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Nate Silver Discusses PA’s Odds of Going Red

Nate-SilverStatistical journalism met political journalism on Tuesday and Pennsylvania’s twenty electoral votes was a topic of discussion.

FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver was the guest on Politico reporter Glenn Thrush’s “Off Message” podcast.

About thirty-eight minutes in, the two began to discuss the probabilities that red and blue states from the last cycle might flip. Pennsylvania was one of the main ones they discussed.

“You know the joke on Pennsylvania is, it’s blue until the last three weeks and then Ed Rendell freaks out,” Thrush said, echoing David Plouffe’s own remarks on a different podcast.

After identifying PA, as well as Ohio, as major bellwethers the host asked Silver if he thought the Keystone State would move out of the blue column.

“I mean, so the polling in Pennsylvania has been weird,” Silver responded. “Where there’s a lot of polling showing like a two point race and occasionally you’ll have one showing a fifteen point Clinton lead or something and you kind of average that together.”

“Look, our model says that Pennsylvania has moved closer to the national trend line. Both overall and with Trump specifically. Where it is struggling a bit economically, I mean Pennsylvania’s basically two states too, people have to remember.”

Let me dream that Nate Silver was referring to my Appalachia vs. Acela concept before Thrush broke in with Carville’s outdated saying.

“It’s kind of half Northeastern and half Midwestern,” Silver offered. “There is a large white working class vote there.”

He believes PA is much more hospitable to the GOP than similar examples like Michigan and Wisconsin and pointed out that their model’s “tipping point states” are Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

8 Responses

  1. Pa. will not go red. For every disaffected blue collar vote for Trump outside of Pittsburg, there will be 2 disaffected Republican women in the Philadelphia suburbs voting for Clinton.

  2. Liars? Like Trump? Politifact’s file on him has almost one in five of his rated statements as “Pants on Fire”, 41 percent were rated “False”, and only two percent were rated “True”. Between the ones rated “Pants on Fire”, “False”, and “Mostly False”, that’s 78 percent of Trump’s statements. Trump lies so much you’re better off assuming he’s lying if his lips are moving.

  3. Some among us will not vote either for crazy Trump (who is also a liar) or for lying Hillary (who is also a megalomaniac). Instead, we will vote for Johnson/Weld, for Jill Stein, or write in Bernie Sanders. As a voter, my job is not to vote for the lesser of two evils because if I do that, evil still wins. My job is to vote for the candidate with competence, integrity and a willingness to put the national interest above personal interests. That disqualifies both Trump and Hillary.

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