Nate Silver faces backlash for pro-Trump model skewing
Last edited Sat Sep 7, 2024, 10:33 AM - Edit history (1)
Source: Salon
Published September 6, 2024 7:43PM (EDT)
Nate Silver, the celebrity statistician who gained notoriety for his FiveThirtyEight election models, is facing backlash over alleged skewing in his new model. Silver left the ABC-owned company and launched his own Substack, the Silver Bulletin, last year. Since then, he’s become increasingly critical of the FiveThirtyEight projection and its behind-the-scenes assumptions and adjustments.
“There’s a fine line between an “objective” statistical model and “just some dude’s opinion,” Silver wrote in mid-July, a month after launching his own competing election model. “But the 538 model falls somewhere on the wrong side of this line, in my view.”
Some social media users have denounced his complaints as not based in math, especially as he makes similar adjustments to his data. Silver has adopted the FiveThirtyEight system of weighting polls differently, ostensibly based on reliability. He's facing criticism for allegedly favoring junk polls over respected pollsters.
“Patriot Polling is literally run by two right wing high school students that is ranked 240th on FiveThirtyEight,” former pollster Adam Carlson noted on X, asking why that poll was weighted more highly than a YouGov poll, which they called “an internationally respected pollster that is ranked 4th on FiveThirtyEight.” Some users believe that Silver’s methods of weighting polls are dubious, especially as his swing state calculated “polling averages” move in the opposite direction as recently released swing state polls.
Read more: https://www.salon.com/2024/09/06/nate-silver-faces-backlash-for-pro-model-skewing/
Link to tweet
@tbonier
·
Follow
So over the past couple of days, Nate Silver has been tweeting multiple times a day insisting that things are looking worse and worse for the Harris campaign.
One state he claims has moved 1.2 pts to Trump since the convention is WI. Let's take a look at the recent polls there.
Image
4:56 PM · Sep 6, 2024
= new reply since forum marked as read
Highlight:
NoneDon't highlight anything
5 newestHighlight 5 most recent replies
JT45242
(4,044 posts)If I were Russian disinformation service, I would throw money at a pollster to skew results.
They might reach not just the faithful.
Seems like more bang for your buck than neonazi on tik tok and you tube.
gab13by13
(32,345 posts)I sincerely doubt he has stopped paying.
4lbs
(7,395 posts)I seriously doubt he has actual cash to be paying for anything.
One would have to stick a crowbar in his wallet, and even then, the crowbar is in danger of bending and breaking off from the effort.
Since his financials were released, we know he is in massive debt, even after his DIL sucks the RNC dry.
Trenzalore
(2,575 posts)Silver is financed by Peter Thiel.
liberalla
(11,089 posts)JT45242
(4,044 posts)Thiel and Eloon are both very pro Putin bring back apartheid dudes.
So there may be overlap between the two asshats south African billionaire megadonors and the Putin regime and oligarchs.
obamanut2012
(29,370 posts)Just like JD Vance.
And also has a known, severe gambling problem.
zorbasd
(526 posts)another Peter Thiel bottom boy, just like Vance.
ananda
(35,162 posts)Silver is a paid stooge now... has been for quite a while.
Docreed2003
(18,714 posts)When you're bankrolled by Peter Thiel, just like JD Vance, you post polls and skew statistics to support your benefactor. Silver has lost all credibility in my book.
marble falls
(71,947 posts)Docreed2003
(18,714 posts)marble falls
(71,947 posts)
Think. Again.
(22,456 posts)...for giving away their trade secrets.
PJMcK
(25,049 posts)He’s awfully full of himself, isn’t he?
I guess we’ll see how accurate all the pollsters have been come Election Day.
What I expect is that we’ll hear lots of explanations about why this or that model was inaccurate and how NO ONE saw a specific voter bloc going a certain way. Or they’ll say the weather in a swing state altered the outcome.
The aftermath is where we’ll see the ass-covering by the pollsters.
