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By Jay Boice and Gus Wezerek. Additional contributions by Laura Bronner and Aaron Bycoffe. Presidential elections President, election night Presidential primaries U. Senate elections U. Senate, election night U. New York magazine reported that executive editor Jill Abramson "put on a full-court press" to keep Silver at The Times and that "for Abramson, Silver was a tentpole attraction for her favorite subject, national politics, and brought the kind of buzz she thought valuable", but the company's CEO and President Mark Thompson "confirmed that keeping Silver was not at the top of his agenda.
The mixed signals from Thompson and Abramson—his lack of enthusiasm for committing resources to Silver, her desire to keep a major star—frustrated Silver and his lawyer. We've expanded our staff from two full-time journalists to 20 and counting. Few of them will focus on politics exclusively; instead, our coverage will span five major subject areas — politics, economics, science, life and sports.
Our team also has a broad set of skills and experience in methods that fall under the rubric of data journalism. These include statistical analysis, but also data visualization, computer programming and data-literate reporting. So in addition to written stories, we'll have interactive graphics and features.
Within a couple of months we'll launch a podcast, and we'll be collaborating with ESPN Films and Grantland to produce original documentary films. At the same time, he continued making forecasts of the Democratic primary elections. That several of his forecasts based on demographic analysis proved to be substantially more accurate than those of the professional pollsters gained visibility and professional credibility for "Poblano", the pseudonym that Silver was then using.
Silver recalls the scenario: "I know the polls show it's really tight in NC, but we think Obama is going to win by thirteen, fourteen points, and he did. Any time you make a prediction like that people give you probably too much credit for it But after that [Silver's and the website's popularity] started to really take off. It's pretty nonlinear, once you get one mention in the mainstream media, other people [quickly follow suit]".
As a CNET reporter wrote on election eve, "Even though Silver launched the site as recently as March, its straightforward approach, daring predictions, and short but impressive track record has put it on the map of political sites to follow. Silver's final presidential election forecast accurately predicted the winner of 49 of the 50 states and the District of Columbia , missing only the prediction for Indiana.
As his model predicted, the races in Missouri and North Carolina were particularly close. 538 mlb predictions He also correctly predicted the winners of every U. Senate race. The accuracy of his predictions won him further acclaim, including abroad, [65] and added to his reputation as a leading political prognosticator. Barack Obama's presidential campaign signed off on a proposal to share all of its private polling with Silver.
After signing a confidentiality agreement, Silver was granted access to hundreds of polls the campaign had conducted. Senate, the U. House of Representatives, and state governorships. Each of these models relied initially on a combination of electoral history, demographics, and polling.
Silver eventually published detailed forecasts and analyses of the results for all three sets of elections. He correctly predicted the winner in 34 of the 37 contested Senate races. His congressional mid-term predictions were not as accurate as those made in , but were still within the reported confidence interval.
Of the 37 gubernatorial races, FiveThirtyEight correctly predicted the winner of Although throughout Silver devoted a lot of attention on his blog to the Republican party primaries, his first effort to handicap the presidential general election appeared as the cover story in The New York Times Magazine a year prior to the election: "Is Obama Toast?
Handicapping the Election". While publishing numerous stories on the Republican primary elections, in mid-February Silver reprised and updated his previous Magazine story with another one, "What Obama Should Do Next". Silver published the first iteration of his general election forecasts on June 7, According to the model, at that time Barack Obama was projected to win electoral votes—21 more than the required for a majority.
Obama then had an estimated On the morning of the November 6, , presidential election, the final update of Silver's model at A. At the conclusion of that day, when Mitt Romney had conceded to Barack Obama, Silver's model had correctly predicted the winner of every one of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. For example, Rasmussen Reports "missed on six of its nine swing-state polls".
In the week leading up to the U. Donald Trump prevailed in each of these contests, in which FiveThirtyEight forecasted the better chances for Biden to win. Silver has been criticized for inaccurate predictions. In January , journalist and blogger Colby Cosh criticized Silver's performance during the Massachusetts special Senate election , saying he was "still arguing as late as Thursday afternoon that [Martha] Coakley was the clear favourite; he changed his mind at midnight that evening and acknowledged that Scott Brown had a puncher's chance.
Silver's quantitative focus on polling data, without insight from experience in political organizing or journalism, has been a recurring critique from experienced commentators. Huffington Post columnist Geoffrey Dunn described Silver as someone who "has never organized a precinct in his life, much less walked one, pontificating about the dynamics in the electoral processes as if he actually understood them.
Considerable criticism during the elections came from political conservatives, who argued that Silver's election projections were politically biased against Mitt Romney , the Republican candidate for president. The New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan, while defending Silver's analysis, characterized the wager as "a bad idea" as it gave the appearance of a partisan motive for Silver, and "inappropriate" for someone perceived as a Times journalist although Silver was not a member of the newspaper's staff.
After a post-election appearance by Silver on Joe Scarborough's Morning Joe , Scarborough published what he called a " semi apology", in which he concluded:. Silver for predicting an outcome that I had also been predicting for a year. But I do need to tell Nate I'm sorry for leaning in too hard and lumping him with pollsters whose methodology is as rigorous as the Simpsons ' strip mall physician, Dr.
