Nate Silver

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“The State’s White Population Is Well-Educated, And Includes Some Workers Who Have Moved From Other Parts Of The Country”

October 18, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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When Time magazine published Tyler Cowen’s 2013 cover story “Why Texas Is Our Future,” which argued that the Lone Star State was America’s new bellwether, I disagreed with the premise, wondering if Texas, as we’ve long known it, was even the future of Texas.

The article notes the large-scale migration to the state by citizens from other parts of the country but assumes these newbies would gladly live within Texas’ regulations (or lack thereof) rather than altering them. In this vision, the bargain of low taxes and real estate prices would have outweighed concerns about environmental damage, the lack of the Medicaid expansion for the Affordable Care Act and the scary high childhood poverty rate. That’s a big assumption. The piece also failed to speak of the growing young Latino population which was going to leave its mark as it aged into voting eligibility. Rather than doubling down on business as usual, the traditionally red state was actually likely to take on a much more purplish hue.

The first signs of a change may be manifesting in the 2016 Presidential election, as Texas is shockingly too close to call. Now granted Trump is nothing like a normal candidate, but he and his border wall would have still risen to an easy victory in the state in years gone by.

From Nate Silver at Five Thirty Eight:

Another day, another traditionally Republican state that Donald Trump could shockingly manage to lose. Yesterday, I wrote about Utah, where Trump’s weakness with Mormon voters could throw the state to Hillary Clinton or to independent candidate Evan McMullin. Today, we turn to Texas, where two new polls show a tight race: A University of Houston poll has Trump up just 3 percentage points there, while SurveyMonkey puts Trump’s lead at 2 points.

Trump will probably win Texas. Earlier polls had shown a close-ish race there, but with a Trump lead in the high single digits. And as a hedge against the polls, our forecast still assigns a little bit of weight to our regression-based analysis, which is based on demographics and voting history. Thus, our model still has Trump ahead by 5 or 6 percentage points in Texas, and puts Clinton’s chances of an upset at 17 percent.

But to put that in perspective, Texas is closer than Pennsylvania right now (where Clinton leads by 7 to 8 points). And Clinton is more likely to win Texas than Trump is to win the election, at least according to the polls-only model, which puts Trump’s overall chances at 12 percent.

As in Utah, demographics play a role in Trump’s struggles in Texas. The state’s white population is well-educated, and includes some workers who have moved from other parts of the country to take advantage of the state’s burgeoning economy. (College-educated whites have turned away from Trump.) Texas also used to have its share of Republican-leaning Latinos — George W. Bush won almost half of the Latino vote there in 2004 — another group that Trump has turned off. Meanwhile, only 43 percent of Texas’ population consists of non-Hispanic whites, down from 52 percent in 2000. However, because 11 percent of Texas’ population consists of non-citizens — many of them recent immigrants from Mexico — its electorate is whiter than its population overall.•

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“The Content Plan Is To Cover Three Buckets That Are About Equal In Size”

October 20, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s  little worrisome that Nate Silver is joining the ESPN family, since that company just severed ties to Frontline over its excellent program (here and here) about NFL-related concussions. But he tells Hollywood Reporter scribe Erik Hayden that he doesn’t fear editorial interference. He also out lines what the new FiveThirtyEight blog will be. An excerpt:

“Silver’s blog, formerly hosted by The New York Times, was acquired in July by ESPN with the goal of developing it into a standalone site similar to Bill Simmons’ Grantland. He outlined the three primary coverage areas for the new FiveThirtyEight — politics, sports and economics — which will debut ;very early’ next year.

‘It’ll be no subscription fee, we hope you guys click on the banner ads or the sponsorships,’ the statistician explained. ‘The content plan is to cover three buckets that are about equal in size — one being kind of politics and political news, of course emphasizing elections still very heavily, one third being sports and one third being everything else put together. So with a special emphasis on economics, for example, maybe topics like education.'”

