Nate Silver has way more than you'd probably care to learn at the moment on Marco Rubio's presidential electability (a brutally short translation of Silver's piece: Who knows?), but this passage is exceptionally noteworthy:
Among Republican presidential nominees since 1960, in fact, only the extraordinarily conservative Barry Goldwater ... rates as being more conservative than Mr. Rubio.
It's noteworthy for two reasons. One, it rather nicely bookends ultraconservatism's chronological rise and much-anticipated fall, already in observable progress; and two, it perhaps alleviates the often acute pain that comes with the habitual monitoring of today's maniacal Republican Party--just knowing, that is, that anything that takes 50 years to get here won't go away tomorrow, but rest assured, go away it will (see reason #1).
Silver's method seems reasonable from a mathematical point of view, but his interpretation is flawed because he omitted a crucial factor.
The problem is that the numbers are all relative to the entire liberal-to-conservative spectrum as it existed AT THE TIME of the activities on which the numbers are based. From Goldwater to today, the envelope of mainstream American politics has gradually moved to the right. On cultural/social issues, Goldwater would now be considered liberal, and on foreign policy issues, well, conditions are so different that it's hard to compare. Politicians on the left today look more like centrists of 30-50 years ago. So to say that Barry Goldwater rates as more conservative than Mr. Rubio is extremely misleading.
Posted by: priscianus jr | February 19, 2013 at 03:07 PM