NYT Statistician and Election Analyst Nate Cohn: No, Fox News Should Have Never Called Arizona on Election Night. I Knew We Couldn't Call Arizona Until All Votes Were Counted. Why Didn't Fox?

He also says that Jonah Goldberg is a great sweaty fat fuck of a failure who doesn't read anything deeper than Twitter.

By implication, you understand.

Last week, grotesque low-T toad and Soros Towelboy Jonah Goldberg called Fox News viewers "snowflakes" for continuing to dispute very early Fox News' call of Arizona.

Column: If only Tucker Carlson's treatment of woke snowflakes were aimed at Fox News viewers

By Jonah Goldberg
Columnist
March 7, 2023 3:15 AM PT

If you search for "safe space" on the Foxnews.com website you'll get over 46,000 results. All of them aren't about those woke snowflakes who need trigger warnings and cry rooms. But a lot of them are.

For instance, in 2017, shortly after the inauguration of Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson grilled a college professor about a student who came into her classroom crying about the election. "As the adult shouldn't you say, 'You know, it was an election, and it was democratic, and nobody got cancer, nobody died, and maybe you should toughen up a little?' "

Would that Carlson and the rest of Fox's leadership had a similar attitude toward their own audience, the average age of which is 56.

"A little more than a week after television networks called the 2020 presidential election for Joseph R. Biden Jr.," the New York Times' Peter Baker reported, "top executives and anchors at Fox News held an after-action meeting to figure out how they had messed up."

The primary mess-up was the network's decision to call Arizona for Joe Biden at 11:20 p.m. on election night. The call infuriated the Trump campaign and viewers alike.

Save for Washington managing editor Bill Sammon, who also served on the "Decision Desk" that made the call, attendees at the meeting believed the Arizona announcement hurt Fox's "brand" -- not because they got it wrong, or even because they got it right. It hurt the brand because it hurt people's feelings.

That's it. Calling Arizona had no real-world effect. Arizona's polls -- and polls everywhere except for solidly Democratic Hawaii -- were closed. It was a bit like telling a fan who recorded the Super Bowl that his team lost before he had a chance to finish watching the game. It was mean, but no one wanted to tell the audience to "toughen up."

Of course, Trump himself was angry for another reason. He'd encouraged his voters to vote on election day so he could claim to be ahead that night and declare victory before mail-in votes were counted the next day. He thought he could then win in the courts or Congress. As Steve Bannon admitted before the election, this was always the plan. But the Arizona call made it harder to claim he was ever beating Biden.

It's unclear whether some Fox opinion hosts were complicit or simply useful idiots in this scheme. But there's no evidence the executives were in on any of that. Their overriding concern was simply not to hurt the feelings of the viewers and thereby lose them to upstart pro-Trump rivals One America News Network and Newsmax, which were all too happy to be safe spaces for election fraud lies.

By the way, Jonah's fellow fatso Chris Stirewalt is implicated in this call. Stirewalt posts at The Dispatch. Jonah Cowberg gives no hint that he might have a bias in writing this column, to defend fellow fugitive from Jenny Craig Chris Stirewalt.

As I responded to this lazy porker's "column" last week, the margin in the race was so close -- under 0.5%, I said, 0.3% to be precise -- that the race was actually a "coin flip" which could not be called until all votes were counted.

I also said this was not statistical analysis, this was merely "guessing."

Actually -- and how many times do we have to point this out to the chronically ignorant and dishonest, like Jonah? -- the eventual recount showed that the difference between Trump votes and Biden votes was razor-thin, and FoxNews' estimate of what the actual vote was, a 5% difference, I think, their "experts" proclaimed, was wildly wrong. And no, no election-caller would call an election if they knew the difference between two candidates was less than 1%.

It was a coinflip, as they say. Therefore it should not have been called -- no other organization called it until, I believe, the next day.

But Jonah and his Fellow Fatty Chris Stirewalt say they were right to call it because the random flip of the coin that determined the ultimate winner did turn out to be, supposedly, Biden.

That is not statistical analysis -- that is guessing.

Via John Sexton, the New York Times' poll analyst Nate Cohn reviews the prediction and agrees with me, using the same "coin flip" and "guessing" terminology I did.

