Nate Silver made a name for himself in the field of baseball analytics (“SABRmetrics”) and then became a household name among election nerds when he started blogging at DailyKos and then his own FiveThirtyEight site during the 2008 election. That ultimHeately led him to the larger spotlight at the New York Times (2010-2012) and Disney/ABC until he was let go during a round of massive layoffs last April. He has subsequently taken his show to SubStack.
After showing a massive swing blueward after President Biden dropped out of the race (which Silver had been actively encouraging for months), giving Kamala Harris a 60% shot at winning the election, he has been something of an outlier in showing no convention bounce for Harris and actually predicting that Trump was actually in the lead. I’ve mentioned this before but, since I’m not a paid subscriber to his site, haven’t followed up since I’m not privy to the analytics.
In yesterday’s Open Forum, @charontwo posted a link to an Adam Silverman thread on Bluesky Social drawing a line between Russian influence operations, Peter Thiel’s investment in political betting platform called Polymarket, Silver’s joining said market, and Silver’s prediction flip.
The evidence beyond the post hoc ergo propter hoc is, to put it generously, thin. But Silverman notes,
Remember, Silver’s model is proprietary, so there’s no way to replicate (stress test for accuracy) his results. Without being able to replicate them, the model cannot be verified. This is the opposite of social, behavioral, or any other type of science or application of scientific methodology.
He notes political scientist Rachel Bitecofer makes the same point, going so far as to call it “unethical in terms of research standards” and “anti-theoretical.”
But, of course, Silver isn’t an academic social scientist but a stats nerd trying to make a living getting people to pay for the results of his proprietary model. It’s absurd to expect him to make it freely available.
A Salon roundup of the pile-on (“Nate Silver faces backlash for pro-Trump model skewing“) adds:
Silver left the ABC-owned company and launched his own Substack, the Silver Bulletin, last year. Since then, he’s become increasingly critical of the FiveThirtyEight projection and its behind-the-scenes assumptions and adjustments.
“There’s a fine line between an “objective” statistical model and “just some dude’s opinion,” Silver wrote in mid-July, a month after launching his own competing election model. “But the 538 model falls somewhere on the wrong side of this line, in my view.”
Some social media users have denounced his complaints as not based in math, especially as he makes similar adjustments to his data. Silver has adopted the FiveThirtyEight system of weighting polls differently, ostensibly based on reliability.
First off, as already noted, Silver didn’t “leave” ABC, he was let go. And, as he’s repeatedly pointed out (apparently to no avail), while the company retained the rights to the FiveThirtyEight brand, he retained the right to the FiveThirtyEight model, which was his own creation. So, he didn’t “adopt the FiveThirtyEight system,” he took it with them—and the site operating under that name now uses a completely different system that’s mostly driven by non-polling factors.
He’s facing criticism for allegedly favoring junk polls over respected pollsters.
“Patriot Polling is literally run by two right wing high school students that is ranked 240th on FiveThirtyEight,” former pollster Adam Carlson noted on X, asking why that poll was weighted more highly than a YouGov poll, which they called “an internationally respected pollster that is ranked 4th on FiveThirtyEight.”
Some users believe that Silver’s methods of weighting polls are dubious, especially as his swing state calculated “polling averages” move in the opposite direction as recently released swing state polls.
Silver’s reaction to all this on the Platform Formerly Known as Twitter has been characteristically abrasive. But basically he argues that he’s applying a model that has been shown to be effective for quite a long time and trusting his process. Further, he argues that others are simply not weighting the significant skew presented by the Electoral College highly enough and that Harris’ showing in recent swing state polls has in fact moved in the wrong direction.
That seems plausible to me. And, indeed, the latest NYT/Sienna poll (which, Silver notes, is the highest-rated poll in the FiveThirtyEight model) shows Trump with a slight national lead and neck-and-neck in the swing states.
Silverman’s counter is, to say the least, bold:
Is Thiel or Silver taking RU funding? Thiel probably has unsanctioned RU money in his investment fund. But not like Benny was being paid. Here we have the two different revenue & influence to establish reflexive control streams move in the same direction until they overlap, merge, and become one.
The purpose of all of this is demoralization of Democratic turnout; exhaustion of Democrats, Democratic leaning voters in having to deal with this bouncing around the information domain; normalization of Polymarket as a legit political forecaster; amplification of Trump as the likely winner.
Drive positive sentiment for Harris down in the info domain & up for Trump. All of this is exactly how Prigozhin’s network operated in the Sahel & Madagascar under contract to the GRU prior to Putin extrajudicially executing him. It’s also the first part of the subversion process they used.
Silver is a gambler. Indeed, his latest book is about that subject. So, I’m inclined to believe that he’s pushing his chips to the middle betting on his model.
Is it possible that he’s instead pushing his reputation on the line to push Russian propaganda? I . . . suppose? But the payout would have to be pretty big, given that being wildly wrong on this election would presumably be the end of his career as a political odds savant.
I could not let a post referencing gambling; Lawyers, Guns, and Money (Silverman); and the Russians go by without a nod to Warren Zevon, who presaged this all many years ago:
Well, I went home with the waitress
The way I always do
How was I to know
She was with the Russians, tooI was gambling in Havana
I took a little risk
Send lawyers, guns and money
Dad, get me out of thisI’m the innocent bystander
Somehow I got stuck
Between the rock and the hard place
And I’m down on my luck
And I’m down on my luck
And I’m down on my luckNow I’m hiding in Honduras
I’m a desperate man
Send lawyers, guns and money
The shit has hit the fan
