RealClearPolitics.com not so "clear"...
Nate Silver over at fivethirtyeight.com has some issues with how RealClearPolitics.com conducts their collection of polls. It seems that RealClearPolitics.com has an aversion to including polls that are favorable to Obama while including ones that are favorable to McCain even though they swore some of those polls off long ago. Nate Silver expresses his skepticism via this post and follows it up with some very interesting circumstances.
If everything that Nate writes is true (and I believe that he's on to something here), why would RealClearPolitics.com skew toward McCain? I see two potential reasons:
1. They are in the tank for McCain.
Or...
2. They have gotten such a great amount of traffic during this election cycle that they are trying to wring everything they can out of it by trying to keep the race as close as possible for as long as possible to keep interest/traffic on the site high.
Personally, I don't have a problem with them doing so in either case as long as they change their name because there is nothing "clear" about either reason. What say ye, RealClear?
UPDATE: Nate had a follow-up conversation with the owner of RealClearPolitics and has a bit more to this story.
If everything that Nate writes is true (and I believe that he's on to something here), why would RealClearPolitics.com skew toward McCain? I see two potential reasons:
1. They are in the tank for McCain.
Or...
2. They have gotten such a great amount of traffic during this election cycle that they are trying to wring everything they can out of it by trying to keep the race as close as possible for as long as possible to keep interest/traffic on the site high.
Personally, I don't have a problem with them doing so in either case as long as they change their name because there is nothing "clear" about either reason. What say ye, RealClear?
UPDATE: Nate had a follow-up conversation with the owner of RealClearPolitics and has a bit more to this story.
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