For those sins and a multitude of others that I'm sure I don't even know about , I am sorry. Politics is a messy sport. And just as ball players who drink beer and eat fried chicken in dugouts across America can screw up the smartest sabermetrician's forecast, Nate Silver's formula is sure to let his fervent admirers down from time to time. But judging from what I saw of him this morning, Nate is a grounded guy who admits as much in his book.
I was too tough on him and there's a Silver's nondisclosure of the details of his analytical model has resulted in some skepticism. Washington Post journalist Ezra Klein wrote: "There are good criticisms to make of Silver's model, not the least of which is that, while Silver is almost tediously detailed about what's going on in the model, he won't give out the code, and without the code, we can't say with certainty how the model works.
That last feature makes it unwise to use Silver's model as a straw stand-in for "science", as if the model had been fully specified in a peer-reviewed journal". It dropped to 20 in the second week, before rising to 13 in the third, and remaining on the non-fiction hardback top 15 list for the following 13 weeks, with a highest weekly ranking of 4.
The book describes methods of mathematical model-building using probability and statistics. Silver takes a big-picture approach to using statistical tools, combining sources of unique data e. Case studies in the book include baseball, elections, climate change , the financial crash, poker, and weather forecasting.
These different topics illustrate different statistical principles. As a reviewer in The New York Times notes: "It's largely about evaluating predictions in a variety of fields, from finance to weather to epidemiology. We learn about a handful of successes: when, for instance, meteorologists predict a hurricane's landfall 72 hours in advance But mostly we learn about failures.
It turns out we're not even close to predicting the next catastrophic earthquake or the spread of the next killer bird flu, despite the enormous amounts of brainpower trained on these questions in the past few decades". Silver's self-unmasking at the end of May brought him a lot of publicity focused on his combined skill as both baseball statistician-forecaster and political statistician-forecaster, including articles about him in The Wall Street Journal , [] Newsweek , [] Science News , [] [] and his hometown Lansing State Journal.
That Silver accurately predicted the outcome of the presidential race, in the face of numerous public attacks on his forecasts by critics, inspired many articles in the press, ranging from Gizmodo , [] to online and mainstream newspapers, [] news and commentary magazines, [] business media, [] trade journals, [] media about media, [] and Scientific American , [] as well as a feature interview on The Today Show , [] a return appearance on The Daily Show , [] and an appearance on Morning Joe.
Silver is referenced in the Syfy channel show The Magicians as an earth wizard who uses polling spells. In , Silver appeared on the podcast Employee of the Month , where he criticized Vox Media for "recycling Wikipedia entries" in their content. Silver is a great-nephew of geologists Caswell Silver and Leon Silver.
Silver is gay. I've always had friends but I've always come from an outside point of view. I think that's important. If you grow up gay, or in a household that's agnostic, when most people are religious, then from the get-go, you are saying there are things that the majority of society believes that I don't believe", he told an interviewer in Silver discussed his sexuality in the context of growing up in East Lansing, in an article about the Supreme Court ruling Obergefell v.
Hodges in favor of recognizing same-sex marriage on the date of its announcement. He analyzed the speed of the change of public sentiment, pointing out that the change over only several decades has been palpable to the current generations. Silver has long been interested in fantasy baseball , especially Scoresheet Baseball. Back to back super bowl champions Silver plays poker semi-professionally. In a interview with Charlie Rose , Silver said, "I'd say I'm somewhere in between being a libertarian and a liberal.
He added that he has voted Democratic in every presidential election he voted in, though he voted for John Kasich in the New York Republican presidential primary , as he believed "the difference between a Kasich-led GOP and a Trump-led GOP would make a large difference to the future of the country". Silver also criticized "the progressive political class ", believing that it had become "more left and less liberal ".
Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote. American statistician and writer born This article is about the author and statistician. For the American football player, see Nate Silver quarterback.
For the American filmmaker, see Nathan Silver. East Lansing, Michigan , U. Main article: FiveThirtyEight. Main article: FiveThirtyEight: U. Main article: The Signal and the Noise. August 13, Archived from the original on February 20, Retrieved August 21, Archived from the original on June 2, Retrieved August 6, Archived from the original on May 8, Retrieved May 8, Retrieved November 7, Where will people commune in a godless America?
Religious decline has happened fast. It means fewer places for connection. See how demographic swings could impact the election 's new Swing-O-Matic shows which states could flip under different scenarios. When will Trump make his VP pick. Running mates have historically been announced in July or August. 538 mlb predictions The presidential election has become an unpopularity contest President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are both underwater in the polls with the American public.
Have Americans ever hated two candidates as much as Biden and Trump. Why favorability might not matter in the presidential election. Are US politics undergoing a racial realignment. Is an election vibe shift underway. Who said it: Biden, Trump or someone from 'The Bachelor'. We quizzed the staff with 12 quotes about finding love — or votes. How worried should Democrats be about the polls?
Do campaign stops actually matter. Does Gen Z really care more about that viral TikTok than politics. What is and isn't motivating young voters today. A very political State of the Union Politics Podcast Biden highlighted the top campaign issues in his address to the nation.