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Comment by josh2600 | Hacker News Reader

I adore Nate Silvers work and the presentation for the NYTimes during the Presidential Elections was outstanding.

I do hope they bring him back for future major Elections. His commentary is a delightful respite from the ultra-polarized world of Reddit and Fox News.

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> I do hope they bring him back for future major Elections. His commentary is a delightful respite from the ultra-polarized world of Reddit and Fox News.

Funny you say that, as Reddit had majorly sided with Nate Silver way before election day. Almost every post of his was frontpaged when political campaigns were in full swing. It's also important to note that Fox News is not in the same category that Reddit is in. Fox News reports new findings, Reddit is a social bookmarking website.

I think it's important to note that they sided with him while he was saying what they wanted to hear.

Reddit/MSNBC had it easy this past election, because they could say what they could be optimistic and listen to the experts at the same time. My disillusionment with political journalism will be fully validated during the next election won by Republicans, when Fox is on the side of 'science' and MSNBC says that 'science' can't be trusted.

For example, during the 2010 midterm elections, there were a number of Democrats arguing "Silver is wrong this time because (random political reasons)", which is exactly what the Republicans were doing in 2012.

Winning an election requires enthusiasm and people willing to volunteer their personal efforts, so partisan activists dismissing contradictory polling data should be expected.

Still, most of Reddit's political frontpage posts are along the lines of "We can't have cute puppies on the frontpage anymore because Republicans just kill them and drink their blood".

> Funny you say that, as Reddit had majorly sided with Nate Silver way before election day.

Be that as it may, Nate Silver is actually thoughtful, articulate, and well-reasoned - three words which do not describe /r/politics, etc.

It's not just a matter of which opinions one holds; it's a matter of how intelligently one expresses them and defends them with data and evidence.

(The irony with Reddit's love of FiveThirtyEight - and with the right-wing criticism of FiveThirtyEight being 'partisan' during the 2012 election cycle - is that Nate Silver is not himself an entirely left-wing person as much as people often thing. You'd have to dig pretty deep back into the archives of pre-NYT FiveThirtyEight to notice this, but he holds rather somewhat moderate or right-wing views on a number of issues).

I agree Silver is relatively moderate, but FiveThirtyEight did more or less grow out of DailyKos [1], so it's not a huge stretch to suggest he personally has a clear preference for one or the other side of the American political spectrum. It's not like he also had a blog on the right-wing equivalents of DailyKos, like FreeRepublic or RedState.

[1] For a year or so before he launched fivethirtyeight.com as an independent site, he posted data-driven election analysis, among other things, at http://www.dailykos.com/blog/poblano

It could also be because the Daily Kos' founder also cofounded SB Nation, one of the larger networks of sports blogs that are well regarded in the baseball analytics community, so it's likely that Silver had some connection/comfort with DailyKos.

And Reddit is not nearly as left-wing as you think. It's populated by tens of millions of people now, all around the political spectrum. If anything, they tend to swing left on social policy issues, but they are not far off from the national average in economic policy. The Obama love last election had a lot more to do with the lack of any reasonable republican candidate than it did with the political makeup of Reddit. Remember, Ron Paul actually received serious support from Reddit.

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