Nate Silver Can be Annoying,* But

He knows his math, as shown by his take-down of the study by Veronique de Rugy of George Mason University and the National Review^† claiming to show that stimulus went disproportionately to Democratic districts.

You see, much of the aid under the stimulus package was direct aid to the states, which, of course, was sent to state capitals, like Sacramento, and Albany, and then disbursed from there to the rest of the state.

It turns out that state capitals, with their generally urban character, and having a large, and usually significantly unionized workforce, tend to be more liberal than the state as a whole, but what is more significant, is that the money that goes to these state capitals does not generally end up there; it is allocated by the governors or legislatures all over the states:

That de Rugy has testified before Congress on the basis of her evidence, and never paused to consider why the top five congressional districts on her list overlap with Sacramento, Albany, Austin, Tallahassee and Harrisburg, is mind-boggling. The presence of a state capital is the overwhelmingly dominant factor it predicting the dispensation of stimulus funds. This could have been discerned in literally five minutes if she had bothered to look at the apparent outliers in her dataset and considered whether they had anything in common -- a practice that should be among the first things that any researcher does when evaluating any dataset.

Once you read his analysis, it's pretty simple to see the flaw, but it is one that is hard to spot in the first place.

Basically, if you make any sorts of block grants to the states, they go to the capitals, and are then disbursed all around the states, so if you only go 1 or 2 levels down, you make it look like the stimulus program is a Democratic pork project.

The reality is far different.

^*I tend to find his political analysis largely directed at either cock-punching DFH's,^‡ or mindlessly contrarian, kind like a mini-Michael Kinsley.
^†2 strikes against her credibility there to start.
^‡Dirty F%$#ing Hippies.