Nate Silver, a poll analyst and poker player, thinks people should care that he wants President Biden to resign.
There was one reporter on the weekly media calls with U.S. Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner from last week who cared enough to waste the senators’ time with a question about Silver’s take that Biden is all the sudden not “competent” to finish the last two months of his term.
“When I saw that, I thought, Nate Silver, wait, he’s a pollster, right?” Kaine said. “I mean, now suddenly he’s a governing expert, like, you know, well, if Tim Kaine said that the play that the Washington Commanders should run on third-and-7 against the Dallas Cowboys was x, why would anyone pay any attention to me?
“I don’t think Nate Silver knows the first thing about any sort of governing and the job that needs to be done between now and the end of the presidential term,” Kaine said. “So, I think this was an example, and I have noticed this, you know, hey, this is true with pollsters generally, because if they’re ever right on a poll, they think it conveys them a lot of wisdom about things they don’t really know anything about.”
Silver isn’t even a pollster himself; again, he’s just a guy who weighs in on the polls that other people have conducted.
And he didn’t even get that right in the 2024 cycle. Silver waffled on making a final call in the days leading up to the election, then declared himself out of the prediction game when his statistical model was calling the election for Kamala Harris at 9:05 p.m. on Election Night.
Warner didn’t address Silver by name when he was asked to address the comment about Biden needing to resign.
“I absolutely have faith that this administration will finish. There’ll be a transition to the next administration. And again, I think he’s shown that he respects that tradition. He opened the White House to President-elect Trump, a courtesy that was not extended to him when President Trump was last in office, and we will get through this transition of power,” Warner said.
Both Warner and Kaine recognized the challenges facing the administration in the final weeks.
“I still believe that to give Vladimir Putin a big win in Ukraine raises the threat of him looking beyond Ukraine and those nations that are adjacent in Ukraine, many of them are members of NATO. So, if you want to see American troops or NATO troops engaged in a potential conflict with Russia, let Vladimir Putin have a pure win on Ukraine, and I’m terribly afraid that we could face that face that reality,” Warner said.
“There are a lot of significant challenges on the table right now, globally,” Kaine said. “I’ve been interacting with the White House on some things I agree with them on, some things that I disagree with them on. I was with the Secretary of State yesterday, the entire team, including the President, very, very engaged, the President, you know, was, was interacting with global leaders last week and a couple of different international forums. You know, we need to be doing our job in Congress, getting this budget done, getting a budget to the President, and prepping for the inauguration in January of the next president.”
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Chris Graham
