Nate Silver

Submission 3,807

About

Nate Silver is an American statistician and the founder and editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight. Known for his analysis and projections for baseball and elections, Silver developed a following for his political projections, particularly in regards to presidential elections.

History

After working as an economic consultant, Nate Silver began writing for Baseball Prospectus,^[1] and internet-based organizations that analyze baseball through sabermetrics, a statistical approach to baseball measurements. With Baseball Prospective, he co-authored an annual book of forecasts for the Major League Baseball and several other baseball-focused books.

In 2007, he began election predictions, publishing articles under the pseudonym "poblano" on the progressive politics website the Daily KOS.^[2] The site published his first article on October 31st, 2007.

The following year, he launched FiveThirtyEight.com, while continuing to publish under the name "Poblano." In a frequently asked questions page, published on March 1st, 2008, he describes his methodology:^[3]

There are several principal ways that the FiveThirtyEight methodology differs from other poll compilations:

Firstly, we assign each poll a weighting based on that pollster's historical track record, the poll's sample size, and the recentness of the poll. More reliable polls are weighted more heavily in our averages.

Secondly, we include a regression estimate based on the demographics in each state among our 'polls,' which helps to account for outlier polls and to keep the polling in its proper context.

Thirdly, we use an inferential process to compute a rolling trendline that allows us to adjust results in states that have not been polled recently and make them ‘current.’

Fourthly, we simulate the election 10,000 times for each site update in order to provide a probabilistic assessment of electoral outcomes based on a historical analysis of polling data since 1952. The simulation further accounts for the fact that similar states are likely to move together, e.g., future polling movement in states like Michigan and Ohio, or North and South Carolina, is likely to be in the same direction.

FiveThirtyEight became a popular website during the 2008 primaries. As his profile grew, Silver began appearing regularly on television and delivered a TED Talk (shown below).

On June 3rd, 2010, Silver announced that the FiveThirtyEight had partnered with the New York Times.^[4] He wrote:

There are two particular reasons why we felt the Times was the best home for FiveThirtyEight. On the one hand, I very much see what we are doing as a type of journalism, in the sense that it consists of doing original research on a timely basis to help inform the public discourse. Thus, the Times' unflinching commitment to quality journalism makes for a natural fit, and I expect that the relationship will evolve in exciting ways as FiveThirtyEight is incorporated into a "traditional" newsroom setting. On the other hand, the terrific work of their graphic and interactive journalists was a major draw. The new blog should look and feel great, and should be substantially more robust and feature-rich than the simple, one-page design that we have now.

In the 2012 presidential election, Silver published a prediction^[6] that Barack Obama had a 90 percent chance of winning the presidential election. According to The New Republic,^[7] Five Thirty Eight had become 20 percent of the New York Times traffic. The parody Twitter ^[8] account @fivethirtynate gained thousands of followers, who tweeted mystical cryptic ramblings from the perspective of Silver (shown below).

Over the next decade, Silver's work on FiveThirtyEight was a staple of election predictions and reporting in the United States. He sold FiveThirtyEight to ESPN on July 19th, 2013. He remained editor-in-chief of the blog.^[5]

Criticism

In the 2016 election, a so-called polling error made Nate Silver the scorn of many, who had followed his prediction that Hillary Clinton would win the presidency. In 2017, he defended his work in the article and admitted to mistakes. He wrote:

The answers are potentially a lot more instructive for how to cover Trump’s White House and future elections than the ones you’d get by simply blaming the polls for the failure to foresee the outcome. They also suggest there are real shortcomings in how American politics are covered, including pervasive groupthink among media elites, an unhealthy obsession with the insider’s view of politics, a lack of analytical rigor, a failure to appreciate uncertainty, a sluggishness to self-correct when new evidence contradicts pre-existing beliefs, and a narrow viewpoint that lacks perspective from the longer arc of American history. Call me a curmudgeon, but I think we journalists ought to spend a few more moments thinking about these things before we endorse the cutely contrarian idea that Trump’s presidency might somehow be a good thing for the media.

Regardless, Silver's predictions are routinely mocked online, particularly when they are found incorrect (examples below).

Drunk Nate Silver

Drunk Nate Silver refers to both a Twitter hashtag and novelty accounts that are associated with tweets describing what the New York Times statistician Nate Silver would do under the influence of alcohol. The trend took off shortly after he correctly predicted the outcome of the 2012 Presidential Election in all fifty states.

Defeated Nate Silver

Defeated Nate Silver is an image macro meme featuring a disheveled and tired-looking Silver on an ABC news broadcast in the days following the 2016 U.S. election.^[9] One of the earliest known usages of the meme was published by iFunny ^[10] user astrakhan on November 10th, 2016. They captioned the image, "Nate here pictured after being demoted to Nate Bronze for failing completely to call the election" (shown below).