Chris Blattman

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What you should be reading for election news

To be honest, the only two sources of information to which I pay serious attention are Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog and, maybe, the Intrade forecast. I place substantially more weight on Silver, at least this far out from the election, if only because his analysis and not just his numbers are inspired.

My read on why Intrade is more pessimistic on Obama than Silver’s model: Intrade traders are building in unexpected events where (because the world economy is, frankly, teetering on the brink) Obama has much more downside risk. This is something Silver’s model cannot easily account for. So useful to track both.

If I had to pick other news sources this cycle, I might say the New Yorker’s Political Scene podcast, and of course the Daily Show. Plus my Twitter feed.

Those I follow turn out to be raging partisan democrats, as it turns out. While I lean that direction myself, I miss the view from the other side. This became especially apparent over the convention week, as they whipped themselves up into a frenzy. Even the semi-Conservatives I follow (e.g. Andrew Sullivan) have tilted Obama. Only David Frum is left (by which I mean right).

So who are the conservative tweeps worth following?

13 Responses

  1. McArdle is a known flat-out liar with a violent disdain for her readers — which they regularly prove to deserve.

    Reality has a known liberal bias. If you want to know what conservatives think, read conservative blogs. If you want to know what is going on, don’t read conservative blogs.

  2. McArdle, Wilkinson, and the Reason folks are all good, but none of them are really Republicans. All of them are some strand of libertarian, and many of them prefer Obama to other options.

    For real Republicans I think Reihan Salaam is one of the best, both on Twitter and in other fora. Ramesh Ponnuru is okay.

  3. Another great site I follow is PoliticIt.com: http://politicit.com/ .

    From their website:

    “Track how you are fairing against opponents in real time with the It Score. The It Score measures a politician’s digital influence. Digital influence has predicted over 90 election outcomes in 2012 with 87% accuracy indicating that digital influence seems to correlate with election results. The It Score is calculated by collecting massive data on what people do and say in the real world, the internet, and in social networks and processes the “big data” through powerful software. When our software makes a mistake it learns which means the It Score becomes more accurate over time.”

  4. Will Wilkinson isn’t a conservative, but he is a free marketer, and an extremely entertaining writer. See The Economist’s Democracy in America blog, the posts by “W.W.” are him.

  5. Also Megan McArdle @asymmetricinfo

    I don’t think she’s a conservative but she seems fair minded, willing to critique both sides.

  6. Why not follow the people at Reason? @mleewelch @nickgillepsie @nickgillespie @barteldarcy @veroderugy

    Also, Walter Russell Mead @wrmead

  7. The correlation between the S&P 500 and the InTrade market for Obama’s re-election is just above 70%. A little higher than I expected, but I’m not terribly surprised.

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