A presidential election is coming up and people are mad at Nat Silver again.
In itself, this is nothing new: Silver’s election predictions have generated at least some controversy in every presidential cycle since he began making them in 2008.
About what the current rage is like Silver’s forecast Since late August, Trump has been shown as a slight favorite to win the election. As of Monday, that still gave him a 59.6 percent chance of victory.
But the roots go deeper. People have never stopped being mad at Silver since the last election, and the people mad at him are Democrats and progressives. In some of these circles, the mere mention of Silver’s name brings derision, contempt or even anger.
This is largely due to Silver’s own work and changing public commentary. He’s gained notoriety by targeting countless pundits and vote-abnegation Republicans, but he’s increasingly using his combative social media presence to challenge progressives, Democrats and public health experts when he thinks they’re wrong — which has happened often in recent years.
“I think progressive epistemology has gotten really bad,” Silver told me in an interview last week. In 2012, he “naively thought” only conservatives were “capable enough to detach from reality,” he said. More politely, he added, many progressives “are unaware of how much the combination of partisanship and the Internet, especially Twitter, infects people’s thinking and drives them crazy.”
His critics argue that this is what happened to him. Rap on Silva That’s been a long timeWhen he’s not predicting elections, he’s just another anti-moderate pundit who can lash out at issues far outside his area of expertise.
And while some of the criticism from progressives is directed at Silver because people are uncomfortable with what his model shows, most of it is a reflection of Silver’s new approach to commentary: He’s far less hesitant to express his opinion than before, and he challenges conventional wisdom on controversial issues. Don’t be afraid to do it.
Still, the problem that stuck around his neck the most over the past year was hers commentary That was led by the Democrats disaster Rebuild Joe Biden, and it’s a take to hold on. “It’s the most obvious thing in the world, this guy is a fucking walking corpse,” Silver told me. “To say he could be president for another four years was misleading.”
Evolution of net silver explained
When Silver first rose to fame, his prognosis served as a security blanket for nervous Democrats. In 2008 and 2012, his election forecasts underestimated the poll numbers and called Barack Obama the clear favorite to win. Online progressives thrilled at his debunkings zero scholar and conservative Pole-unskewers and believed him to be a sort of selective divination magician; He passed the 2012 cycle At the New York Times and later Sold his FiveThirtyEight website ESPN, which will fund its expansion into a full-fledged data journalism publication under his leadership.
But Silver’s goal was never to reassure the worrisome, the result was to state the truth. Although he shared the generally liberal politics of the Obama era (his primary campaign writing was Posted on progressive website Daily Kos), they were not really his main interest. His background was in baseball stat-crunching and playing online poker; He wanted to predict the future and beat the odds. His first book, 2012 signal and noiseIt was about his attempt to separate truly meaningful data from misleading, useless, or misleading information (noise) to determine results (signal).
When Donald Trump first ran for president, Silver found that easier said than done. In previous coverage of presidential primaries, he believed that early voting was largely a sham. It showed Hillary Clinton ahead of Obama in 2008, and Mitt Romney in 2012 running against different fringes or celebrities, and now it shows Trump ahead. So throughout 2015, he voice self confidence That was Trump apocalypse. “It’s one of the things I think I was critical of,” he says now. “We ignored a lot of polling data because Trump was doing well in the primaries.”
The 2016 general election was a different story. Now in place of crowd election forecasts, Silver’s model matches others by calling Clinton the favorite, but stood out in recent weeks to offer Trump an unusually high chance of winning, unlike other models that said he would almost certainly lose. He can’t claim to have predicted Trump’s victory (the final forecast gave it a 28 percent chance of happening), but his reasoning It proved why the polls did indeed point to an undecided race.
But, to his great annoyance, something left criticized He previously underestimated Clinton’s chances, as did others He exploded Later for not making Trump a favorite. “I was trying to warn everybody this is a close election,” Silver said. “And later, I was villainized for it.”
His tension in the left-of-center speech world began then and continued during the Trump presidency, when he sometimes railed against what he saw as censorious “group think“(Progressives are getting mad He sent the tweet that he considered innocent).
Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit and Silva started trying Number crunch And the revelation offers his take on the situation – which upset Some epidemiologists and public health experts, who faith He doesn’t know what he’s talking about and should Back them off. A common theme was that Silver wanted a quick rollout of the vaccine and then a quick return to normality. He argued that public health expert Dr Underrating The cost of extended school closures, Compare them “Disastrous, invasion of Iraq (or possibly even bigger)” is wrong. “These people don’t understand cost-benefit analysis,” he tweeted. Silver earned the ire of experts by opining that the “lab leak” theory of the origin of Covid-19 was plausible. “I’d probably bet 60-40, 70-30 on a lab leak,” he told me, though he admitted we’ll probably never know for sure.
Last year, Silver struck out with one on his own Substack email newsletter The economic downturn at Disney led to layoffs at Five Thirty Eight and his departure. And if there’s a theme to his first year of writing, it’s that Biden’s age has been a very serious problem for Democrats. “If the expert class doesn’t understand that Biden’s age is a real concern and a legitimate concern for voters,” he said Wrote last September“They will be better prepared” for a second Trump term. At that time, he the thought “It’s probably too late not to nominate Biden” and Harris will Will likely lose to Trump. But he changed his mind in November. writing: “If Biden can’t run a normal campaign, he should step down.”
Many Democrats cried foul at the time and argued that the focus on Biden’s age was a media invention similar to the older focus on Hillary Clinton’s emails. Silver push backCaption: “Not everything is #ButHerEmails.” He argued that shielding Biden from White House public appearances was a clear indication that he would perform poorly in such appearances.
In mid-February, He wrote That Biden stepping down was “an option that Biden, the White House and Democratic leaders need to seriously consider.” He called it “far from an ideal option,” but said: “It may still be the Democrats’ best option to defeat Trump.” It took another five months and a disastrous debate performance, but in the end, the team accepted the verdict as correct.
Current forecast
For almost all of August, Silver’s forecast showed Harris as a very narrow favorite, giving him a 52 percent chance of victory. But at the end of the month, Trump moved ahead, and forecasts now say he’s the narrow favorite with a 59.7 percent chance. (It drew some praise from Trump, who said recently (That Silver was a “very honorable man, I don’t know him, but he raised me a lot.”)
Many people reading Silver’s predictions place too much importance on whether their preferred candidate is a slight favorite (which makes them feel relieved) or a slight underdog (which makes them anxious and/or angry). Silver always insists that this is the wrong way to think about it and that such a race could easily go either way, but few take his advice.
Accordingly, the clamor over the current forecast, from those who want Harris to win, is quite pronounced. “Who bought #NateSilver and how much did he pay?” Actress Bette Midler Posted in X. Baseless conspiracy theories have been made that Silver Recently announced the gig As an online prediction market advisor Polymarket Encouraging him to do its bidding Right-wing millionaires And his analysis is skewed against Harris. (Silver has vehemently denied these claims. “Peter Thiel is not paying me any more than anyone who works for Facebook or Lyft,” he said recently. Posted in X.)
In a more data-literate way, the main criticism of Silver’s model lately has been that it unfairly penalizes Harris for not getting a big polling bounce after the Democratic convention. (Nominees usually get a bounce then and lose some of that advantage later, but this is an unusual cycle and perhaps Harris got his “bounce” when he entered the race.) September 7, Silver wrote that if the “conference bounce” setting is turned off, the model will show something very close to a pure 50-50 competition; He also said that this effect will be reduced further from the conference.
It seems undeniable Shows the current poll A very close Electoral College race, especially in the most important states, Pennsylvania. So the furore over whether Harris should be considered a narrow favorite or a narrow underdog seems to me to be splitting hairs.
To criticize Silver’s commentary more broadly, he told me, “I don’t.” Rejecting what he called a “circlejerk” of “Blue Maga”, he said that outside of them, “there’s a huge audience for the work I do” and noted that his new book is a New York Times Best Seller.
His progressive critics, he said, “don’t affect my life in any way”—except, perhaps, that he “may have a little conflict” with them, “because it’s fun.”
