2016's Best Political Pundit Isn't Even A Real
On this episode of Reply All: Carl Diggler is not just enthusiastic about elections. He's also right. He runs over an 80 percent accuracy rate on predicting elections results. He's also made up.
Elections make a lot of people anxious. They're high stakes events that you, as an individual, have so little control over. Watching the numbers roll in on election night can be so stressful it makes you want to watch something comforting. Like say, maybe, that movie Enchanted. You know, the Disney movie. With Amy Adams.
One thing that can calm those nerves, though, is predictability. Maybe you won't be able to control the outcome, but at least you know what's coming. There was something calming when, during the 2012 presidential election, FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver called every state correctly. Like maybe the world wasn't all chaos and someone out there had it figured out.
This year, though, is the kind that can push you to new levels of stress. Ideas that would have gotten people kicked out of Thanksgiving dinner are now being talked about as being completely possible. Six months ago, the pundits were predicting the precise moment Trump would drop out of the election. A few weeks ago, Bernie Sanders was going to lose Michigan by 20 points. Neither of those things happened.
But in all this uncertainty, there's a new guy who actually seems to know what's going to happen. On his politics blog he predicted who would come in 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th among the Republicans in Iowa. He was calling Cruz in Idaho and Rubio in Minnesota when few others were. For many he's become this year's election oracle. His name is Carl Diggler.
Diggler's blog documents all the crazy things he's done in the course of being a political reporter. He writes about going to Syria to follow the election campaign of Bashar Al Assad, and about being abducted by the Syrian government. He writes about being forced to renounce his American citizenship on Russian state television. And then, in his spare time, he accurately predicts major American elections.
We asked Diggler what he loves about elections. . "I love the ceremony behind them," he said. "I love buying myself a big election cake I can just tear into the night of the caucuses and the primaries, I love the stump speeches, I love the predictions, I love just biting my fingernails while I watch the results come in. I love shoving it in my rival's faces; we are colleagues, we are members of the press, but there is a little competition there.
Diggler is not just enthusiastic about elections. He's also right. He runs over an 80 percent accuracy rate on predicting elections results.
But that's not all he does on his blog. He also refers to Colorado voters as "bong water-soaked Dr. Seuss hat-wearing tokers." He writes almost as much about his grievances with family court as he does about the election. He posts correspondence l from a Russian Colonel who claims to be his father and says that fate has brought them both to Syria.
So is the election predicting just a fluke? Or has this one political blogger figured out something that no one else has?
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