Let the Recriminations Begin!
It’ll be interesting to see what Princeton neuroscience professor / amateur poll modeler / political hack Sam Wang has to say today.
You will recall that a mere four weeks ago Wang was pushing his way into the public square to insist that Democrats had a 63 percent chance of holding the Senate. Like all normal pollsters, his model mysteriously followed the herd in the weeks that followed, making Republicans a slight favorite to take control of the Senate. But even his final model predicted that GOP 54–which is where we are most likely headed–had only a 5 percent chance of occurring.
I wouldn’t single Wang out for special ridicule–everybody makes mistakes–except for three things:
1) He went out of his way to throw a lot of elbows at Nate Silver and everyone else following the election in an attempt to get attention for himself. This wasn’t just some guy, working his own quirky model, and seeing what happened. Wang was obviously on the make and in a particularly unattractive manner. See, for instance, this tweet:
@QuiteColdNight Stu Rothenberg thinks GOP will pick up >7 Senate seats? That is so wrong it does not even deserve the word “wrong”
— Sam Wang (@SamWangPhD) September 9, 2014
2) You didn’t even need a model to see that 54 seats was the most likely outcome. Lots of things from last night were surprising: The gubernatorial results and the margins in places like KS, VA, and KY. But the overall Senate number of 54 always seemed like the single most likely of all possible outcomes. And to have a model which gave GOP 54 the same percentage chance as Dem 51 was pretty obviously flawed.
3) Now, there’s nothing wrong with building a deeply flawed model–people make mistakes–except for how condescendingly boorish Wang was about it. Remember the great quote from his Daily Beast profile:
He is the author of two books on the brain and his recent work focuses on autism. Politics, he says, is just kind of a hobby. “It’s a relatively easy problem compared with the other things I do,” he told me.
Wang should go back to studying autism. I understand that if he does that, the New Yorker and the New York Times won’t pay attention to him anymore and he’ll lose some Twitter followers, but so what. He’s almost certainly better at neuroscience than he is at politics and it’s more important work–much more important–anyway.
But he ought to apologize for having been such a tool on his way out the door.
