An important path to Nate Silver’s ascent to renowned poll analyst was through Daily Kos, where he posted initially as Poblano. His aggregate data analysis helped many of us get through 2012. People were mad at him in 2016 for having pessimistic win percentages for HRC, but they turned out to be correct. As always then, his analysis was always strictly data-based.
But now, Nate has branched out into political analysis, and it’s sometimes not based on data at all. Today he tweets, linking to an article on his website:
The Democrats are still missing perhaps the most essential piece of the puzzle — a smoking gun for whether Trump ordered that military aid and/or a White House meeting be conditioned on the investigations.
The author of the piece, Amelia Thomson Deveaux, is not a lawyer or Constitutional expert, but a “senior writer” at 538, a graduate of Princeton University with a master's degree in religious studies from The University of Chicago. The piece does not rely on data, but her analysis of the evidence.
Many tweets have contested this idea, citing the overwhelming evidence of the two-week Intel Committee testimony. But the tweet and its theory have also been picked up by the likes of conservative Noah Rothman:
You can find the substantial circumstantial evidence suggesting the president did exactly what he is accused of doing. I sure do! But that's no substitute for a first hand account of an oral or written order from POTUS clarifying what the aid's delay was designed to achieve.
This is called raising the bar to a level that does not exist. It can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, in which a false or questionable idea becomes truth through repetition and in this case, promotion by a member of the “liberal media.”
What is a “smoking gun” is subjective, and the many responses to Silver and Rothman describe why the evidence we have is a smoking gun under most definitions. If this were a Democratic President, we would not be debating whether this is a smoking gun. Fox et al would declare it so and the credulous (“no clear link,” “cloud lifted”) media would adopt it.
So Nate. Please stick to data analysis.