We're Doing Horse-Race Political Analysis? Now?! Really?!!
Wikipedia tells us that "Eeyore is generally characterised as pessimistic, depressed, and anhedonic." Being a political Eeyore is complicated, however, for someone like me who is in fact stubbornly optimistic. I can write something like, say, "Happy Birthday, America: 249 Years Was a Pretty Darned Good Run," any day of the week. I can even criticize other people's attempts to see an upside:
I have honestly admired the giddy optimism of those who have consoled themselves with the idea that the Democrats can ride the anti-Trump wave of public sentiment to victories in this year's midterm elections, so much so that I have occasionally allowed myself to imagine that such a thing could happen. But a clear-eyed pessimist is still a clear-eyed pessimist.
Yet despite such sterling Eeyorean credentials, I cannot stop myself from wondering whether there is still a way for the world to turn around. I thus offered "Top Priorities for a Harris Presidency -- or ... Optimism!" in August 2024, as well as "A Few More Smidgens of Optimism -- The Power of Shiny Objects," a month into the second Trump regime. It truly would be wonderful to find something to juice up the optimism numbers.
And then there is The New York Times, which seems determined to make sure that sane-washing and the normalization of abnormality undermine any possibility of a better future, all in the name of being supposedly neutral and objective. This is not simply my opinion, given that the publisher of The Times (A.G. Sulzberger) went on record in the Fall of 2024 to assure the world that
I have no interest in wading into politics. I disagree with those who have suggested that the risk Trump poses to the free press is so high that news organizations such as mine should cast aside neutrality and directly oppose his reelection. It is beyond shortsighted to give up journalistic independence out of fear that it might later be taken away.
What in the world is/was he thinking? As I put it in a response at the time:
Sulzberger says that it is "beyond shortsighted to give up journalistic independence," but that is not what anyone is asking the press to do. People like [Margaret] Sullivan are asking the press not to worry about "wading into politics," in Sulzberger's words, if wading into politics means being clear about who is sane, who is a danger to democracy, and so on. The media needs to, in NYU Professor Jay Rosen's words, focus on "not the odds, but the stakes."
All of this is even more important in early 2026 than it was during the last presidential election. In the meantime, a Trump-aligned oligarch has purchased CBS and put a completely unqualified political hack in charge of dismantling that once great news organization. And as of last night, that same centibillionaire is apparently set to seize control of CNN. The Washington Post, meanwhile, is somehow worse than ever, making The Times look positively saintly by comparison.
But that is a low bar indeed. Moreover, what makes The Times's fake apolitical stance so infuriating is that it is so bland (yet somehow smug). Consider one small example. After one of the worst presidential speeches in history on Tuesday night, late night comedians all led their monologues with the observation that Trump's bore-fest was the longest ever State of the Union address, because of course that is how one would start to describe that interminable series of lies. But that was somehow snark bait for a headline writer at The Times, who put this on top of their latest dreary "Late Night Roundup" (which seems to exist simply to repeat other people's jokes): "Late Night Fixates on How Long Trump Spoke."
Zing! Boy, those late-night guys sure are superficial, huh? Better to pretend that there was no substance to the critiques, I guess. Again, I readily concede that this is a minor matter, but that is in a sense the point. Focusing on that one common hook for comedy writers allows The Times simply to ignore actual substantive (and funny) commentary. Seth Meyers, for example, offered (among many good critiques) this:
Trump's desperate to prevent Democrats from winning back Congress in November, not because he wants Congress to do anything, but because it would be bad for him. ... [Clip of Trump: "If we don't win the midterms, ... they'll find a reason to impeach me."] So trump doesn't want to get impeached for a third, fourth, or fifth time, although I don't know what he's worried about. He could show up at his own impeachment trial and scream, "That's right, I did it, and I'll do it again!" and Republicans still wouldn't vote to convict. Afterwards, Lindsey Graham would tell the press, "I saw a president today who's learned his lesson. He was very contrite."
So The Times's publisher claims to have "no interest in wading into politics," but of course trivializing political issues and treating everything as disposable fluff absolutely puts the newspaper neck-deep in a political cesspool. He can claim to be as pure as snow, but if he truly believes that his newspaper is not supporting its own demise, then he is the most ignorant nepo-baby in the business.
More substantively, it is important to think clearly about Professor Rosen's admonition (from the block quote above) that the focus should be "not [on] the odds, but the stakes." It would be difficult to come up with a better example of the journalistic sin that Rosen is so rightly worried about than yet another dismal and tedious horse-race analysis. Right on cue, last week's edition of The Times included this: "The 2028 Democratic Presidential Contenders, Ranked by Nate Silver: On the lookout for electoral overperformers."