 

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“It Will Begin To Lose Ground Even In Districts That Republicans And Polling Experts Now Regard As Safe”

October 13, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

It’s hard to argue with math, but John B. Judis of the New Republic pushes back at Nate Silver’s idea that the GOP House is safe for the foreseeable future despite the government shutdown. An excerpt:

“One could argue, of course, that the Republican Party will readapt to its rightwing base and eventually create a new majority of’ ‘true fiscal conservatives’ who will disdain compromise. But there is reason to believe that Chocola and the Club for Growth will never achieve their objective. Rightwing populism, like its predecessor, Christian conservatism, is intense in its commitment, but ultimately limited in its appeal. Tea Party Republicans and the outsider groups probably had their greatest impact when they were still emerging phenomena in the 2010 elections. But when the Republican Party becomes identified with the radical right, it will begin to lose ground even in districts that Republicans and polling experts now regard as safe. That happened earlier with the Christian Coalition, which enjoyed immense influence within the Republican Party until the Republican Party began to be identified with it.”

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“It Will Require Not Just A Pretty Good Year For Democrats, But A Wave Election For Them To Regain The House”

October 11, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

From Nate Silver’s new Grantland piece, “The Six Big Takeaways From the Government Shutdown,” an explanation of why it’s unlikely that this failing Republican gambit will cost the GOP control of Congress in 2014:

“Democrats face extremely unfavorable conditions in trying to regain the House.

Even if the shutdown were to have a moderate political impact — and one that favored the Democrats in races for Congress — it might not be enough for them to regain control of the U.S. House. Instead, Democrats face two major headwinds as they seek to win back Congress.

First, there are extremely few swing districts — only one-half to one-third as many as when the last government shutdown occurred in 1996. Some of this is because of partisan gerrymandering, but more of it is because of increasingly sharp ideological divides along geographic lines: between urban and rural areas, between the North and the South, and between the coasts and the interior of the United States.

So even if Democrats make significant gains in the number of votes they receive for the House, they would flip relatively few seats because of the way those votes are distributed. Most of the additional votes would come in districts that Democrats were already assured of winning, or where they were too far behind to catch up.

Consider that, between 2010 and 2012, Democrats went from losing the average congressional district by seven percentage points to winning it by one percentage point — an eight-point swing. And yet they added only eight seats in the House, out of 435 congressional districts.

In 2014, likewise, it will require not just a pretty good year for Democrats, but a wave election for them to regain the House. But wave elections in favor of the party that controls the White House are essentially unprecedented in midterm years.”

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“The Inability Of Newspapers To Adapt To The Fluidity Of Modern Thinking–I Think That’s Their Problem”

August 9, 2013 in Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Really good new B.S. Report with Bill Simmons welcoming Nate Silver and Malcolm Gladwell to discuss newspapers in the age of the Internet and the Graham family selling the Washington Post to Jeff Bezos, among other topics. Some interesting moments:

  • Gladwell on the New Yorker in the Digital Age: “We’re one of the winners of this revolution.” He points out something that doesn’t get said very often: Because the print version of the magazine goes online at the same time all over the world, it’s opened more of a global market. Of course, the same is true of the Times, which hasn’t benefited as much. But the New Yorker has a smaller cast of talent to support and we live more in a niche, boutique age with bigger but fewer global blockbusters. Also: The New Yorker was never given away for free on any platform for any period of its existence.
  • I don’t know if I agree with Gladwell’s take (expressed in the headline) that newspapers need to have polymaths, free of specific beats, who are writing on any number of topics. In such a deadline-driven environment, that may lead to superficial knowledge and armchair journalism. (Gladwell, a proud polymath himself, has been accused of such things.) And does such a wide-ranging talent pool really exist? Could it supply hundreds of such reporters to the Times and the same amount to, say, a quartet of other national newspapers? He may be right in theory–news dissemination should resemble more closely the mash-up machinery that disseminates it–but I wonder if his idea could be applied in a practical sense.
  • My take on Silver’s feeling about the New York Times after listening to this podcast: He speaks of the place respectfully, but feels it isn’t nearly bold enough in reinventing itself, which was one of the main reasons he departed for ESPN, a company with oodles of money to invest in a dynamic online presence. He also questions the business acumen of the Times: “With all the traffic the New York Times is getting right now, I feel like it should be making a much higher profit.”

