Actually, Nate Silver Should Take the “L”, Since His Strategy Was the One That Literally Lost

The person that loses should generally take the “L”, except in Silver’s intellectually contorted world

I can’t explain fully why it is that I tend to get enraged when I read a Nate Silver post criticizing Democrats and Biden. Lots of people criticize Democrats and Biden, some respectable and some reprehensible, and almost none of them elicit any emotion from me.

But there’s something about Silver’s smugness and obvious desire to be both right and “cool” that gnaws at me. Perhaps it’s the way he picks fights with prominent commentators and calls them out publicly via personal attacks (he attacked Tim Snyder and Heather Cox Richardson, of all people, in an article I addressed last year). Perhaps it’s the way he does the opposite with solely one person, his bromance partner, Matthew Yglesias. Perhaps it’s his snooty penchant for bringing up anecdotes about travel (but only for illustrative purposes; not to show off how worldly he is, of course). Perhaps it’s his pathetic repeated attempts to coin a term for which to be remembered. Or perhaps, it’s his pretentiously wannabe-edgy takes that fuse poker and politics together.

I don’t know, but he has once again stirred the demons within me with his most recent article, “Biden defenders need to take the ‘L’”. The usual Silver tropes mentioned above are present in this one, but beyond that it’s obvious that Silver is missing the whole point of the Biden issue, which I’ll explain more below.

First, let’s go through the list of tiresome Silver-isms in this one:

1. Picks fights with prominent commentators? Check. This time it’s Aaron Rupar, Margaret Sullivan and Neera Tanden. He failed to recently spark a public Xitter spat with Rupar and Sullivan, but did muster one out of Tanden. I’m pretty confident that this lack of response from two out of three was the impetus of this post.
2. Bromance with Matt Yglesias? Check. Silver singles him out as the reasonable adult in the room, who had the humility and wisdom to apologize for suggesting that Joe Biden might actually have been a capable president if reelected.
3. Use of travel knowledge for illustrative-only (wink-wink) purposes? Check. He literally analyzes Tanden’s choice of travel arrangements from NY to DC on the night of Biden’s infamous June debate performance, in order to concoct a conspiracy related to her recent Congressional testimony on Biden’s “competency”.
4. Pathetic desire to coin a term? Check. This time it’s “The Big Cope”, specifically defined by Silver in this article as “the belief that Democrats would win every competitive election if only it weren’t for unfair media coverage”. Maybe this one will catch on after the utter failure of the River and Village metaphors from his last book, which even he has largely departed from referencing anymore.
5. Edgy politics-as-poker analogies? No, no in this one. But, four out of five tropes ain’t bad, right?

Now I’ll get to my main thesis, which is to explain how Silver doesn’t get the point of the frustrations of Biden supporters whom he dismisses as “partisans”. And also how since his strategy literally lost the election in 2024, he should be the one to, not just take the “L”, but to wear it on his forehead like a scarlet letter.

Coverage of age

One of the main themes of Silver’s criticisms of Biden and his team is that Biden’s age should have been relentlessly “covered” by the media. He cites that “86% of Americans thought [Biden] was too old to run for another term”. Therefore, this should have been covered, and covered again, and then covered some more.

While that figure is true, at least of one particular poll, it does ignore the following:

1. The same poll shows that 62% of respondents thought Trump was too old.
2. 59% percent believed that both Biden and Trump were too old, compared with solely Biden, solely Trump, or neither candidate.
3. Polls also showed that Americans had greater concerns other than age, with which they felt more comfortable with Biden than Trump. I argued this point last year in an article for The Banter.

Silver is free to think that the difference between 86% (Biden too old) vs. 62% (Trump too old) is such a wide chasm that Trump’s numbers should be dismissed, but many people, such as myself, would argue that if you’re going to hammer Biden on being too old, you should also hammer Trump on being too old.

After all, Trump is only four years younger than Biden, and behaves like a dementia patient on Ketamine in most of his public appearances. Apparently, for Silver, being physically frail and slow is much scarier than being a complete loud imbecilic madman. However, I preferred that the candidate with 50 years of governing experience and more political wisdom in his pinkie nail than anyone else in the world have access to the nuclear codes. But that’s just me, and my crazy emotional side coming out.

Silver weakly attempts to give himself credit for acknowledging that Trump is too old too, citing an article he wrote where he argued this (but still spent about half the article talking about Biden’s age). He also notes that the NY Times recently came out with an article about Trump’s age, as though it should be commended that the corporate media has finally uncovered that Trump is very old too. But Silver’s insane anti-Democrat ranting about Biden’s age during the campaign definitely dwarfed any mention of Trump age concerns at the time.