Polling, by its nature, is not a specific science. It’s almost amusing to read Silver’s prognostications, turn the page then read Alan Lichtman. They can’t both be correct.
marble falls
(71,947 posts)
ArkansasDemocrat1
(3,213 posts)marble falls
(71,947 posts)thesquanderer
(13,009 posts)Here's the right one:
https://www.salon.com/2024/09/06/nate-silver-faces-backlash-for-pro-model-skewing/
BumRushDaShow
(169,810 posts)When I had queued it up this morning, for some idiotic reason the page that I had in the tab was (I guess) refreshing and had done so right before I copied/pasted the link.
(ETA - I see what may have happened - they have a series of stories on the one page that you can see if you scroll down so it must have refreshed the link to point to a newer story and changed the URL that I originally right when I was copying/pasting).
kansasobama
(1,750 posts)Mark Halperin runs a 2Way podcast that attracts big Dem names. I saw Joe Scarborough there. He narrates the entire podcast to favor Trump. Surprised some Dems there. It almost looks like they are driving a Trump comeback narrative. It also seems to be standard misogyny. Is Harris capable? Is she ready? Participants have many very old white men. It is very clear he supports dictator.
As far as podcasters are concerned, I now watch Jen Rubin Green Room.
erronis
(23,895 posts)He went down their hole in the ground many years ago. Too bad a bit of fame destroys so many people.
kansasobama
(1,750 posts)That is Nate's argument. However, just because it is close does not mean it favors Trump. I agree it is 50-50. He says he does not consider DNC bounce. But, then, he says he is doubtful about polls conducted in the aftermath of DNC and wants to wait for 2 weeks for DNC to settle down.
On another front, do you agree that we have less state polling this year?
orleans
(36,927 posts)he isn't sitting behind a desk, he has maps and charts out various states, electoral votes needed to win, etc.
is that nate silver?
House of Roberts
(6,527 posts)He doesn't bother me but he gets under some people's skin it would seem.
orleans
(36,927 posts)
ShazzieB
(22,600 posts)I don't understand the antipathy some here have towards him.
Alliepoo
(2,832 posts)I think it’s Steve Kornacki (sp?) that you’re thinking of.
erronis
(23,895 posts)What’s the deal with Nate Silver? He seems like he’s fully embracing this contrarian persona where everything he says has some snark (usually against Democrats). He had a recent AMA on Reddit which was quite embarrassing, with some COVID and lockdown comments that were just bullshit.
I’ve been following his “election forecast” for a few days and his commentary is always along these lines:
Harris polls above Trump: “Harris has a feeble lead and might not hold for much longer – it definitely doesn’t look too good for the future”
Trump polls above Harris: “Trump is holding strong and it’s unlikely Harris can retake the lead unless something crazy happens”
1) He’s selling a book.
2) The book reveals something that looks suspiciously like a gambling problem.
3) After he lost his last job in a period when he was gambling $ thousands/mo, he was hired by a Peter Thiel venture to a role that has the ability to impact gambling outcomes.
Oh shit. If he’s been gambling on election outcomes — and helping others who may also do the same — everything he’s written about elections could be skewed by that lens.
As an example, Brexit may have been set up for short sales of the pound sterling. Nigel Farage certainly looked happy about the pound’s crash.
What are the chances Bannon encouraged Thiel to hire Silver? They could be attempting to set up short sales but using our lives.
Here’s a piece from Slate on Polymarkets activities
https://slate.com/technology/2024/08/polymarket-nate-silver-prediction-markets-gambling.html
I don’t think it should do anything to allay your general concerns as to the corrupting effect of gambling on politics and elections, but it does seem to be a different sort of operation to the Farage Brexit night manipulation of the value of the £ on financial markets which I know you are very familiar with having discussed it at some depth on a previous thread.
Polymarket is the obvious application but did Silver get hired in the first place because 1) he had a track record, and/or 2) Bannon, a former fund manager with ties to Farage, either knew about the connection or saw the opportunity Silver offered and promoted him to Thiel-Polymarket?
If it’s successful once they do it again. Brexit was successful and made somebody some bank. Why wouldn’t they do it again.
