Dean Chambers: UnSkewed Polls’ Smarty-Smart Manly-Man Data Guy was Wrongy-Wrong

Dean Chambers has an action hero name. A manly name. He felt that Nate Silver’s data pointing to an Obama win on his site FiveThirtyEight was wrong, so he did what any real man would do in response to Silver’s pansy-ass predictions:

• He created UnSkewed Polls, which also used poll data but employed weightings that better fit his worldview, and
• he made sure that you knew what kind of a faaaaaaag Nate Silver was. Faaaaaaags may know interior decorating and musical theatre, but leave the math to us real men, okay?

(And seriously, dude, running your site on ColdFusion only perpetuates the stereotype that Republicans have no idea what to do with technology.)

The money quote for the second point comes from a rather catty article by Chambers published on October 25th, with the tinfoil hat titled The Far Left Turns to Nate Silver for Wisdom on the Polls. Rather than let the data speak for itself, Chambers saw fit to resort to that classic schoolyard bully tactic: ad HOMOnem…

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.

Let’s put aside the petty personal attacks and look at the data, which is what a real man would do, shall we?

Here’s Chambers’ final prediction, predicting a Romney/Ryan win over Obama/Biden, 275 electoral votes to 263, with 270 needed to win. He got a number of states’ results wrong:

Here’s Silver’s final prediction, predicting an Obama/Biden win, 313 electoral votes to 225:

Here are the actual results. Silver’s electoral votes are closer to actual than Chambers’ — 303 electoral votes for Obama/Biden and 206 for Romney/Ryan, plus he’s 50 for 50 on predicting which way each state would go:

A real man would admit he was wrong, and also apologize for his pointless, unworthy, ungentlemanly cheap shots at Silver. We’ll see if Chambers is such a man.