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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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538 was the best in the business, where am I supposed to go for election forecasts now?

Whatever new brand Nate Silver comes up with? He's got the rights to the actual valuable part of 538.

ABC News is scrambling to find a replacement for Nate Silver’s election forecasting model, which the 538 founder is taking with him when he leaves the news organization at the end of his contract. According to two sources with knowledge of the situation, ABC executives were slow to realize that the company only owned some of the models that 538 used to forecast major elections, and that many were on rent from Silver as part of the initial deal to bring the data journalism site to ESPN ten years ago.

“They have put very very very little bandwidth into managing 538, and they seem pretty clueless about who-owns-what IP questions,” one person familiar told Semafor.

If true, Silver is smarter than I thought. Well played Nate.