Nate Silver, the Democratic primaries, and the trouble with Likert scores
Yesterday, Nate Silver tweeted out a table purporting to calculate Likert scores for a list of potential contenders in the Democratic primaries:
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdc370013-fc03-4553-afb2-f3223ec491af_468x419.png)
This ranking, he added, “isn’t that far from how I’d rate the candidates chances.” But is this actually a plausible way of assessing a candidate’s chances? And did he even calculate the Likert score correctly? S…