And now we should be asking ourselves if this has also shaped news media — are outlets not only influenced by oddsmakers in their coverage by quoting them without caveats or research, but are the managers or the news business invested in betting because their old business model is unsuccessful? This is what “Neutron Jack” Welch did at GE in buying NBC; Karl Rove encouraged him to buy NBC through GE to shape tax policy affecting GE. Are news media invested in any businesses which are based on predictive markets?
yardwork
(69,365 posts)
Salviati
(6,059 posts)I believe that this quote understates his gambling issue by quite a bit, I recall seeing that around the time he was dropped from 538 he was betting around $10k per day in vegas.
Dropping large bets on stupid things, like darts. Now he's hired by thiel to work on a political gambling platform? The man's poll analysis should not be trusted.
Mr.WeRP
(1,098 posts)TRHST82
(57 posts)However, there were warning signs before: Gay, but doesn't like gay culture and agrees with the conservative concept of "pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps."
I guess Peter Thiel is behind Silver getting worse lately?
obamanut2012
(29,370 posts)dalton99a
(94,172 posts)ColinC
(11,098 posts)His model accounts for a post convention bounce (even if there isn’t one) That’s the only reason he shows Trump as the projected winner in November currently. If the election were next week his model would show something completely different.
Wiz Imp
(10,002 posts)To claim that Wisconsin moved 1.2 points toward Trump since the convention when the biggest lead Trump had in any individual poll is only 1 point is laughably dishonest. He's a supposed statistician yet his claim here is statistically impossible. At this point, no one should ever take a thing he says seriously again. I'm sure he was paid well for his mendacity but he better watch out cause Karma can be a bitch.
PortTack
(35,820 posts)yardwork
(69,365 posts)
pnwmom
(110,261 posts)to his prediction for November to cancel out the current convention bounce.
However, there was no convention bounce, so he must be canceling out part of Harris's rise before the convention, just after she won the nomination. But he says that he will stop applying the "adjustment" after some number of days that he judges to be the bounce period.
ArkansasDemocrat1
(3,213 posts)I haven't been there in a while so I don't know if they still do.
lanlady
(7,229 posts)I saw Silver's recent anti-Harris analysis and almost had a panic attack. I thought someone would have to talk me down from the ledge. Silver's always maintained that he doesn't even vote so that he can maintain his neutrality. That made me really concerned that the past few weeks of HOPE and OPTIMISM were for naught. I want to wake up on November 6 a joyful person and Silver had just thrown a monkey wrench into all that. I didn't know about his gambling addition and pivot to partisanship. Screw him them. He's just another dude with a lot of resentment issues.
BumRushDaShow
(169,810 posts)and was too haughty and cowardly to own up to it.
I have posted the below before but at least one of his staff did a mea culpa -
By Nathaniel Rakich
Dec. 28, 2022, at 6:00 AM
Here’s a prediction that 100 percent, absolutely, positively will come true: I will get something wrong in 2023. Here at FiveThirtyEight, we make a lot of predictions every year; some of them work out, but we can’t get every single one right. We can, however, learn from our mistakes. That’s why I like to write about everything I got wrong in the previous 12 months.1 I do this for two reasons: First, they’re often unintentionally hilarious (and when you’re a politics reporter, sometimes you need a laugh); second, identifying my blind spots has helped me become a better analyst.
And there’s no shortage of material for this year’s installment. Let’s start with a tweet I wrote on Nov. 6, 2020, shortly after it became clear that Joe Biden had won the presidential race: “Congratulations to Republicans on their victory in the 2022 midterms!” This was obviously meant to be snarky but also to communicate a political tenet: that the president’s party almost always has a bad midterm election. Of course, that tweet wasn’t from 2022, but I also made this argument in January of this year. And for several months thereafter, my analysis was colored by my expectation that 2022 would be a good election year for Republicans. As everyone knows by now, the midterms were a disappointment for Republicans. They won the House — but only barely (they gained just nine seats on net). Meanwhile, Democrats gained a seat in the Senate.
Clearly, I was overly confident in my early prediction. While it is true that the president’s party almost always has a poor midterm, there have been exceptions. And the 2022 midterms turned out to be one of these “asterisk elections,” thanks in no small part to the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to overturn the constitutional right to abortion. This year I should have been more prepared for the possibility that the ruling could throw a wrench into the election, especially after a draft of the decision was leaked in May. And even after the decision, it took me a while to become convinced that voter anger over Dobbs would prove durable enough to last until Election Day.
