Nate Silver Pushes Back After The New York Times Blasts Him For Getting Donald Trump So Wrong

[Purveyor]

The Times credits Breitbart with predicting the rise of Donald Trump better than its former polling guru

SOPHIA TESFAYE

“7 Times Nate Silver Was Hilariously Wrong About Donald Trump,” a triumphant Daily Caller headline read the morning after Trump became the “presumptive” Republican nominee.

There was the time back in September 2015 when Silver implored people to “calm down” about the possibility of Trump winning the Republican nomination. Two months later he wrote, “stop freaking out about Donald Trump’s polls,” calling Trump’s odds “higher than 0 but (considerably) less than 20 percent.” The former New York Times polling guru who correctly predicted Barack Obama’s map to victory during the 2008 Democratic primary and caused Republicans to spend the majority of the 2012 reelection campaign screaming about skewed polls, wrote of Trump as recently as last December, “the most difficult hurdles between Donald Trump and the Republican presidential nomination are still to come.”

“The Republican Horse Race Is Over, and Journalism Lost,” a more brutal takedown of Silver from The New York Times’ Jim Rutenberg read on Thursday.

“Wrong, wrong, wrong — to the very end, we got it wrong,” the media columnist opened, admonishing the entire collective to begin before singling out Silver in particular for his failed call on the Democratic side in Indiana only two sentences later.

“Predictions can have consequences,” Rutenberg wrote Thursday, blasting what he called the “questionable news coverage” brought forth by Silver’s style of data journalism:

This season has been truly spectacular in its failings. It has been “Dewey Beats Truman” on a relentless, rolling basis. The mistakes piled up — the bad predictions, the overplaying of every slight development of the horse race to the point of whiplash, the lighthearted treatment of what turned out to be the most serious candidacy in the Republican field.

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http://www.salon.com/2016/05/05/data_journalism_didnt_fail_nate_silver_pushes_back_after_the_new_york_times_blasts_him_for_getting_donald_trump_so_wrong/

[tomm2thumbs]

1. most recent case in point

[newthinking]

2. Why do people follow his analysis? He is wrong as often as right

[MisterFred]

3. He has some skills.

Specifically, he's quite good at analyzing polls and their methodology... after the fact. The spectacular fail comes from trying to expand into predicting what will come next rather than analyzing what has already happened.

[localroger]

4. Silver started out as a sports handicapper

He developed an elaborate software suite for doing sabermetrics, the software analysis of sports probabilities. His software would play thousands of virtual games, allowing all the random factors to fall out differently in each run and taking a survey of the overall result. His had success there and decided to apply the same technique to politics, which nobody had really tried before.

And his initial attempts were impressively successful. But Nate's technique works because it's like science, and like science it has the flaw that it depends on the world working the same way tomorrow that it did yesterday. And just as scientists can get tripped up by a paradigm shift, so has Nate Silver in this election season which has unfolded on wildly different dynamics than anything in living memory.