- Sabato Crystal Ball switches Nevada last minute to Dem Cortez-Masto
- Silver moves Laxalt from 59% to 51%
So what big event happened? Did the tepid Democratic early vote total suddenly grow to provide a bigger "Clark Firewall"? Was there some new polling that hasn't quite made it to the rankings yet? Did someone catch Laxalt having sex with a farm animal?
Nope... some guy named Jon Ralston predicted Cortez-Masto would win by two? Apparently, according to everyone, Ralston is the foremost expert on Nevada elections and according to others, he is never, ever wrong.
Except Ralson himself freely admits he has been wrong at least twice over his election prognostication career. Both times failing to see a Republican victory in a statewide race. Apparently he has been correctly predicting the past few Democrats who have won, since no Republican has won a statewide race in over a decade. But it looks like the last couple of Republicans to have won, snuck by his analysis. So is he just been right more often than not because he is smart, or simply because he has kept predicting Democrats (and they have won quite a bit in Nevada over the past several cycles).
Except Ralson himself freely admits he has been wrong at least twice over his election prognostication career. Both times failing to see a Republican victory in a statewide race. Apparently he has been correctly predicting the past few Democrats who have won, since no Republican has won a statewide race in over a decade. But it looks like the last couple of Republicans to have won, snuck by his analysis. So is he just been right more often than not because he is smart, or simply because he has kept predicting Democrats (and they have won quite a bit in Nevada over the past several cycles).
I read his article, and his argument seems to be that the early voting numbers do not show a Red Wave, but rather just the possibility of the Red wave. He also openly admits that he understands the reasons why Republicans are optimistic. He admits that to a large degree that he is relying on his "gut" more than the numbers to make his picks this year, and his analysis is littered not with numbers, statistics, polling, or anything really tangible, but rather with why he thinks Laxalt is a bad candidate.
While I respect certain people when they make predictions... is it really worthy of people like Sabato and Silver literally changing their ratings fairly dramatically over a "gut" call?