And he says that no decision desk would have called Arizona so early if they had any idea about the composition of the outstanding mail-in vote, which was largely Republican.

And he says that competent analysts such as himself strongly suspected the late mail-in vote -- mailed in votes on the day of the election, or just before -- would trend heavily Republican, and therefore no competent analyst would call Arizona before all or almost of that vote came in and was counted.

But Fox News' decision desk was not competent.

If you're a subscriber to this newsletter, my guess is you'd be interested in my colleague Peter Baker's article about the drama at Fox News in the aftermath of its decision to call Arizona for Joe Biden on election night.

Here's the short version: Fox News executives, news anchors and pundits were enraged over the call, with messages and a recording showing they thought it hurt ratings and threatened to "impact the brand" by alienating Donald J. Trump's supporters.

Most people would agree that political and branding concerns shouldn't dictate an election call by a news organization. But the article has nonetheless rekindled an old debate about whether Fox News was really "right" to call Arizona for Mr. Biden on election night in 2020.

This debate can be a little confusing, since Fox was right in the most important sense: It said Mr. Biden would win Arizona, and he ultimately did.

But a race call is not an ordinary prediction. It's not like calling heads or tails in a coin toss. A race call means that a candidate has something like a 99.9 percent chance of winning. As a result, a call can be wrong, even if the expected outcome ends up happening. If you assert that there's a 99.9 percent chance that a coin flip will come up heads, you're wrong -- regardless of what happens next.

Of course, everyone knows heads or tails is a 50-50 proposition. It's much harder to know whether Mr. Biden had a 50.1 percent or 99.9 percent chance of winning Arizona based on the data available at 11:20 p.m. Eastern on election night, when Fox called the state for Mr. Biden. Most other news organizations didn't think so; only The Associated Press, a few hours later, joined Fox in making the call so quickly. And in the end, Mr. Biden won Arizona by just three-tenths of a percentage point -- a margin evoking a coin flip.

Was the Fox call the result of the most sophisticated and accurate modeling, or more like being "right" when calling heads in a coin flip? It appears to be the latter -- a lucky and dangerous guess -- based on a review of televised statements by the Fox News decision team and publicly available data about the network's modeling.

The Fox team believed Mr. Biden would win Arizona by a comfortable margin at the time the call was made, based on erroneous assumptions and flawed polling. While it worked out for Fox in the end, similarly risky decisions could have easily led to a missed call, with potentially dire consequences for trust in American elections.

...
.
In a recording of a Fox Zoom meeting two weeks after the election obtained by The Times, Mr. Mishkin acknowledged that the Arizona call appeared "premature" but that "it did land correctly."

A Fox spokesperson on Sunday said that "Fox News continues to stand by its decision desk's accurate call of Arizona."

Still, there is a compelling body of publicly available evidence suggesting that Fox, when it called the state, fundamentally misunderstood the remaining votes. It did not imagine that Mr. Trump could come so close to winning.

At the time Fox called Arizona, Mr. Biden led Mr. Trump by 8.5 percentage points, with an estimated 73 percent of the expected vote counted. The tabulated votes were mainly mail ballots received well ahead of the election. To win, Mr. Trump needed to take about 61 percent of the remaining votes.

...

A person with knowledge of how the call was made, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the Fox team believed that the early returns confirmed the Fox News Voter Analysis. Indeed, Mr. Biden's early lead seemed to match the survey's findings among early voters, who broke for Mr. Biden by 10 points in the survey, 54 percent to 44 percent. The implication was that Mr. Biden was on track for a clear victory.

When asked on election night on Fox to explain the Arizona call, Mr. Mishkin rejected the notion that Mr. Trump would do well in the outstanding ballots. Instead, he said he expected Mr. Biden to win the remaining vote:

"We've heard from the White House that they need to get just 61 percent of the expected vote and they'll be getting that." He added: "But the reality is that's just not true. They're likely to only get 44 percent of the outstanding vote."

Note: Trump got 59% of the remaining vote. Per Arizona's official counting, which you may take with a grain of sand.

Mishkin expected these votes to go to Biden. That's why he was so smugly arrogant in announcing Trump just could never get 61% of the vote.

Turns out -- 59%. A kiss on the wind away from 61%.

Again, even Mishkin admitted later this call was "premature."

