He famously called two US presidential elections, but Nate Silver blew it with Trump
There, his name is in lights, and people start to nudge one another and point him out. Hundreds of fans - many of them male, young and white - have lined up outside, waiting to watch the data journalist and his colleagues record a podcast. Those who hold the priciest tickets ($100) even get the chance to mingle with the stars of the website FiveThirtyEight and have their picture taken with top editor Silver afterwards.
“We’re giant nerds,” explained Priyanka Mitra-Hahn, a PhD student from Brooklyn, when asked why she, her wife and a friend came out to last week’s sold-out event.
If a statistics guru can be a rock star, Silver is surely it. But even rock stars have bad days.
Silver, 38, had a run of them a few months ago, when it became obvious that his consistent early dismissals of Donald Trump’s chances to be the Republican presidential nominee were flat-out wrong.
But when it came to Trump, Silver and Co. missed the boat with a resounding splash. As the Republican primary elections approached, Silver pooh-poohed Trump - by mid-February, he was still putting the businessman’s chances for the nomination at less than 50 per cent.
Many took comfort, trusting that Silver could not be wrong.
“For those of us who didn’t want to believe we lived in a country where Donald Trump could be president, Silver’s steady, level-headed certainty felt just as soothing as his unwavering confidence in Barack Obama’s triumph over Mitt Romney four years ago,” wrote Leon Neyfakh of Slate. After it became clear that Trump would win the nomination, Silver apologised in a long post. And he explained that “we made a big mistake.”
The mistake was allowing his predictions to be based, at least partly, on the very thing that he has criticised all along: educated guesses.
He explained in his mea culpa the consequences of his decision not to build a statistical model.
“Without a model as a fortification, we found ourselves rambling around the countryside like all the other pundit-barbarians, randomly setting fire to things,” he wrote.
Last week, in his Upper West Side newsroom, Silver talked about learning that lesson the hard way - and about the next hurdle.
“There’s certainly huge anxiety,” he said. But now that he and his colleagues are back to relying more fully on data and statistical models, “there’s not much we can do about it.”
“We make the best forecast that we can,” and wait for the truth to arrive to prove them right - or wrong.
Last week, the numbers continued to seem reassuring to the never-Trump forces.
Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the presidency were at about 85 per cent; Trump’s at about 15 per cent. (They’ve tightened since then. On Sunday, Clinton was at 79 per cent and Trump at 21.)
Looking back, David Firestone, FiveThirtyEight’s managing editor, echoes Silver on what happened with the Trump miss.
“We let our gut lead our head in the wrong direction,” he said.
“We hope we’ll never let that happen again.”
