Nate Silver (1978- ), an American statistician and writer, is the top polling expert and political forecaster at the New York Times.
- In 2008 he got 49 of 50 states right in the presidential election and got all 35 Senate races right.
- In 2010 he got 34 of 37 Senate races right and 36 of 37 governor races. He said Republicans would gain 55 seats in the House. They gained 63.
- In 2012 he got 50 out of 50 states right and 33 of 35 Senate races.
He made his name in May 2008 when he said Obama would win the North Carolina primary by 13 or 14 points. Professional pollsters said it would be close. Silver was right.
Some of his tricks:
- Margin of error: The margin of error makes polls useless in close races. But if you take several polls and put them together the right way you can lower the margin of error.
- Historical data: He has poll numbers going all the way back to 1952. That lets him measure how good different polls are at picking winners. He weights them accordingly. (CNN and Reuters are currently good, Rasmussen and Gallup are bad.)
- Knowing what to throw out: He throws out polls done for politicians, those that seem to be faked (some are) and those that are way off from what you would expect demographically.
As a boy he loved baseball and numbers. And so even though he got an economics degree at the Univeristy of Chicago and worked for KPMG, a big accounting firm, his true love was forecasting how baseball players would do in the coming season based on their numbers.
To do this he worked on a computer program called PECOTA. He left KPMG, supported himself for a while playing poker, and then sold PECOTA to Baseball Prospectus in 2003, which hired him as a writer.
In 2007, while stuck at an airport in New Orleans, he noticed that news reporting on political polls was terrible. He got the idea of applying statistical models to politicians, not just to baseball players.
In 2008 he founded the FiveThirtyEight blog, named for the 538 electoral college votes in presidential elections. The New York Times hired him in 2010, in time for the mid-term elections.
In October 2012 when Obama lost the first debate to Romney, Silver kept his eyes on the numbers and said that Obama would still most likely win. Republicans hated that. Some were predicting a Romney landslide. They tried to discredit Silver:
- Dean Chambers of UnskewedPolls.com doubted Silver because – he is short and seems kind of gay.
- Joe Scarborough of MSNBC called Silver an “ideologue” and a “joke”.
- Mendy Finkel of The Daily Caller said Silver was purposely cooking the numbers against Republicans.
- Michael Knox Beran of the National Review and the Manhattan Institute said:
I have sometimes caught myself taking seriously even the artfully contrived hogwash of Nate Silver, who solemnly asserted the other day that President Obama has a “70.4% chance of winning” on November 6. The precision of the decimal point is a nice touch.
See also:
- FiveThirtyEight
- The Republican bubble
- The New York Times
- ad hominem argument
- Kepler – also very data-driven but knew when to throw out numbers
Ha-ha. Bravo. You actually did it! 😛
I like the idea of his applying statistical models to politicians.
And is this an example of how to make money from blogging?
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A genious with numbers!! Romneys crowd didn’t want to take him seriously when his poll predicted an Obama win!!
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Once again, republican blind faith bites them in the ass. Silver helped to prove that.
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[…] Nate Silver (1978- ), an American statistician and writer, is the top polling expert and political forecaster at the New York Times. In 2008 he got 49 of 50 states right in the presidential election and got all 35 Senate races right. In 2010 he got 34 of 37 Senate races right and 36 of 37 governor races. He said Republicans would gain 55 seats in the House. They gained 63. In 2012 he got 50 out of 50 states right and 33 of 35 Senate races. […]
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Nate Silver currently gives Trump 24.6% chance of winning in his polls-plus forecast, his best guess. It looks as current state polls, historical data and the economy.
Gary Johnson has a 0.1% chance of winning.
The most likely scenario at this point is that Hillary Clinton wins all of the Obama states from 2012 plus North Carolina. Even Arizona and Georgia are starting to look shaky.
For Trump to win as Michael Moore suggests – sweeping the rust belt – he would need to hold onto North Carolina and all the other Romney states. Even losing Arizona would sink him.
The latest polls-plus forecast (constantly updated):
http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/#plus
Interactive electoral map:
http://www.270towin.com/
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Nate Silver on rumours that Roger Ailes, formerly the head of Fox News, will advise Donald Trump:
More:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-still-has-a-chance-doesnt-he/
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