Well it looks like Dean Chambers has surfaced. Business Insider managed to get him on the phone and he admitted he was wrong — what choice did he have? — though he still manages to hypocritically point the finger at Republican-leaning polling companies and blame them for it.
“Nate Silver was right, and I was wrong,” Chambers said in a phone interview.
Chambers’ method of “unskewing” polls involved re-weighting the sample to match what he believed the electorate would look like, in terms of party identification. He thought the electorate would lean more Republican when mainstream pollsters routinely found samples that leaned Democratic.
But as it turned out, the pollsters were right — self-identified Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 6% in election exit polls.
“I think it was much more in the Democratic direction than most people predicted,” Chambers said. “But those assumptions — my assumptions — were wrong.”
But he said he probably won’t go back to “unskewing” polls next time. He actually thinks conservative-leaning pollsters like Scott Rasmussen have a lot more explaining to do.
“He has lost a lot of credibility, as far as I’m concerned,” Chambers said. “He did a lot of surveys. A lot of those surveys were wrong.”
And the fact that you were even “unskewing” those polls and saying they were underpredicting the Republican landslide? You were even more wrong. And we’re all laughing at you.
