Nate Silver Shuts Down Women’s March With One Statistic

Nate Silver is considered by many to be a “fair-minded liberal,” a title that he wears proudly on his FiveThirtyEight blog, which has blossomed into a harder news site over the last five years since he correctly predicted the Mitt Romney-Barack Obama showdown of 2012.

While Huffington Post gave Hillary Clinton a better than 95 percent chance to win the Nov. 8 general election, Nate was the voice of caution, holding her chances of winning at just 70 percent.

He even called out HuffPo when they called out his “generous” modeling to Trump and used some pretty salty language to do it, as reported by Mediaite.

One week ago today, 1 in 100 Americans participated in the #WomensMarch. pic.twitter.com/soxiVxilbI

— Women’s March (@womensmarch) January 28, 2017

And while Silver has taken a bit of a backslide in the aftermath of the election, what detractors overlook is that his final model was pretty much in line with how the popular vote broke, and he warned every day on the Elections Podcast that there was a clear path to victory for Trump in the Electoral College.

All of that turned out to be true.

Nate Silver routinely tells his listeners “we’re not here to tell you what you want to hear,” and with the Women’s March, he’s at it once again.

The Women’s March has been called one of, if not the biggest mass protest in the history of the United States.

Marches all across the country broke out the day following President Trump’s inauguration and dominated headlines over a two-day period.

Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight estimates that between 3 million and 3.2 million demonstrators marched across hundreds of locations in solidarity, far greater than the tea party marches of 2009.

But there is one aspect to this statistic that has many on the left now discouraged with the effectiveness of the demonstration, and leave it to Silver to point it out.

In spite of the fact that the Women’s March “was about 10 times higher than at the tea party rallies,” Nate said, “the geographic distribution of the marches also echoed November’s election results, in which Hillary Clinton lost the Electoral College despite receiving almost 3 million more votes than Trump nationwide.”

Silver cautioned liberal Democrats not to take too much comfort in the turnout because they simply drew from the existing base with no evidence they expanded their coalition in any way that would be meaningful for victories in future elections.

About 80 percent of Women’s March attendees were in states Clinton won, Nate said, adding that a “disproportionate number were in major cities.”

He continued.

“So if the marches were a reminder of the depth of opposition to Trump — unprecedented for a president so early in his term — they also reflected Democrats’ need to expand the breadth of their coalition if they are to make a comeback in 2018 and 2020.

The bottom line, from the Nate Silver perspective, is that for the Women’s March to amount to any real meaningful change in a future presidential election, Democrats will have to leave the comforts of metropolitan centers and expand their numbers in heartland “red states,” especially if Trump continues to build on that base of supporters.

While the president came in with the lowest favorability ratings of any president at that same point in history, his first week witnessed a flurry of executive orders and memoranda that bumped his overall approval rating up six points in five days.

A recent poll from Rasmussen Reports even has President Trump with a 59 percent approval rating, while a Quinnipiac poll that has him at only 36 percent has a relatively high undecideds number (19 percent) that were apparently not turned off enough by his week one actions to disapprove.

But what do you think, readers?

Is Nate Silver right about the Women’s March? Has it had any meaningful impact on Trump’s early tenure as president? Sound off in the comments section below.

[Featured Image By Joe Tabacca/ Shutterstock]