Dean Chambers, the man behind UnskewedPolls, admitted following a tough election that he’d been wrong on his premise that polls systematically underrated GOP challenger Mitt Romney. A couple weeks of reflection, however, and Chambers is back in action. He claims the president is little more than Barack O’Fraudo, having won four states (Ohio, Virginia, Florida, and Pennsylvania) through malfeasance. As to whether he still finds Nate Silver too skinny and effeminate to be trusted on numerical matters, that’s an open question. source
He has lost a lot of credibility, as far as I’m concerned. He did a lot of surveys. A lot of those surveys were wrong.“Unskewed” pollster Dean Chambers • Discussing his results in light of the election — and, in this particular quote, calling out pollster Scott Rasmussen for his poor results. Chambers, who “unskewed” the polls to balance out apparent Democratic biases, admitted his failings, point blank, to Business Insider: ”Nate Silver was right, and I was wrong.” At least he was willing to admit it.
Shorter Dean Chambers in the Arlington Conservative Examiner: Nate Silver is wrong about polling because he’s not a real man:
Nate Silver is a man of very small stature, a thin and effeminate man with a soft-sounding voice that sounds almost exactly like the “Mr. New Castrati” voice used by Rush Limbaugh on his program. In fact, Silver could easily be the poster child for the New Castrati in both image and sound. Nate Silver, like most liberal and leftist celebrities and favorites, might be of average intelligence but is surely not the genius he’s made out to be. His political analyses are average at best and his projections, at least this year, are extremely biased in favor of the Democrats.
HT: Justin Green.
There’s been something of a rhetorical war happening lately on the topic of polling mavens – Nate Silver, who runs FiveThirtyEight.com for The New York Times, has been running a prediction model since the 2008 presidential election, when he famously called the winner in 49 of 50 states. Conversely, Dean Chambers founded UnskewedPolls.com, a site dedicated to undoing the allegedly liberal bias of polling samples. In his attempt to take on Silver personally, Chambers reveals a deeply unpleasant side – when your argument over somebody’s integrity requires you to attack their appearance, voice, and masculinity (as well as introducing them, in the first paragraph, by copying a line directly from their Wikipedia article), that’s not a position of strength you’re signaling.
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