19DispatchesMARCH 2020Silver, a former manage-
ment consultant and profes-
sional poker player, got into the
political- forecasting business in
2007, after growing frustrated
by coverage of the Demo-
cratic 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 mis-
using them to create false nar-
ratives of momentum.
Exasperated by the guess-
work of pundits, Silver cham-
pioned the more objective sci-
ence 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 wonky
assurance seemed of a piece
with the professorial cool of
Barack Obama, whose victory
he predicted in 2008, and again
in 2012, when FiveThirtyEight
correctly forecast the results in
every state.
Then came 2016. Like
most journalists, Silver ini-
tially underestimated Donald
Trump, dismissing his chances
of winning the Republican
nomination. It was a rare
embarrassment, one that Sil-
ver attributed to losing sight
of a fundamental principle:
Trust the polls. Trump had
consistently led in surveys of
GOP voters, but Silver had
succumbed to the conven-
tional wisdom that the inter-
loper couldn’t possibly prevail.
By the eve of the general
election, Silver had come to
believe that Trump had a path
to victory. FiveThirtyEight pre-
dicted that he had a 29 per-
cent chance of winning—
significantly higher than the
predictions of The New York
Times’ The Upshot (15 per-
cent) or the Princeton Elec-
tion Consortium’s Sam Wang
(7 percent). Ryan Grim of
HuffPost accused Silver of
inflating Trump’s chances. Cit-
ing HuffPost’s prediction that
Hillary Clinton had a 98 per-
cent chance of winning, Grim
wrote that if you have faith in
the numbers, “you can relax.
She’s got this.”
She did not, in fact, have
it. After Trump’s victory, poll-
sters and prognosticators
became targets of derision.
Critics alleged that rapid par-
tisan realignment, unpre-
dictable voter turnout, and
the demise of the landline had
rendered poll-based predictions
obsolete. Though he had been
savaged days earlier for over-
estimating Trump’s chances, Sil-
ver, as the leader of the data rev-
olution, now absorbed criticism
for its failure to foresee Trump’s
victory. “The entire 2016 cam-
paign season was ... character-
ized by a series of spectacular
Silver blunders,” read a typical
critique, in Current Affairs. It
ran under the headline “Why
You Should Never, Ever Listen
to Nate Silver.”As the 2020 race begins
in earnest, the question of
whether to listen to Nate Silver
returns to the fore, which is why
I was visiting Five ThirtyEight.
Silver believes he got 2016
right—it’s everyone else who
got it wrong, and in ways that
could lead the media to get
2020 wrong as well. “I think
the 2016 campaign exposed
whatever your bad habits were
as a newsroom,” Silver told me.
“But no one actually seems to
have learned very many lessons
in 2016.”
Silver insists that polling
is still up to the task of mea-
suring voter sentiment in theTrump era. In 2016, national
polls found Clinton leading by
three points on average. In fact,
she won the national popular
vote by about two percentage
points—making those polls
more accurate than they had
been in 2012. State polls fared
worse—some overestimated
Clinton’s support, while oth-
ers underestimated it—but
they weren’t bad by historical
standards. (Silver arrived at
Trump’s 29 percent chance of
winning— roughly the same
chance the campaign gaveitself—by accounting in his
model for possible variation
in state polls.) Polling in the
2018 midterm elections proved
highly accurate, correctly antici-
pating the wave of Democratic
victories that handed the party
control of the House of Rep-
resentatives. “In some ways,
polling is the only way in which
the Trump presidency has been
normal,” Silver said.
As he sees it, the problems
stem not from the polls but
from how the press interprets
them. During the long run-up
to the 2020 primary season, he
saw pundits fall into familiar
traps. The same sort of com-
mentators who expected Trump
to collapse four years ago have
consistently predicted a Joe
Biden implosion that, as of thiswriting, has yet to happen—
perhaps in part because Biden’s
core supporters, like Trump’s,
are members of demograph-
ics under represented in the
press (for Trump, non- college-
educated voters and rural vot-
ers; for Biden, non- college-
educated voters and black
voters). Despite Biden’s durable
lead, the press has been quick to
crown a series of front-runners
in waiting, from Kamala Har-
ris to Elizabeth Warren to Pete
Buttigieg—all while largely
ignoring Biden’s most persis-
tent rival for the top spot in the
polls: Bernie Sanders.
To locate story lines where
they don’t exist, commentators
seize on outlier polls, like the
one from Monmouth Univer-
sity in August that suggested a
closer race than any previous
survey had. (That single snap-
shot was covered so breathlessly
that the director of the univer-
sity’s polling institute took the
rare step of publicly noting how
much it deviated from the oth-
ers.) Or pundits rely instead on
what Silver described to me as
“stylized facts”: A strong debate
performance or fund raising
quarter will kick off a round
of coverage of a candidate’s
supposed surge, even if polls
don’t detect much movement.
It’s not that these factors don’t
matter—they do—but Silver’s
work suggests that they don’t
matter nearly as much as most
journalists imagine. By Silver’s
estimation, the average debate
performance moves polls about
as much as an average week
on the trail—and, as Senator
Harris can attest, even a well-
received moment can take a
candidate only so far.
What does this mean for
coverage of the general election?
Regardless of who emerges as
the Democratic nominee, 2020
will have a different complexion“IN SOME WAYS,
POLLING IS
THE ONLY WAY
IN WHICH
THE TRUMP
PRESIDENCY
HAS BEEN
NORMAL,”
SILVER SAYS.