Can You Still Trust Nate Silver?

The leader of the data revolution believes he got 2016 right—and the rest of the media is in danger of getting 2020 wrong.

- David A. Graham

In November, I visited Five Thirty Eight’s offices in New York on picture day. For journalists who style themselves as nerds, the formal photo shoot was a mild form of torture. Nate Silver, the site’s founder, donned a blazer, forced a smile for his headshot, then snuck away to get back to work on the site’s 2020 primary forecast. Though FiveThirtyEight now has a staff of about 35, covering sports, pop culture, and more, the site’s essential element is still the elaborate models Silver himself builds to predict elections.

Silver, a former management consultant and professional poker player, got into the political- forecasting business in 2007, after growing frustrated by coverage of the Democratic 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 misusing them to create false narratives of momentum.

Exasperated by the guesswork of pundits, Silver championed the more objective science 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 initially underestimated Donald Trump, dismissing his chances of winning the Republican nomination. It was a rare embarrassment, one that Silver 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 conventional wisdom that the interloper couldn’t possibly prevail.