This site dragging 538 for what they call clickbait articles
There may also be a second major issue with FiveThirtyEight, which we will describe as one of economy. We start this part of the discussion by noting that every one of us who is writing about politics this year benefits from a horse race. "Things are the same as they were yesterday" is not a story. "Clinton extends her lead" and "Trump makes up ground on Clinton" are. Similarly, we also benefit from finding things that are new and different to talk about. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and his rallies tended to get relatively little media coverage; not because of any particular bias against him, but because they were all the same. You can only write, "10,000 young, mostly white people show up to cheer Sanders" so many times. Hillary Clinton, evenhanded and cautious as she is, also tends to give us relatively little to talk about much of the time. With Donald Trump, on the other hand, it's several new and outrageous and previously unheard of things almost every day. Hence his dominance of the headlines.
Point is, all the political sites have a certain bias towards "dog bites man." However, there is reason to believe the bias is unusually strong for Silver and his crew. Many political sites and prognosticators—NBC News, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, Bloomberg Politics—are part of organizations for whom political coverage is part of their core mission. Others—Sabato's Crystal Ball, the Harvard Political Review—are part of (and are supported by) universities. Still others—HuffPo, Breitbart, Politico, The Hill—are already stable, self-sustaining businesses. And a few—this site, Sam Wang's Princeton Election Consortium—are side projects of academics who already have day jobs. The point is that while we all like page views and clicks, none of these sites is—as far as we know—facing an immediate existential crisis. Page views could go up or down by 50%, and most or all of the above would keep on trucking.
For FiveThirtyEight, by contrast, this may not be true. Only ESPN president John Skipper knows for sure, but there are three things that should have Silver and his staff at least somewhat nervous. The first is that for ESPN, politics (and burritos and Harper Lee and the optimal cake) are not part of their core business. If ABC or Fox or the Washington Post ceased all political coverage tomorrow, that would be earth-shattering. If ESPN does so, it's a sidebar.
...The point is that it would be very easy for ESPN to decide, sometime after November 8, that FiveThirtyEight is a luxury that can no longer be afforded. Of course, that calculation depends on how much money the site is losing, or whether or not it's losing money at all. The more clicks they get, and the more publicity they get, the further they move from the chopping block. It's understandable that under these circumstances, Silver & Co. would—either consciously or subconsciously—be working particularly hard to be provocative and to stand out from the crowd. Indeed, the motivation is so strong that their analysis really should be taken with a grain of salt until we see that ESPN is truly committed to them, and that they're truly not going anywhere (in other words, if they survive to 2020). Alternatively, Silver might consider leaving ESPN, and finding a partnership where he's not a tiny data-analysis fish in a big sports-broadcasting pond.
This assessment may seem like an attack on a competitor, but really it is not. Surely, there is room for both this site and FiveThirtyEight in the blogosphere. If anything, it's a form of tough love, in hopes that a site that was once a pleasure to read can return to being a pleasure once again.
http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp201...ories/538.html
