennsylvania every fucking single time.” No, that’s not how fucking polling works. That’s not how polling is supposed to work, there’s a margin of error. So you get herding and like everyone just, “Oh!” Well, I mean, basically the pollsters are-, 50-50 is a forecast because not all base rates are 50-50, right? The pollsters are just fucking punting — except The New York Times that actually has balls, right? The pollsters are just fucking punting on this election for the most part.
I mean, not just The New York Times. There are other — some of the other high quality polls will actually publish numbers that surprise you once in a while. If a pollster never publishes any numbers that surprises you, then it has no value. “Information that has no potential to be surprising has no value” should already be kind of like priced into your worldview or like kind of priced into the model in my case.
“But look, all seven swing states are still polling within it looks like a point and a half here,” he concluded. “It doesn’t take a genius to know that if every swing state is a tie, that the overall forecast is a tie.”