Listen here.

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“To Clarify, I’m Not Leaving Political Analysis”

July 29, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Star stats guy Nate Silver has left the New York Times for ESPN and other properties under the Disney umbrella. He just did an Ask Me Anything at Deadspin. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

When will I die?

Nate Silver:

I’d guess that the median Deadspin commenter is a 34-year-old white male with middle-to-high income but also above-average alcohol consumption. So we’re taking about a remaining live expectancy of 47 years, give or take. My best guess is that you’ll die in 2060, perhaps just a few days before Sasha Obama wins her second term.

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Question:

What size staff do you envision the new 538 having? Are you going to be looking more for specialists or generalists?

Nate Silver: 

I think the goal is perhaps to have a site where we’re publishing 3-4 articles per weekday, plus perhaps some blogs and other quick-hit type stuff. What I’m not quite sure about is exactly how many people we’ll need to hire to make that happen, and what the mix of freelancers versus full-time staffers will be.

We are looking for people with a diverse set of interests, within reason. We’ll have people who specialize in sports, I’m sure, as opposed to politics or economics or culture. But I’m not sure that we’ll have people who specialize only in (say) baseball or golf, as opposed to sports more broadly.

And yes — we are taking resumes. (There’s no formal process for this yet, but it’s not too hard to find my email.) We’ve already gotten interest from some great quant-friendly journalists. What’s a little bit tougher to find is people who are journalism-friendly quants, if that makes sense — people who might be employed in (say) tech or finance or consulting right now but who can express themselves pretty well and who might be interested in a change of careers.

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Question:

Nate, what will you miss most about the political analysis you did for the Times and what will you miss the least?

Nate Silver:

To clarify, I’m not leaving political analysis. My guess is that it might still occupy 40-50% of my time personally, and that politics/elections might represent something like 30-40% of the content at the “new” 538. We’ll probably also hire at least one full-time politics writer/editor, along with some talented freelancers.

But to be honest — there’s not very much I’ll miss about pulling back from politics some. 2012 was an amazing year for me in any objective sense, but I still get sort of bitter and angry when I think about how hard it was to get people to accept some very basic statistical conclusions, and how personal things became.•

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“It’s Wholly Empirical, Rather Than Building Edifices Of Equations”

December 24, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Andrew Hacker’s New York Review of Books critique of a trio of new volumes about predictive powers, including The Signal and the Noise, written by political polling wunderkind Nate Silver:

“The Signal and the Noise is in large part a homage to Thomas Bayes (1701–1761), a long-neglected statistical scholar, especially by the university departments concerned with statistical methods. The Bayesian approach to probability is essentially simple: start by approximating the odds of something happening, then alter that figure as more findings come in. So it’s wholly empirical, rather than building edifices of equations. Silver has a diverting example on whether your spouse may be cheating. You might start with an out-of-the-air 4 percent likelihood. But a strange undergarment could raise it to 50 percent, after which the game’s afoot. This has importance, Silver suggests, because officials charged with anticipating terrorist acts had not conjured a Bayesian ‘prior’ about the possible use of airplanes.

Silver is prepared to say, ‘We had some reason to think that an attack on the scale of September 11 was possible.’ His Bayseian ‘prior’ is that airplanes were targeted in the cases of an Air India flight in 1985 and Pan Am’s over Lockerbie three years later, albeit using secreted bombs, plus in later attempts that didn’t succeed. At the least, a chart with, say, a 4 percent likelihood of an attack should have been on someone’s wall. Granted, what comes in as intelligence is largely ‘noise.’ (Most intercepted conversations are about plans for dinner.) Still, in the summer of 2001, staff members at a Minnesota flight school told FBI agents of a Moroccan-born student who wanted to learn to pilot a Boeing 747 in midair, skipping lessons on taking off and landing. Some FBI agents took the threat of Zacarias Moussaoui seriously, but several requests for search and wiretap warrants were denied. In fact, an instructor added that a fuel-laden plane could make a horrific weapon. At the least, these ‘signals’ should have raised the probability of an attack using an airplane, say, to 15 percent, prompting visits to other flight schools.”

