20 MARCH 2020
Dispatches PREDICTIONS
from 2016: Trump is now an
incumbent, not a curiosity, and
his opponent won’t be Hillary
Clinton. But a tight race with
a polarized electorate offers
plenty of chances to repeat
common mistakes.
In Silver’s view, the media
were overconfident in a Clin-
ton victory because of long-
held assumptions about the
mechanics of American politics.
Take the “ground game”—the
business of identifying voters
and getting them to the polls.
Some pundits initially argued
that if the election was close,
Clinton’s superior campaign
organization would put her
over the top; then, after she lost,
many flogged her for failing to
get out the vote in key states.
Yet decades of political science
suggest that such tactics have a
relatively minor effect on elec-
tion results. Based on his analy-
sis of late movement in the race,
Silver argues that factors mostly
beyond Clinton’s control mat-
tered far more than the success
or failure of her canvassers in
the Upper Midwest. These fac-
tors included Trump’s ability
to command the news cycle—
Silver has found that earned
media is far more valuable than
the kind you can buy—and
James Comey’s belated reopen-
ing of the FBI investigation into
Clinton’s use of a private email
server, which had a measurable
impact on polling.
In part because of Trump’s
already prodigious fundraising,
the old temptation to overstate
the importance of the campaign
war chest—and the electioneer-
ing efforts it can buy—will
once again be present in 2020.
As will the press’s quadrennial
weakness for the supposedly
game-changing gaffe, another
Silver bête noire. Obama’s “lip-
stick on a pig” flap, Clinton’s
“deplor ables” remark—such
moments may reveal aspects
of a candidate’s character, but
Silver believes the media con-
sistently exaggerate their effect
on voter behavior.
On other fronts, Silver sees
the press as overlearning the les-
sons of 2016. Journalists have
obsessed over Russian interfer-
ence in elections, and while for-
eign meddling is undoubtedly
troubling, Silver sees no strong
evidence that hacking or dis-
information swung the 2016
result. “There’s a bias toward
believing in explanations that
involve secrecy or things hap-
pening that are hidden,” Silver
said. The most important fac-
tors, he believes, are right there
in the numbers.Silver is now the elder
statesman of a growing class of
data-based journalists, includ-
ing his frenemy Nate Cohn
of The Upshot, with whom
he likes to spar. Despite the
beating forecasters took after
2016, quantitative analysis is
better integrated into contem-
porary political coverage than
it was before. FiveThirtyEight’s
own primary-election model
is wildly complex, evidence of
Silver’s continued faith in the
power of data. For all his suc-
cess, however, Silver frets that
his work is not well understood.
During my visit, the
FiveThirtyEight staff was in the
middle of a debate about how
to present election forecasts
so the general public can eas-
ily comprehend them. Four
years ago, the site gave readers
a percentage chance that each
candidate would win. For the
2018 midterms, it switched to
odds: Democrats had a 7-in-8
chance of taking the House;
Republicans had a 4-in-5
chance of holding the Senate.
Silver’s hunch is that readers
find odds easier to understandthan percentages, because they
can imagine a series of coin
flips or rolls of the dice.
Delivering forecasts in
the clearest way possible is
undoubtedly to the good; stud-
ies have demonstrated that the
public doesn’t grasp probabil-
ity well. But it’s hard to believe
that FiveThirtyEight would havebeen spared opprobrium had it
predicted Trump had a 3-in-10
chance of winning. And con-
vincing readers to trust the
model again is more than just
a math problem.
Silver’s celebrity was never
entirely a function of his accu-
racy. It helped that his predic-
tions were congenial to Obama,
and to liberals more gener-
ally. (Silver’s name became a
staple of Obama-era Demo-
cratic fundraising emails, his
predictions—sunny and dire
alike—invoked to persuade
donors to pony up.) His own
political views, however, have
always tended toward the lib-
ertarian and moderate, and as
Democrats have moved to
the left, Silver’s heresies have
drawn new scrutiny. In Octo-
ber, he chastised “Libs” for
not giving Trump credit for
the death of the Islamic State’s
leader, Abu Bakr al- Baghdadi.
“Nate Silver has been morph-
ing before our eyes into exactlythe kind of bloviator he made
his name mocking,” The New
Republic announced.
But it’s Silver’s devotion to
quantitative analysis as much
as his politics that has put him
at odds with our post-truth
moment. Trump’s dis regard
for facts is singular, but the
left, too, has grown more sus-
picious of technocrats and their
pronounce ments. Many liberals
today see Obama as a president
whose achievements were hob-
bled by bloodless calculations
of what seemed possible. They
now seek candidates who make
grand ideological gestures, even
if the math is fuzzy. Silver, to at
least some extent, is an emblem
of an era when it felt as if any
problem could be solved with
enough elite brainpower.
After Trump’s victory, the
major media organizations
flagellated themselves for
spending too little time with
the voters who elected him. To
make amends, they sent report-
ers to Trump country, seek-
ing to understand the sources
and strength of the president’s
support by lingering in Ohio
diners and Pennsylvania fac-
tories. The introspection was
overdue, and it tracked with
Silver’s long-standing belief
that journalists spend too much
time talking to one another. But
this reporting is by definition
anecdotal and, to borrow Silver’s
term, stylized— an implicit rejec-
tion of more analytic approaches
to understanding the electorate.
For Silver, no number of dis-
patches from the heartland can
deliver the insights that hard
data can. “The impulse maybe
isn’t bad,” he told me. “But,
you know, polls are also a way
of talking to voters.”David A. Graham is a staff
writer at The Atlantic.SILVER’S
DEVOTION TO
QUANTITATIVE
ANALYSIS
HAS PUT HIM
AT ODDS
WITH OUR
P O S T-T RU T H
MOMENT.