What Does Nate Silver Know?
In November, I visited FiveThirtyEight’s offices in New York on picture day. For journalists who style themselves as nerds, the formal photo shoot was a mild form of torture. Nate Silver, the site’s founder, donned a blazer, forced a smile for his headshot, then snuck away to get back to work on the site’s 2020 primary forecast. Though FiveThirtyEight now has a staff of about 35, covering sports, pop culture, and more, the site’s essential element is still the elaborate models Silver himself builds to predict elections.
Silver, a former management consultant and professional poker player, got into the political-forecasting business in 2007, after growing frustrated by coverage of the Democratic primary on cable news. He could scarcely believe how bad the analysis was—based on little more than hunches and hoary wisdom, and either ignoring opinion polls or misusing them to create false narratives of momentum.
Exasperated by the guesswork of pundits, Silver championed the more objective science of polling. He aggregated polls, grading and weighting them to predict the outcome of the election—an egalitarian project that sought to replace the opinionating of insiders with quantitative analysis of voter sentiment. Silver’s wonkycorrectly forecast the results in every state.
