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Notes -
Most of the utility from 538 was plausible deniability for 'free thinkers' to be on the "neutral" side. They had the numbers and the data. Nate Silver is a nerdy numbers guy. I mean, just look at him. ABC are taking a mechanism to be 'safely' "neutral" and ruining it. And Nate recognizes it.
That being said, it's all a sham. Nate Silver, just like so many of his 'followers' are always looking for plausible deniability to be on the "neutral" side because not being on the "neutral" side is way too much work. And much more importantly, you can't be anything other than "neutral" if you expect to participate in 'civilized' urban society, let alone show up on TV and be respected for your work. The guy was not slightly wrong or missing a few steps in 2016, he was off on the numbers and way off with his attitude.
It's not that "conservatives" accidentally got this one right against all odds against all polling against all reality. It's that there was a manufacture process going on with an extremely biased media complex doing everything it could to push one candidate forward whilst pulling another back. If you recognized this you would have no issue predicting, at the least, a very tight race.
If you didn't recognize it you were either stupid or willfully complicit. The 2016 election cycle was genuinely insane in its bias and one should not take people who missed the insanity part of it either too seriously or too trustingly.
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