Seriously, in February 2026 we are treated to a horse-race column about who might be the Democrats' nominee in November 2028? Without even the barest acknowledgment that there might not be an election in 2028? Instead of saying anything useful, "Nate Silver, the author of the newsletter Silver Bulletin, recently participated in a fantasy-style draft of potential 2028 Democratic contenders ... and assessed the front-runners, the politicians and nonpoliticians — and what surprised him about the picks."
To be clear, even within the degraded space that is horse-race analysis, there are better ways and worse ways to proceed, and Silver would seem to be among the best equipped people out there to do the job better than (or at least not as badly as) others. He is generally a data-driven guy, and he knows how to assess the reliability of polling data and point out which surveys are statistically sound. That, however, is not what he did here. Instead, he decided to be a mere pundit, a job for which he is wholly unprepared.
Perhaps the weirdest bit of gratuitous bloviating was his offhanded comment that "[t]he 2024 election was close-ish." Yes, the data guy just sneered that the most recent US election that was not a nail-biter. This past November, I summarized some of the key numbers:
Trump's 49.80 percent of the popular vote gave him a 1.48 percent winning margin, barely better than the four tightest presidential elections from 1892 onward -- JFK '60 and Nixon '68, plus non-majority wins for George W. Bush in 2000 and Trump himself '16 -- being less brag-worthy. In the Electoral College, Trump's outcome was the seventh worst out of 34 elections in that time period.
Or recall that if 114,884 votes in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania had shifted from Trump to Kamala Harris, Harris would have won the Electoral College. That is 0.71 percent of the vote in those states. Why does this matter? Does it matter? Inasmuch as there will be future elections, it matters that prominent analysts snidely mischaracterize the last election by making it seem that Trump was anything but an anomaly who eked out a slightly better result than his non-majority win in 2016. His party suppressed votes everywhere possible, and he still only managed to win by the skin of his teeth. He is not a "winner" who was barely challenged by his opponent, and people should not be told otherwise.
Silver then decides to share his thoughts about why the left-right axis is wrong, coming up instead with three subgroups of Democrats: left-populists, "abundance libs," and "resistance libs." On the latter, he makes this jaw-dropping claim:
"[Resistance libs] usually attribute Democrats’ problems in 2024 to poor messaging or the failure to take on President Trump aggressively enough. They want a fighter. And Newsom plays expertly into that. They actually think the party’s platform is totally fine, though; it’s hard to identify any real differences between Newsom and Harris.
What the hell? First, left-populists are resistance libs. (At least I am.) The people who are totally fine with what the party establishment has been doing are the party establishment -- Chuck Schumer, Tim Kaine, Hakeem Jeffries -- who are barely putting up any resistance (unless strongly-worded letters count). What makes Newsom very much a problem substantively is that he sometimes decides to agree with the other party's platform, notably when he decided to abandon trans people after the last election. What makes him worrisome electorally is that he comes across as completely inauthentic.
Silver follows up with this: "Or maybe they think the same message would win if it were articulated by a white man rather than a Black woman. There’s some of that subtext here, too." And there it was, the uncomfortable but fact-based truth, sitting right in front of him. And even though he put it there, he simply dropped it and moved on. Instead, he came up with this head-nodder to explain who should be nominated: electability! Bold, I know. He adds: "But what really ought to be the best demonstration of electability is, well, actually having won elections, ideally by comfortable margins in purple states that will be key in the Electoral College or even red states, as in the case of Beshear."
Joe Biden never won an election in a purple or red state, but he crushed Trump in 2020. Barack Obama won a blowout in a blue state after his Senate opponent dropped out of the 2004 Illinois race due to a sex scandal. Al Gore won his Senate reelection in a landslide in 1990, then became Vice President, and then lost his own state in 2000.
Are all of the data points that I mentioned in the paragraph above explainable? Of course. Do they tell us anything about what the Democrats should do if there is an election in 2028? Of course not. But neither can we learn anything from Andy Beshear's "electability," given his truly unusual profile. Among other things, his father was Kentucky's governor before he was. Why in the world would that make him seem to Silver to be electable nationwide?
In the end, the problem is not merely that there is no longer any reason for a putatively responsible news organization to publish a horse-race analysis, or even that the analysis that it published was so haphazard and sloppy. In the guise of being objective, Silver is simply saying the same thing that self-styled objective pundits have been telling Democrats for years: Don't have policy views. Don't take risks. Just keep doing what we've been telling you to do for decades. Would we steer you wrong?
At this point, not being an Eeyore is simply irresponsible.
- Neil H. Buchanan