Fake pundit triumphs

The collapse of the blowhard ‘experts’

He went from being a hostage of Russian security forces to predicting the exact results of the Iowa presidential caucuses, right down to the third- and fourth-place finishers.

He called Bernie Sanders’s upset win in the recent Indiana primary, when his competitors all said Hillary Clinton had it locked down. He has correctly predicted the results of 77 out of 87 races in this year’s primaries, an 89 percent accuracy rating that equals that of FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver while tackling nearly twice as many contests.

And he’s a fictional character.

Carl “The Dig” Diggler is a parody of political pundits written by Felix Biederman and me for CAFE. Carl exists to satirize all that is vacuous, elitist and ridiculous about the media class. From his sycophantic love of candidates in uniform to his hatred of Bernie Bros, from his reverence for “the discourse” to his constant threats of suing the people who troll him on Twitter, Carl is predicated on being myopic, vain and — frankly — wrong.

But something funny happened along the way. Biederman and I, who are neither statisticians nor political scientists, started making educated guesses for our parody about the results of the primaries. And we were right. A lot.

We beat the hacks at their own game by predicting every Democratic winner on Super Tuesday. We told readers who would win in the unpredictable caucuses that FiveThirtyEight didn’t even try to forecast, such as those in Minnesota, Wyoming and even American Samoa. We called 19 out of the past 19 contests. FiveThirtyEight, whose model cannot work without polling, accurately predicted 13.

Unlike professional forecasters, who maintain the pretense of objectivity, Diggler’s approach is proudly based on gut instinct and personal bias. Take his Wisconsin prediction:

Wisconsinites are mostly a simple people. They eat their three lunches, kiss their often enormous children on their often featureless faces, and go to church so they can pray for the 2 Broke Girls.

Or his New Hampshire call:

This state is practically built on the idea of filming police officers and pestering them about maritime law, so they see the harassment Sanders’ campaign is built on as inherently patriotic.

The success of two amateurs writing a fictional pundit who relies on “gut” and bogus “racial science” highlights the collapse of the expert prognosticators this year. For months, professional data journalists at FiveThirtyEight, Vox, the New York Times, et al, proclaimed that Trump and Sanders had no chance. They checked the numbers and reassured readers that the Trump bubble would pop, that Sanders would win two states and then go home.

In particular, Silver, who correctly predicted the results of the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, enjoys the imprimatur of scientific authority. His site is the grandaddy of a strain of data journalism — er, “empirical journalism” — which insists that hard mathematical analysis is more objective and more accurate than old-school pundits with their capricious instincts. “DataLab,” the name of FiveThirtyEight’s blog, conjures up wonks

The early retirement “for convenience” of Chancellor Dan Klaich last week was obviously intended to release some of the pressure building in the steam engine of reform.

If anything, it should have the opposite effect.

Klaich’s resignation was inevitable after revelations involving the manipulation of research about the governance and funding formula of the Nevada System of Higher Education. In both cases, emails show system officials influenced research to ensure favorable outcomes.

And Klaich was the driving force behind that influence, conspiring with consultants to ensure the Nevada Legislature saw what the system wanted it to see. The subterfuge was detailed in emails obtained by ReviewJournal reporter Bethany Barnes; if not for her persistence and attention to detail, last week’s resignation drama would never have taken place.

Former Assemblyman Pat Hickey, now a member of the state Board of Education, defended Klaich, and claimed the Review-Journal was simply pursuing a public official’s scalp and hunting for prizes. But Hickey, himself a former journalist, should know better. If there had been no evidence of misconduct, there would have been no story to write, and no need for the convenient early retirement of the man at the center of it all.

The temptation now is to consider the matter closed, another classic Nevada story of behind-the-scenes chicanery followed by a feather-soft landing. But that would be a tragic mistake; the higher ed system obviously needs changes, and now is the perfect time.

Assemblyman Elliot Anderson, D-Las Vegas, said the first action may be to remove the Board of Regents from Article 11 of the Nevada Constitution. The system has developed the attitude that it exists as some kind of mutant fourth branch of government alongside the Legislature, the executive branch and the courts. “There is this culture, they’re not accountable,” Anderson said.

Under his bill, university presidents should present budgets jointly to the Legislature and regents, and they should get protections so they’ll feel free to testify to lawmakers without fear of losing their jobs. (Anderson said he’s heard reports of system officials following presidents in the halls of the Legislature, ostensibly to monitor their contacts.) And, in the event of funding disagreements between the Legislature and the Board of Regents, lawmakers should prevail, Anderson said.

“There’s a lot of trust that needs to be rebuilt,” Anderson said.

But Regent Trevor Hayes said any stab at reform should not write the regents out of their role governing the system. “I think there needs to be some kind of autonomy, not as a separate branch of government, but the ability to address the subject that we were elected to address and that we’ve developed expertise in,” he said. The part-time Legislature has neither the time nor the specialized knowledge of higher education to take over governance of the system.

Hayes said he supports presidents making presentations to regents in an open meeting, after which the board should set funding and legislative priorities for the new chancellor to advocate in Carson City. The idea of presidents testifying independently to lawmakers on behalf of their individual institutions is a non-starter, he said.

Clearly, there’s a wide gulf to be overcome. But no matter what else, the haughty, arrogant abuses of the Klaich administration must never be repeated. “It’s always been about controlling information,” Anderson said.

And he’s right, as Barnes’ stories demonstrate: It was the uncontrolled release of information that sparked the push for reforms, Klaich’s convenient early retirement and, if we’re lucky, some changes that will ultimately benefit students and the state.