It wasn’t until the fall that I revised my expectations from a “red wave” to a “red ripple.” My biggest mistake here was not realizing just how common an “asterisk election” actually is. I often quoted one key stat: that the president’s party had gained House seats in only two of the previous 19 midterm elections. But there were four other midterms where the president’s party lost fewer than 10 House seats — so what happened in 2022 isn’t that rare. I also neglected to remember that the president’s party had lost Senate seats in only 13 of the last 19 midterms. In other words, midterms like 2022 happen about a third of the time — way too frequently to count them out.
(snip)
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/2022-predictions-i-got-wrong/
And to further underscore the practice and problem (i.e., the elevation and heavier weighting of partisan polls) -
By Jim Rutenberg, Ken Bensinger and Steve Eder
Dec. 31, 2022
Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat, had consistently won re-election by healthy margins in her three decades representing Washington State. This year seemed no different: By midsummer, polls showed her cruising to victory over a Republican newcomer, Tiffany Smiley, by as much as 20 percentage points.
So when a survey in late September by the Republican-leaning Trafalgar Group showed Ms. Murray clinging to a lead of just two points, it seemed like an aberration. But in October, two more Republican-leaning polls put Ms. Murray barely ahead, and a third said the race was a dead heat.
(snip)
Ms. Murray’s own polling showed her with a comfortable lead, and a nonprofit regional news site, using an established local pollster, had her up by 13. Unwilling to take chances, however, she went on the defensive, scuttling her practice of lavishing some of her war chest — she amassed $20 million — on more vulnerable Democratic candidates elsewhere. Instead, she reaped financial help from the party’s national Senate committee and supportive super PACs — resources that would, as a result, be unavailable to other Democrats.
A similar sequence of events played out in battlegrounds nationwide. Surveys showing strength for Republicans, often from the same partisan pollsters, set Democratic klaxons blaring in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Colorado. Coupled with the political factors already favoring Republicans — including inflation and President Biden’s unpopularity — the skewed polls helped feed what quickly became an inescapable political narrative: A Republican wave election was about to hit the country with hurricane force. Democrats in each of those states went on to win their Senate races. Ms. Murray clobbered Ms. Smiley by nearly 15 points.
(snip)
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/31/us/politics/polling-election-2022-red-wave.html
I am still seeing analysis articles that continue to dismiss the Roe issue as "important" and are still doing this idiotic "worrying" about "missing the 'hidden' or 'reluctant' 45-voter". It's like I'm reading about a bunch of idiots stuck on stupid because election after election since 2020, Democrats have been reported, once the actuals are in, to have "over-performed expectations".
erronis
(23,895 posts)
AllaN01Bear
(29,504 posts)
erronis
(23,895 posts)AllaN01Bear
(29,504 posts)BumRushDaShow
(169,810 posts)
ArkansasDemocrat1
(3,213 posts)He was an excellent professor, I earned an A and gained my confidence about math back.
BumRushDaShow
(169,810 posts)and that final course would have been "Statistics". But as a Chem major, I had so many other damn classes to take, and the lab credits were each 4 hours long (vs 3 for regular classes), that it was just too much to try to fit in.
Woodycall
(603 posts)his work is "Pollshit"?
kellytore
(261 posts)And tell his minions that he was up bigly and then it was stolen from him. Thanks Nate for adding to the violence his mob will create.
Mike Nelson
(10,943 posts)... give Republicans a sampling edge? With the Electoral College and gerrymandering, Democrats can't win a very close race. This is why we have to waste no effort in getting EVERY Democratic voter to cast their vote.
BumRushDaShow
(169,810 posts)which is why the GOP tries everything they can to make it hard for those in (D) areas, TO vote. 
Mr. Mustard 2023
(361 posts)... a few years ago. That leads me to believe he's being paid by Russia. You watch, it'll come out one day where Nate, the supposedly brilliant statistician was tricked into taking large sums of money from Putin.
Tricked so he's a another..... say it with me now....another white boy victim.
So superior, so rugged... barf.
geardaddy
(25,392 posts)and who did they cite? Nate Silver.