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[BumRushDaShow]

16. He was sent packing when ABC wanted to "cut costs" after the 538 2022 poll failures

They kept the "538" brand and discarded its founder.

Nate Silver Out at ABC News as Disney Layoffs Once Again Hit News Division

April 25, 2023 9:18am

The second round of Disney layoffs hit ABC News on Tuesday, with Nate Silver’s data-driven politics and journalism brand FiveThirtyEight among those being impacted.

Silver told FiveThirtyEight employees in a Slack message that he expects to leave Disney when his contract is up, which he added would be “soon,” The Hollywood Reporter has learned.

ABC News is expected to keep the FiveThirtyEight brand name, with plans to streamline the site and make it more efficient.

“ABC News remains dedicated to data journalism with a core focus on politics, the economy and enterprise reporting — this streamlined structure will allow us to be more closely aligned with our priorities for the 2024 election and beyond,” an ABC News spokesperson said in a statement. “We are grateful for the invaluable contributions of the team members who will be departing the organization and know they will continue to make an important impact on the future of journalism.”

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https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/nate-silver-leaves-538-abc-news-disney-layoffs-1235401689/

What I Got Wrong In 2022

By Nathaniel Rakich

Dec. 28, 2022, at 6:00 AM


Here’s a prediction that 100 percent, absolutely, positively will come true: I will get something wrong in 2023. Here at FiveThirtyEight, we make a lot of predictions every year; some of them work out, but we can’t get every single one right.  We can, however, learn from our mistakes. That’s why I like to write about everything I got wrong in the previous 12 months.1 I do this for two reasons: First, they’re often unintentionally hilarious (and when you’re a politics reporter, sometimes you need a laugh); second, identifying my blind spots has helped me become a better analyst.

And there’s no shortage of material for this year’s installment. Let’s start with a tweet I wrote on Nov. 6, 2020, shortly after it became clear that Joe Biden had won the presidential race: “Congratulations to Republicans on their victory in the 2022 midterms!” This was obviously meant to be snarky but also to communicate a political tenet: that the president’s party almost always has a bad midterm election. Of course, that tweet wasn’t from 2022, but I also made this argument in January of this year. And for several months thereafter, my analysis was colored by my expectation that 2022 would be a good election year for Republicans. As everyone knows by now, the midterms were a disappointment for Republicans. They won the House — but only barely (they gained just nine seats on net). Meanwhile, Democrats gained a seat in the Senate.

Clearly, I was overly confident in my early prediction. While it is true that the president’s party almost always has a poor midterm, there have been exceptions. And the 2022 midterms turned out to be one of these “asterisk elections,” thanks in no small part to the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to overturn the constitutional right to abortion. This year I should have been more prepared for the possibility that the ruling could throw a wrench into the election, especially after a draft of the decision was leaked in May. And even after the decision, it took me a while to become convinced that voter anger over Dobbs would prove durable enough to last until Election Day.

It wasn’t until the fall that I revised my expectations from a “red wave” to a “red ripple.” My biggest mistake here was not realizing just how common an “asterisk election” actually is. I often quoted one key stat: that the president’s party had gained House seats in only two of the previous 19 midterm elections. But there were four other midterms where the president’s party lost fewer than 10 House seats — so what happened in 2022 isn’t that rare. I also neglected to remember that the president’s party had lost Senate seats in only 13 of the last 19 midterms. In other words, midterms like 2022 happen about a third of the time — way too frequently to count them out.

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https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/2022-predictions-i-got-wrong/