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Meet Nate Cohn, New York Times' new young gun on data
This article is a bit old but if anyone is wondering about the NYT Upshot (NYT's replacement for 538) and the guy that runs it, Nate Cohn, here is a polico article from awhile back. Nate Cohn is in a bit of a feud with Nate Silver this year and he is starting to get more attention. But he isn't some nobody with a website, like the unskewed polls guy from 2012 that had run ins with the people at 538. He actually has a pretty solid track record of projecting races. He's not necessarily some bullshitter going up against the reigning political projection King. I'm very nearing jumping ship from 538 and going to Nate Cohn's projections instead.
When The New York Times lost statistics star Nate Silver and his high-traffic 538 franchise to ESPN in July 2013, it found a way to fill the void by assembling a data-driven politics and policy brand called The Upshot, which launched as a website and print component the following April. In doing so, the Times also found another Nate (last name Cohn), a precocious numbers-cruncher and polling whiz who has emerged as the new face of election analysis for the paper of record, as well as one of the latest players in a growing brood of wonksters (see also Steve Kornacki, Ezra Klein, etc.) who’ve brought some new fire to the nerd-media genre.
Cohn, bearing the same bookish, bespectacled countenance as his predecessor and the same predilection for predictions, has amassed a devoted following through his coverage of demographics and polling. One of his earliest hits was a prescient exegesis last March of Mitch McConnell’s reelection prospects heading into the midterms. (“The polls overstate his vulnerability.”) He’s also your go-to for, say, a demotic explanation of why “Republicans do not necessarily need significant gains among Hispanic voters to win the presidency,” a story The Upshot ran on Nov. 20; or, as the headline of Cohn’s Dec. 17 contribution proclaimed: “Why the Cuba Issue No Longer Cuts Against Democrats in Florida.”
A typical day for the 26-year-old might involve merging five pre-midterm surveys and re-weighting them, as Cohn did over Thanksgiving, or burying his nose in the North Carolina voter district file to figure out exactly what percentage of the population is either white or over the age of 65, which is what Cohn was up to when I visited him recently in The Upshot’s little corner of the Times’ D.C. bureau. “I go through data sets. If someone wants to know what the black share of the electorate was in Georgia in 2010, I can tell them that.” (28.3 percent, for the record, he said. )
Cohn grew up in Auburn, Wash., a working-class suburb about 30 minutes southeast of Seattle. A debate-team member and astronomy buff, he caught the election bug during the Bush-Kerry contest of 2004 and went on to study politics at Whitman College, a private liberal arts school clear across the state in Walla Walla. After graduating in 2010, Cohn got a job at the Henry L. Stimson Center, a D.C.-based global security think tank where he researched defense budgets and terrorism in Pakistan. In January 2012, he started his own blog about politics and polling called Electionate. If you were to pinpoint his “discovery,” you might say it happened on Tuesday, March 13, the night of the 2012 Alabama and Mississippi primaries, when Andrew Sullivan’s election live-blog over at The Dish—part of The Daily Beast at the time—picked up one of Electionate’s posts. Cohn’s popularity with politicos and Beltway types took off from there. “He stood out pretty quickly,” said Sullivan, who is a fan of Cohn’s Times work as well: “He does much more narrative as well as stats. I think he’s been on a roll.”
Cohn, bearing the same bookish, bespectacled countenance as his predecessor and the same predilection for predictions, has amassed a devoted following through his coverage of demographics and polling. One of his earliest hits was a prescient exegesis last March of Mitch McConnell’s reelection prospects heading into the midterms. (“The polls overstate his vulnerability.”) He’s also your go-to for, say, a demotic explanation of why “Republicans do not necessarily need significant gains among Hispanic voters to win the presidency,” a story The Upshot ran on Nov. 20; or, as the headline of Cohn’s Dec. 17 contribution proclaimed: “Why the Cuba Issue No Longer Cuts Against Democrats in Florida.”
A typical day for the 26-year-old might involve merging five pre-midterm surveys and re-weighting them, as Cohn did over Thanksgiving, or burying his nose in the North Carolina voter district file to figure out exactly what percentage of the population is either white or over the age of 65, which is what Cohn was up to when I visited him recently in The Upshot’s little corner of the Times’ D.C. bureau. “I go through data sets. If someone wants to know what the black share of the electorate was in Georgia in 2010, I can tell them that.” (28.3 percent, for the record, he said. )
Cohn grew up in Auburn, Wash., a working-class suburb about 30 minutes southeast of Seattle. A debate-team member and astronomy buff, he caught the election bug during the Bush-Kerry contest of 2004 and went on to study politics at Whitman College, a private liberal arts school clear across the state in Walla Walla. After graduating in 2010, Cohn got a job at the Henry L. Stimson Center, a D.C.-based global security think tank where he researched defense budgets and terrorism in Pakistan. In January 2012, he started his own blog about politics and polling called Electionate. If you were to pinpoint his “discovery,” you might say it happened on Tuesday, March 13, the night of the 2012 Alabama and Mississippi primaries, when Andrew Sullivan’s election live-blog over at The Dish—part of The Daily Beast at the time—picked up one of Electionate’s posts. Cohn’s popularity with politicos and Beltway types took off from there. “He stood out pretty quickly,” said Sullivan, who is a fan of Cohn’s Times work as well: “He does much more narrative as well as stats. I think he’s been on a roll.”
http://www.politico.com/media/story/2015/01/meet-nate-cohn-new-york-times-new-young-gun-on-data-003282#ixzz4P0cvYbBd
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