Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Primary whiffs

Jim Newell's rundown of bad presidential nomination forecasts is a bit dickish, but quite funny. Unsurprisingly, I take some issue with his attack on political scientists, mainly Jonathan Bernstein, for thinking Tim Pawlenty had a better shot than was generally acknowledged.

Newell treats pretty much every wrong prediction as equally wrong. And fine, if you make a prediction, you take a chance at being ridiculed, even if your candidate "should" have won. But Pawlenty was a serious player -- a governor with conservative credentials from a moderate state. That's just the sort of person that often gets nominated! Saying a Pawlenty prediction is no better than a Bachmann or a Trump prediction is like saying that predicting the Broncos to win the last Superbowl was no better than predicting the Calabasas High JV Coyotes to win it. One had a legitimate shot. The other never did.

3 comments:

andrew said...

I have to disagree. Pawlenty was DOA and never made it to undead stage.

reflectionephemeral said...

Hmm... maybe let's say the 49ers, instead of the Broncos, if you want to defend Bernstein's pick...

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