Why can't Chubbs McNepotism admit it?

...

Through a Fox News spokesperson, Mr. Mishkin said he "misspoke on election night" when he said Fox expected Mr. Biden to win the remaining vote. If Mr. Mishkin did misspeak, there was still no indication that the Fox team expected Mr. Trump to win the remaining votes by a meaningful margin -- let alone an overwhelming margin.
On air on election night, Mr. Mishkin offered two main reasons to expect Mr. Biden to fare well in the remaining vote:

"Yes, there are some outstanding votes in Arizona. Most of them are coming from Maricopa, where Biden is currently in a very strong position. And many of them are mail-in votes, where we know from our Fox News Voter Analysis that Biden has an advantage."

On their face, these arguments weren't outlandish. Mr. Biden won Maricopa County, which is the home of Phoenix and a majority of Arizona voters. He won the mail vote in Arizona as well.

In the end, Mr. Trump won 59 percent of the remaining vote, all but erasing Mr. Biden's advantage.

He goes on to explain that only was it predictable that Trump would win these outstanding mail-in votes, but win them handily, and that Mishkin and Stirewalt and the rest of the Fox News Election HQ Brain Trust should have known this, too.

Basically, the early mail-in vote went to Democrats, because Democrats push that kind of voting.

But there were mail-in votes just before election day and even on election day. And these represented Republicans using the mail-in voting system, but attempting to vote on or very close to the actual election day, as tradition dictates.

Ahead of the election, it was clear that Democrats were turning in their ballots earlier than Republicans. As a result, the mail ballots counted on election night -- those received at least a few days before the election -- were likely to break for Mr. Biden by a wide margin.

The flip side: The voters who received mail ballots but had not yet returned them were very Republican. If they ultimately returned their ballots, these so-called "late" mail ballots counted after the election would break heavily for Mr. Trump.

Supposed "expert" and Hillary Clinton Donor Arnon Mishkin should have known this, if he's as infallible an expert as Fox News and Jonah Disgusting Fatbody pretend.

But he's not. He's incompetent, and a hack Democrat who would not be adverse for the hero points of telling his progressive friends and family to say "Hey, I was the first to call the election for Biden, how cool am I...?"

Nate Cohn says he knew that these ballots would either break Republican or at least could break Republican. He knew in advance that he would almost certainly not be able to call Arizona on election night-- they'd have to wait for those late mail-ins.

But in 2020, whether the late ballots would be overwhelmingly Republican was nonetheless "the big question," as I wrote before the election. As a result, we never contemplated the possibility of a call in Arizona on election night; it was an easy decision for us to reject the A.P. call without knowing exactly how the "late" mail ballots would break.

Again, here's the "expert" Johan Future Ozempic User says we're "snowflakes" to continue disputing:

When asked on television the day after the election if the so-called late mail voters could back Mr. Trump with more than 60 percent support, Mr. Mishkin dismissed the possibility, saying it could happen "if a frog had wings."

Mr. Mishkin said he did not "ascribe any significance" to whether mail voters turned in their ballots on Election Day. Instead, he expected the "late" ballots would "confirm" their call. He was confident the late data "would look like the data we've noticed throughout the count in Arizona," which to that point had shown Mr. Biden with a clear lead.

Mishkin's modeling was itself completely wrong in other states, too: Fox gave Biden a 95% chance to win North Carolina.

Actual result: an easy Trump win.

One indication that Fox's modeling was prone to overestimate Mr. Biden was its publicly available probability dials, which displayed the likelihood that Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump would win the key battleground states.

At various points, these estimates gave Mr. Biden at least an 87 percent chance of winning Ohio and at least a 76 percent chance of winning Iowa; Mr. Trump ultimately won both by nearly 10 points.

Maybe most tellingly, Fox gave Mr. Biden a 95 percent chance to win North Carolina -- even at a point when it was quite obvious that Mr. Trump would win the state once the Election Day vote had been counted.

Here's the difference between Fox News' atrociously-wrong voter modeling, and the New York Times'.

Fox News gave Biden a 95% chance of winning North Carolina.

The New York Times was predicting a Trump win by 1.7%.

And here was Mishkin doubling down on how much of an "expert" he is:

posted by Ace at 05:25 PM

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