Nate Silver Criticizes Politico Again

Nate Silver sits on the stairs at Allegro hotel in downtown Chicago, Friday, Nov. 9, 2012. The 34-year-old statistician, unabashed numbers geek, author and creator of the much-read FiveThirtyEight blog at The New Yor... Nate Silver sits on the stairs at Allegro hotel in downtown Chicago, Friday, Nov. 9, 2012. The 34-year-old statistician, unabashed numbers geek, author and creator of the much-read FiveThirtyEight blog at The New York Times, correctly predicted the presidential winner in all 50 states, and almost all the Senate races. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh) MORE LESS
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Nate Silver, prominent New York Times statistician who is currently launching a new website with ESPN, on Friday again criticized Politico for its overreliance on horse race coverage.

“Recently for example, I saw an article in Politico that claimed the government shutdown was responsible for the Democrat Terry McAuliffe’s expanding lead in the Virginia gubernatorial race,” Silver said at an Online News Association conference. “The article cited one question in the poll that the government wasn’t popular and another showing McAuliffe well ahead, and asserted there was a link between the two. There was no evidence however, of a causal link that anyone had switched their vote because of the shutdown.”

Silver said that the way in which the information was presented in the article, not the information itself, was the issue.

“It was a fine theory, but instead it was stated as a fact when there was no proof of it whatsoever,” he added.

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