But the thing about the “age” issue — or more precisely, the coverage of the “age” issue — is: how do you continuously cover “age”? One’s age is a simple empirical fact. How much coverage or analysis can you give it? You can cover polling about it. You can cover birthdays, when the age of someone changes. But how can you keep producing content about someone’s age in an interesting way? At what point is “age” not news anymore?

In this article that Silver cited, he provided a chart that tracks how often news articles in 2023 and 2024 mentioned the word “age” along with mentions of Biden and Trump. Is this really the standard we should be focusing on? Is a reporter supposed to just write the word “age” again and again, and somehow that magically covers the issue?

The competency question

The question is not about age itself; it’s really about competency, and whether or not age affects one’s ability to function as president. Silver makes clear that he thinks Biden was incapable of functioning as president. And his lack of critique or alarm regarding Trump’s age suggests that he thought that Trump was capable of functioning as president. If he didn’t think that, then where was the outrage regarding Trump?

You can be outraged at two different things at once. This is really the crux of the problem that I have with Silver, along with Tanden and others publicly swiping back at Silver for his Biden outrage.

If you’re outraged about Biden’s age and related incompetence, why wouldn’t you be similarly outraged about Trump’s age and related incompetence? Unless you have a partisan agenda, it doesn’t really make sense.

If you want to argue that the slow frail old guy is scarier than the loud insane old guy, then just make that argument. Otherwise, stop acting as though you are above the partisan bickering and simply an agent of impartiality.

And many people, like me, believe that while it wasn’t ideal that Biden was getting slower and feebler with age, he was still one of the most competent people for the job in the country at the time. And certainly the best of the two options in the election. An older, slower Biden beats a generic Trump any day of the week for me. Honestly, a comatose Biden beats a Trump for me.

When it’s a critical matter of going up against a blatant authoritarian like Trump, as an American it makes sense to drop many intellectual pretenses you may have embraced in normal times. You pick a side and fight for it. Silver preferred to be seen as right, and having the best political instincts of others in his class. So, by default, he helped allow an authoritarian to win.

Silver put his lot into spreading alarm about old age instead of preventing the dismantling of the republic. Either he was too ignorant to see that it could be this bad or was blinded by a potential path to claim intellectual superiority. Considering he turned out to be wrong and yet continues to insist that he was right, I am guessing the later.

Who should really take the “L”?

The ironic thing about Silver’s take is that the “L” should be taken by the side that lost, not the side that didn’t even get to see its preferred strategy come to fruition.

The “L” was literally achieved by the side of those that wanted Biden out. They got their wish and Biden was removed. As they hoped, a new younger and fresher candidate took his place….and she lost.

So, the “L” needs to be taken and polished and put on a mantle above the fireplace in the living rooms of the people that were eager to change candidates. They were able see their strategy through and that strategy failed. This is a simple fact.

Now, I know that the argument for this — which Silver again articulates in this post — is that Harris got closer than Biden ever would have, and even though she lost it was still the best path to give Democrats the highest chances of winning. This is a plausible argument for any reasonable person to make, although interestingly, it was not an argument that was made until we knew this strategy was going to fail.

And it’s true that Biden was looking weaker and weaker in the polls, and internal polling apparently was showing catastrophic Electoral College losses. There’s a good chance Biden would have lost by a landslide had he stayed in the race.

But consider that he had gone through months and months of rabid attacks about his age, not just from Republicans, but from defeatist Democrats, such as Silver, that propagandized his age to achieve their ends. As discontent began to win out over loyalty and stalwart support among Democrats, a self-fulfilling prophecy took hold. Turns out, joining the opposition in shitting on your candidate in the middle of a campaign is not good for that candidate.

Imagine if Democrats circled the wagons the way Republicans regularly do for Trump. They could have easily spun Biden’s candidacy towards the positive, shrugged off questions about his age, and pretended to have the utmost confidence in him to garner support. They also had the benefit of going up against an historically horrible candidate in Donald Trump, who incited an insurrection at the Capitol as his final act of his previous foray into politics.

The fact that many Democrats and “impartial” commentators, such as Silver, chose instead to spend their time and energy pounding the “age” drum with Biden, while treating Trump with kid gloves, resulting in a Trump victory, should really give these people pause and a bit of humility.

Nope, not Silver, at least. Even though he literally earned the “L”, he’ll never take it. And he’ll insist that others take it, to preserve what little remains of his relevancy in political commentary.