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“A Higher Percentage Of Conservatives Are More Inclined To Question Empirical Methods”

November 15, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Nate Silver, the erstwhile baseball numbers cruncher, who, from what I hear, now does political predictions, just completed a chat with readers at Deadspin. The opening follows.

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Question: 

Will you be forecasting the 2014, and 2016 election?

Nate Silver:

As tempting as it might be to pull a Jim Brown/Sandy Koufax and just mic-drop/retire from elections forecasting, I expect that we’ll be making forecasts in 2014 and 2016. Midterm elections can be dreadfully boring, unfortunately. But the 2016 G.O.P. primary seems almost certain to be epic.

Question: 

Hypothetically, if the GOP presidential nom starts getting up big in the polls in 2016, do you fear a backlash from your most ardent supporters/fanbase?

Nate Silver:

We got a modest amount of this in 2010, where I’d get Tweets saying things like “When did Nate become a Republican?”

But I don’t want to make it sound as though the two sides are equal. It seems as though a higher percentage of conservatives are more inclined to question empirical methods, to put it diplomatically. 

Question:

Nate – Who gave the most ridiculous refutations of your work? Old school baseball guys, or GOP media a couple weeks ago? 

Nate Silver:

It’s MUCH worse in politics, I think:

1) People in sports will make lots of silly refutations of your arguments. But they do tend to deal with your arguments, rather than attack your character or your integrity.

2) A lot of people in politics operate in a “post-truth” worldview, whether they realize it or not. Less of that in sports.

3) In sports, scouts actually contribute a lot of value, even though statistics are highly useful as well. In politics, the pundits are completely useless at best, and probably harm democracy in their own small way.

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Even In An Industry Of Blowhards, Joe Scarborough Stands Out

November 2, 2012 in Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Joe Scarborough: Glasses aren’t only for smart people anymore.

Joe Scarborough is almost always wrong, but that doesn’t prevent him from being smug and loud. The MSNBC puddinghead (and, oh christ, former congressperson!) likes to cherry pick political polls, especially the less helpful national ones, and sell lazy narratives based on one or two surveys. Lately he’s been peddling the idea that the Presidential election will either be a razor-thin victory for Obama or a rout for Romney, though the statistical evidence doesn’t suggest there’s any reason for the latter position. 

Scarborough has lately taken aim at Five Thirty-Eight pollster Nate Silver whose numbers disagree with his dubious plotline. Because Silver is smart and perceived as liberal, he’s attacked by the right as underhanded in some way. A recent Politico article by Dylan Byers had numerous media figures figures assailing Silver as some sort of hack. He’s not. He’s a bright guy working off an objective model, and he was more accurate during the 2008 election than anyone. It doesn’t mean that he will be correct this time–he has Obama as a heavy favorite–but at least his views are based on hard evidence.

In the Politico article, Scarborough, a human whoopee cushion, labeled Silver as a “joke.” He attacked the analyst’s  methodology without offering a better system because he doesn’t have one–he just makes shit up.  But the cable babbler went further, suggesting that Silver was an “ideologue,” a partisan in the tank for Obama, trying to nudge the election in the direction of his candidate. Without having any proof of such behavior, it was a pretty scurrilous attack. 

When Scarborough endlessly derided Team Obama’s Bain ads in the early summer as being tone-deaf and ineffectual, he was wrong. The commercials had the intended impact. But I don’t recall Silver (or anyone, really) accusing the Republican host of being an ideologue for his opinion. Anything could happen in this election, sure, but if Scarborough is right it would have to be by accident. And even then the way he portrayed Silver will never be right.•

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