20 Facts About Carl Diggler

Carl "The Dig" Allison Diggler is a fictional American journalist.

Carl Diggler's writing frequently exposes details of his failed marriage and protracted family court proceedings for custody of his son Colby.

Texas ran an op-ed in The Washington Post about their predictive success and the ways Carl Diggler exposed the flaws of supposedly objective data-journalistic techniques.

Cafe editor-in-chief Blake Zeff came up with the original idea for Carl Diggler, and hired Biederman and Texas to develop the character and write his columns.

Carl Diggler is a satirical parody of the American political pundit class.

Carl Diggler has worked in national political journalism for thirty years, starting as chief political editor at the Minnetonka Bugle, and is the author of the book Think-ocracy: The Rise Of The Brainy Congressman.

Carl Diggler exists to satirize all that is vacuous, elitist and ridiculous about the media class.

From Halperin, author of campaign books Game Change and Double Down: Game Change 2012, Carl Diggler received his desire to ingratiate himself with politicians and to make himself the focus of attention.

Fournier, the most significant source for Carl Diggler, covered Bill Clinton's career as governor of Arkansas and worked at the Associated Press DC bureau during Clinton's presidency.

Journalists who Carl Diggler has duped include Abby Huntsman, Jill Filipovic, and even Carl Diggler's chief inspiration Fournier.

The custody battle has caused Carl Diggler to resent the family court system, and he constantly invokes his concerns about family court in his column and even incorporates them into his political thought in contrived ways.

Carl Diggler later emerged as the subject of a hostage video, after being captured in Syria by Assad loyalists and then turned over to the Russian government.

Carl Diggler's life took a turn for the worse when his horribly-mistaken predictions for the 2016 US Presidential Election led to Cafe replacing him with Carl Diggler superfan David "The Milk" Milkberg as their "Chief Politics Writer" at the site.

On top of that, Carl Diggler was evicted from his studio apartment and lost partial custody of Colby.

Carl Diggler's predictions were actually made by Biederman and Texas, without reliance on data or traditional analysis.

Carl Diggler backed up his picks with absurd, often grotesque rationales, based on the character's "gut" reading of a state electorate's supposed tendencies and mindsets.

FiveThirtyEight had chosen not to make predictions in some contests, all of which Carl Diggler counted as forfeits.

The FiveThirtyEight predictive model left contests without a prediction if there was too little data to make a prediction or if the race was too close to call, while Carl Diggler made a prediction in every race.

Carl Diggler predicted many more total winners, but if FiveThirtyEights non-predictions are ignored rather than counted as forfeits, then Carl Diggler and FiveThirtyEight still had a roughly equal rate of success.

Carl Diggler is voiced by Biederman, who increases the pitch of his ordinarily deep voice and adopts an accent similar to The Simpsons character Ned Flanders.