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Originally Posted by wheatrich
That's Pete now. She didn't know that at the time ofc though. She should really just drop now but I guess she'll probably want to wait till after whatever first debate stage of things.
That 538 points thing from endorsements is so dumb. 10 points for Mondale, lmao. Like hell no. They're basically all worthless, nobody cares.
The endorsements thing is so dumb. All it is is that endorsements are a measure of conventional wisdom on who is going to win the nomination, and that conventional wisdom is correct more often than not. The 538
article is a masterpiece of the genre. Halfway through, it cope to exactly what I'm saying above:
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So in some ways, the question is not so much who gets the most endorsements but whether a consensus forms.
That is, what is predictive is not endorsements but "consensus", also known as "conventional wisdom".
A couple other bites from the article:
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As poorly as the theory fared in the 2016 GOP nomination, it had done exceptionally well in the 2012 Republican race, when the party-backed Mitt Romney fought back a series of insurgent candidates (Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain) who surged in the polls but didn’t have staying power.
It is a powerful predictor indeed which can tell us that Herman Cain - who was literally 0% to win the nomination at any point in both 2012 and 2016 - isn't going to win the nomination.
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In 11 of the 16 nomination races, the pre-Iowa polling and endorsement leaders were the same. Differences have become more commonplace in recent years — in three of the five incumbent-free nomination processes since 2008, the polling and endorsement leader was not the same — which may suggest an increasing divide between voters and elites, especially within the Republican Party
YOU THINK? Really got his finger on the pulse there.
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So the party usually does get its way. But it also usually agrees with voters in the first place — or at least it can live with their choices — and it’s not so clear what happens in the event of a disagreement.
lol, so "the party decides" unless voters disagree?
I haven't read the book so it's hard to comment in detail, but it seems really obvious to me that endorsements are a measure of conventional wisdom and don't have much if any causative power in their own right. For the most part, people get endorsed because the endorser believes they will win. It's not the other way around, they don't win because of the endorsement.
I agree of course that the party committees have their preferences, like it was of course obvious that Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton were the preferences of the elites of each party in 2016. But I don't need to count endorsements to know that, I can just read the news. It's hard to say whether a fractious voting public will go along with these preferences, but the "endorsement primary" offers me absolutely no information on that either.
Edit: Basically what I'm saying is that the "endorsement primary" is a way of laboriously working out conventional wisdom quantitatively, which provides no benefit over "just look at the ****ing candidates and work out who the establishment will like". Doing it heuristically is dumb because it involves pretending that Mondale endorsements matter.
Last edited by ChrisV; 04-28-2019 at 04:39 AM.
