How do you build credibility & status? Let’s check Nate Silver. He was a stat guy who made a baseball player rating system that he sold. After this he ran a politics blog that successfully called states in ‘08/‘12. Check La Wik for Time making him a “100 most influential people”

He goes from blogging to working for the NY Times (the system’s Gospel) in ‘10. He writes a NY Times bestseller. He nails the ‘12 election. With this status boost, he sells out to Disney and does data journalism. He becomes the go to for electoral poll forecasting.

But how did this all start out? Simple. The Obama campaign fed him 1000s of internal polls in ‘08 and beyond. He signed an NDA. Buzzfeed assures us no bias from Silver but the entire time he was being pushed in the Obama era, he was getting Obama polls. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/buzzfeedpolitics/obama-campaign-shared-08-polling-with-silver

Silver was in effect, a propagandist for Obama & the Democrats. The institutions nominally independent were Obama campaign orgs. Zero skill. All of his Nostradamus like ability was him seeing the expensive internal Obama polls, figuring out which state polls lined up well.

He wasn’t a poll wizard. He was an anonymous DailyKos blogger looking at polls in the winter of ‘07 & primaries. Hypothetical: like the Trump team feeding Ricky Vaughn internals in ‘16, then RV being hired by the NY Times & given a book deal released 2 months before re-election

This becomes a chicken and egg issue though with managing a campaign. Silver becomes a faux neutral voice. In super close races, how much does the institutional prestige affect a race? Not everyone thinks the media is garbage. Affect 0.5%. That’s all that is needed in 1% races.

Anon blogger to Time’ “world’s 100 most influential people” in 1 year due to being a contracted propagandist for the selected presidential figurehead. They made him influential.