Steve again shows why he is the best.
As has been noted of late, political predictor market got Trump wrong, real wrong. Nate Silver, the guru’s guru of that industry, recently penned a piece in which his figuratively scratches his head, trying to figure out how he as so wrong in his predictions about The Donald (“Why Republican Voters Decided On Trump”).
Of Silver’s column, Steve makes a larger point in classic ‘Sailer Gap’ fashion:
To update James Carville’s advice to Bill Clinton: It’s the immigration, stupid, same as in the rest of the world’s elections the last couple of years.
Loose immigration policies tribalize domestic politics. When elites team up to import tribalist foreigners to lower their own citizens’ wages and to vote against the natives’ interests (and, now and then, murder them), why is it surprising when the poor dumb natives eventually get the message that they need a tribe of their own, too?
A methodological shortcoming of the various Nates’ models of American politics is that they ignored evidence from abroad. It has been pretty obvious from recent elections in Denmark, Australia, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, Germany, France, and so forth that immigration policy is a hot issue in the world today — even in Canada, where Justin Trudeau rode a spasm of sentimentality and smugness into office.
But these models ignore what voters are seeing on TV about the Camp of the Saints, terrorism, and sexual assault abroad. Instead, crimethink kicks in among pundits: protective stupidity about immigration policy as a subject that only bad people ever think about except in terms of ethnocentric schmaltz.
